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 The Lycaeum Forums » Integrate » The Alchemist's Den (Moderator: tryp2fun)Topic:
 Purification of MDMA

[Papyrifera]

One of the problems with MDMA and other synthetic street drugs is that there are a lot of shoddy chemists out there. People who don't know enough, or don't care enough to properly wash their final product before selling it. I was curious what someone could theoretically do to wash, purify, or recrystallize something they bought off the street, in order to obtain a higher purity substance. I believe that some of the toxicity associated with MDMA would be related to impurities in the product being used. I once was shown some MDMA that was brown in colour, which looked pretty gross. Some people apparently can only get shoddily synthesized and poorly washed product, and it would be nice if these people could do something to clean it up.

I overheard someone talking about doing a wash of MDMA with chilled acetone, and saying that the acetone pulled a little colour out of the MDMA. Their final product apparently was a beautiful sparkling white.

Anybody have ideas on how to wash or purify MDMA? What about doing a recrystallization in some kind of solvent?

[pylkko]

The answer to this question is: depends.

MDMA can be cut with stuff like lactose, which is really different from MDMA in chemical properties, making the separation of it easy. But it can also be cut with other psychedelic amphetamine derivative or meth or ephedra alkaloids or whatever else.

Recristalization is yout best bet, but washing can only help.

Washing is using a solvent in which MDMA does not dissolve in, and attempting to dissolve the impurities. The more different kinds of washes you do, the better the quality.


Here is an article on acetone washing and other pill cleaning methods:
http://mdma.tribe.net/thread/1afa7d89-db82-471e-9908-c8a20ea117e7

[pylkko]

The Hive (2003), your friend:



          Rhodium
(Chief Bee)
08-21-03 23:03
No 454897
                  Recrystallization of MDMA.HCl for Purity
(Rated as: good read)          

The final product had a faint smell of MeAm and tasted different. When tested it became clear that there was meam in it.

Tested how?

Smell and taste is not an adequate analysis method to differentiate between different amines, as most aliphatic amines have a very similar smell. If you vacuum distilled the MDMA, the MeNH2 would evaporate. Also, it would have formed MeNH2.HCl when you crystallized the MDMA.

I believe that you simply did not recrystallize your MDMA.HCl properly, and what you smell/taste are either residual MDMA freebase, alternatively unknown byproducts carried over through the distillation.

Anyhow, whatever the identity of the amine-smelling impurity, it will be removed by recrystallization of your MDMA.HCl. Preferably recrystallize from 7 mL/g boiling acetonitrile, but you can also dissolve the salt in a minimum of boiling isopropanol, and then with good stirring add just enough acetone (or preferably diethyl ether) to form a lasting turbidity* in the solution. Stop the stirring, and allow the MDMA.HCl to crystallize at room temp for ~30 minutes, then filter, and wash the crystals with a little acetone (or ether), then place the filtrate in the freezer a couple of hours to recover a second crop (less pure) of MDMA.HCl, but this will amount to much less than the first crop. As this second crop is of lesser purity, you should ideally subject it to another recrystallization, and you definitely should if it visually looks worse than the first crop.

Note to everyone: This is a perfect example of why it is preferable to both distill your MDMA freebase, as well as recrystallize the MDMA.HCl afterwards to achieve a high purity of your final product. The A/B extraction before the distillation is even more important, but you hopefully already knew that, didn't you?wink

Factoid: Recrystallizing (already purified) MDMA·HCl from boiling THF (~130mL/g) gives an insanely low density microcrystalline powder (unusable as purification method, but for you who want to choose your crystal size...)

*turbidity (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=turbidity)

[Papyrifera]

Thanks for this info, u.

[Shadowlord]

Great Thread. Great info especially for those still not quite able to dream their own dreams but have to procure them otherwise.