Hypothetical situation: I have a bottle of concerta thats pretty much useless in its current form so I decided to try an A/B extraction on it. I think it worked, the naptha layer looks saturated with methylphenidate base particles. Now I can't decide if I should just leave it as a base and try smoking the shit seeing as it's pure and all or turn it back to salt so I can snort it.???
hypothetical my ass. I'm guessing the oil/wax stuff that stuck around in the naptha is not methylphenedate, but the time release powder from your concerta. This is because the coating would need to be something that wouldn't disolve and break down easily in water (only in naptha). I'm pretty sure ritalin/methylphenedate is water soluble, and not soluble in naphtha.
why not a naptha wash, filter, dry. Extract with MeOH, perhaps with a tiny bit of base thrown in, filter. Evaporate:hyper: or vac. distill off the MeOH, suspend residue in low molar base, add non-polar, separate. Save non polar layer. Add water if desired to aqueous phase and extract again with non-polar. unify non-polar, (wash if desired with salt water, then distilled water) dry, and gas w/HCl to get the mph.hcl. If I were to bother doing this I'd probably just stop at :hyper: good enough. Actually I'd just swallow the damn pills.
if you're talking about concerta, then you're talking about methylphenidate hcl... but it looks like you basified. astroneurologist got it down... methylphenidate hcl is freely soluble in water and in methanol, soluble in alcohol, and slightly soluble in cholorophorm & acetone. Donno why they suggested MeOH, and not some more common base. Anyways... how did you end up doing it? Snorting? Smoking?
Huh? MeOH, is methanol, quite common. I thought that would work better than water because it is much quicker to evaporate. Most binders and such won't be highly soluble in alcohol, but will be soluble in acetone. And since there is only slight solubility in chloroform/acetone, acetone might be useful for recrystalization or a quick wash. If I were to bother doing the A/B i'd choose toluene for the non-polar. Come to think of it I besides recrystalization I would be tempted to wash with toluene, formaldehyde in methanol, and alcohol denatured with pyridine. Disclaimer: These procedures are only for qualified professionals, kids don't try this at home. There is danger of fire, explosion, cardiac arrest.
snorted it, and it was great. I tried smoking a little in some foil just as hcl and I was suprised I actually felt something off of it.
I don't know much about extraction techniques, but I do know a lot about the time release mechanism of Concerta. The outside colored shell contains methylphenidate, which is designed to be the first bit that is absorbed. Then there is the capsule itself, which is indigestible. There is a tiny laser-cut hole on one end of the pill. This end has the rest of the methylphenidate (the other half has a brown substance that acts like a sponge. When water comes through the little hole, the methylphenidate turns into a liquid, and the brown shit expands over 12 hours, pushing the liquid methylphenidate out the little hole at a constant rate for the 12 hours.) If you want to defeat the time release, just put the capsule in a pair of plyers and break the outer layer.
FYI: I got about 75% on the naptha wash, filter, and methanol soak and filter of regular release mph. Evaporated off 1/2 of the methanol to yield some very clean mph. hcl crystals. Did the same with the other 1/2 of methanol but added a little IPA that was slightly acidified with HCL and a little toluene once the methanol was almost entirely dry and the crystals were easier to collect but appeared a little more white than clear.
