Hello Fellow Chemists, I have bought a small amount of 1,000ml Brown Camphor oil, however i was told by the shop that Safrole is a banned item and that the content of safrole is in broken form and can not be extracted, does anyone know what this means? what does broken form mean, and is there anyway of extracting the safrole from the oil. The main components of this oil are methyl cinnamate, camphene, 1,8-cineole, a-pinene, b-pinene, eugenol, borneol, caryophyllene, terpinen-4-ol, piperitone, phellandrene, limonene, y-terpinene, p-cymene, terpinolene, furfural, camphor, linalool, geraniol, bornyl acetate, sabinene, and cinnamaldehyde. I need the Safrole content for a long winded prodect involving many other oils. PLEASE HELP!
Safrole is a banned precursor because it can be used for MDMA production (I am sure that is not what you want it for :scholar: ) However you can obtain small amounts in other legal products and it is very common in the cosmetics industry so people do have legit uses for it.I am not a chemist but sounds to me like they have done something that would make working with the sass difficult. I know they do something to sudafed now so it's tough to break it down and make meth. So in my amateur mind there must be something you can do to get only the chemical you want. There are certainly ways to obtain reasonably pure Sass for your needs.
i don't have any first hand experience working with safrole but have heard it can be a bitch to purify and requires a pretty decent set of glassware and lab setup, as well as a decent amount of organic chemistry experience. we are talking fractional distillations and breaking the azeotropes that safrole could form. i'm sure the chinese chemical manufacturers would have no problem supplying safrole, and for cheap if they don't rip you off.
i bought 2 gallons of Sassafras oil (92% safrole) a few months ago from a overseas supplier, im not sure if i wanna use it or not yet. But the stuff you got doesnt sound good. With the stuff i have, as far as the Bright Star method its probably usable as is, but id probably still do a simply distillation to get 99% pure safrole.
why not just use vanillin? You can demethylate it with AlCl3 in pyridine, then you can form the dioxy by deprotonating the two alcohols with a base and substituting with a dihalomethane thing, like dichloromethane, which is a common solvent.
