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Here's a summary & simplification of their described route:
Materials:
Acetone (100%);
Ethanol(100%);
HCl (37%);
H2O2 (6%);
H2SO4 (98%);
Toluene;
Na2S2O3;
NaOH;
Iodine source;
Red Phosphorous source;
d-Pseudoephedrine containing decongestant (60mg/tablet);
(optionally NaCl and/or TCCA for the HCl generator)
1. Prep Precursors
A - Pseudoephedrine HCl
Now you have to keep in mind that the current ingredients have changed slightly from 2012
when this paper was written and as such most decongestants cannot have their pseudo extracted
in the following way, but here's what they described in the paper, extracting from Sudafed 60mg.
- Each Sudafed tablet was crushed individually using a mortar and pestle and placed in a beaker.
- Then by repetitively washing with small amounts of acetone (10ml in total) until the red colour had disappeared. (Here we're removing the iron oxide responsible for the red colour)
- This is followed by gravity filtration to remove the acetone and the residue is dried.
- Now 15ml of anhydrous ethanol is added to the beaker. Then the beaker is covered with aluminium foil and shaken for 15 minutes mechanically.
(i.e place it on a flat surface that vibrates, although a stir plate & bar should work too in my opinion)
- The solution is left to settle for one hour before being run through another gravity filtration.
- The solvent (the liquid this time) is evaporated giving essentially pure pseudoephedrine hcl. If you're lucky you'll get crystals, otherwise it'll be a mass.
(In the likely scenario this doesn't happen, sorry to say you won't be able to extract the pseudo from the pills you bought as they've been changed to prevent this exact thing happening).
They didn't report a yield, but expect roughly 80% if the pills are possible to extract from. Also keep in mind if water is added at any point, just about every single pill will clog up due to the additives meant to prevent extraction.
Vacuum filtration is superior but make sure to be quick as acetone fumes in the compressor does not a good day make.
B - Iodine
Now, iodine can be prepared in several ways from several sources.
I've actually covered this before in detail ( /post/de835abcec47dbf75db8 ).
However, in this paper they briefly covered one of the most common ways it's done by amateurs and first-timers.
It's a bit more expensive but will work for small scale.
- Iodine tincture (7ml, 2.5%) and distilled water (7ml) are combined and mixed by swirling the bottle/beaker.
- 1ml of the conc. HCl (37%) is added dropwise while swirling.
- Then the peroxide is added, 7ml of chilled 6% H2O2, also while swirling. It might get a bit warm but at small scales it should be fine.
- Once it's all added it's poured into a beaker containing 50ml distilled water and left for 20 minutes to settle.
- Then the mixture is filtrated using gravity to reveal iodine crystals.
- This is transferred to an appropriate container. It will stain everything it touches and give off noxious fumes that you should NOT breathe in.
Of course, if you're just making small amounts, you could actually just buy pure iodine on amazon, ebay, etsy etc
by looking for it from the perspective of an element collector. This is cheaper and you can get 50g without raising any flags.
C - Red Phosphorous
There are plenty of ways to obtain this, but by far the most common one for us common folk is to get it from the strikers on matchbooks.
What you're looking for are striker strips that don't contain the hexagonal paper grid. The ones with a grid will still work but you'll get some contamination.
- Cut up the matchbox/book to separate the striker, then try to peel off just the paper and avoid the cardboard.
- Soak them for half an hour in a tiny amount of acetone (~10ml).
- Then just scrape it off and discard the paper.
- Then the phosphorous is washed with distilled water and left to dry.
- Next you make a 20% wt/vol solution of NaOH in water. 20ml is all we need for the next step, so you add 4g NaOH to 20ml of distilled water.
- The dry red phosphorous is placed in a beaker and the lye solution is added.
- The solution was placed on low heat for 2h. (They didn't specify but assume 40-60C)
- Then it's carefully filtered and the residue is washed with distilled water.
- The residue is then left to dry to a constant weight and transferred to an appropriate container. Red phosphorous is an extreme fire hazard, shock and friction sensitive too.
This can be a bit more difficult to get ahold of pure, even under the guise of element collecting, but obtaining from matchbox strikers is very easy.
Some pyrotechnic stores might sell you some but that varies a lot between country to country.
2. Methamphetamine (freebase)
Finally on to making the meth!
- 2g of pseudoephedrine hcl is added to a 100ml round bottom flask using a funnel, along with 0.6g red phosphorous, 4g of iodine and 2ml of distilled water.
- A reflux condenser is attached on top of the flask and the solution is refluxed for 24 hours.
- After 24 hours it is allowed to cool and then diluted with an equal volume of water before being filtered to remove the red phosphorous. (Very important step!)
- A few grams of Na2S2O3 is added to a fresh beaker and 8ml of a 25% wt/vol NaOH solution is added to basify the solution.
- This solution is then added to the filtered solution and swirled to reveal beautiful meth freebase as an oil which will float to the top.
To extract this, they're using toluene.
More on this in the next step
3. Methamphetamine (HCl)
- 20ml of toluene is added to the solution to extract the freebase. The toluene extract should be clear, possibly a light yellow tint.
(- Now if it isn't clear, you should either decant, or preferably use a sep. funnel to separate the toluene and the lower aqueous layer. You do not want water for the next step)
- Dry HCl gas is bubbled through the toluene to reveal a white precipitate, our Methamphetamine HCl.
- The solid is filtered out and dried under vacuum.
You should recrystalise it a few times to purify, although this should be more or less pure. Anyways, recrystallising will yield beautiful crystals of meth instead of just a white precipitate.
Now, they don't mention how to make the dry HCl gas as this is something most chemists will be well familiar with.
There are several ways but it has to be dry. We do not want any water contamination.
This means having as dry sulphuric as you can, 98% in other words.
Personally, -and this is unnecessary- if I'm preparing a HCl generator,
I use TCCA and HCl to make a small amount of chlorine gas to bubble through making sure the joints are properly lubricated with the sulphuric.
It's easier to see and smell chlorine in coming over. The little chlorine that does dissolve in the sulphuric is negligible and you can then switch over to whatever HCl you're using.
You could use other safer gases but when you're risking bleaching your eyebrows and lungs for a 6th time,
you tend to double, triple and quadruple check and pay more attention. At least I do.. now..
But the main reason is because whenever I've done this step before starting a HCl generator is because it has given better yields.
Whether it actually makes it more dry or not, I don't know. I won't question it.
I'm well aware of its insanity, but there is a lot of superstitious behaviour you'll find in most chemists that doesn't follow any real logic.
We had an autoclave in undergrad which would break if you didn't watch it the entire time you had it running. But that's a story for another day.
Point is: Make sure the seals are damn secure and don't let any air in.
There are plenty of ways to generate the gaseous HCl, which we'll cover at some other point (thanks leroy for reminding me we should do it).
Of course, you could just mix NaCl with sulphuric and then use that gas to salt out the meth and I suspect that's what they did in the paper as they include NaCl in the materials bought.
A guide for both NaCl + sulphuric and HCl + sulphuric will be made shortly and be linked in this post here and on the wiki when published.
Anyways, so what you'd do to set one of these generators up, well you could check youtube as there are plenty there and it's not something illegal,
but essentially assemble a two-necked bottle with a pressure-equalising addition funnel in one end and a gas adapter in the other,
with a tube leading into some concentrated sulphuric acid in a second bottle (make sure to use stoppers so no air gets in)
and have a second tube at the top to lead the dried HCl gas into the toluene solution with the methamphetamine freebase.
Just monitor the pressure and it'll be fine. Like leroy mentioned, (and this should be clear to most but I realise I should probably explain anyway),
the pressure will at first be higher as the HCl gas is being generated, but once it slows down and stops,
the pressure inside the sulphuric acid will decrease leading to the tube sucking up the toluene
(if it's in the toluene, if it's above in the air then obviously it'll just suck the air back).
If you use a third flask inbetween, the toluene/meth/meth hcl solution will simply land in the third container, safely,
but if it lands in the sulphuric, that's pretty much ruined and beyond saving. So it's definitely a good idea and will be covered in the HCl generator guide.
You could definitely DIY it with a few jugs and rubber stoppers you shove a tube through, but let's try to keep this a bit more scientific and less methhead-y.
If you're able to get your hands on pure pseudoephedrine hcl powder, then this whole writeup will work well.
Now, the paper doesn't list yields either as it focuses on how to solvents for the pseudo extraction affect the finished product,
but you could assume anything between 20 and 90%. So between half a gram and slightly below 2 grams per batch from step 2.
In the paper, they made 24 batches and did analysis on each and got plenty of nice graphs.
DOI 10.1007/s00216-012-6600-8 for those interested in the analysis.
They themselves based the procedure mostly from a few recipes in Uncle Fester's 9th volume of meth manufacturing book,
that thing is a goldmine despite being slightly outdated in a few parts.
Wrote this summary somewhat quickly so might edit it a bit later to clear things up and format it cleaner. Please stop sending all those AI generated trash, here's literally the pseudo route, and a safe benzaldehyde to p2p is available for the other route. Read and check our wiki instead of making 4 posts each.
Materials:
Acetone (100%);
Ethanol(100%);
HCl (37%);
H2O2 (6%);
H2SO4 (98%);
Toluene;
Na2S2O3;
NaOH;
Iodine source;
Red Phosphorous source;
d-Pseudoephedrine containing decongestant (60mg/tablet);
(optionally NaCl and/or TCCA for the HCl generator)
1. Prep Precursors
A - Pseudoephedrine HCl
Now you have to keep in mind that the current ingredients have changed slightly from 2012
when this paper was written and as such most decongestants cannot have their pseudo extracted
in the following way, but here's what they described in the paper, extracting from Sudafed 60mg.
- Each Sudafed tablet was crushed individually using a mortar and pestle and placed in a beaker.
- Then by repetitively washing with small amounts of acetone (10ml in total) until the red colour had disappeared. (Here we're removing the iron oxide responsible for the red colour)
- This is followed by gravity filtration to remove the acetone and the residue is dried.
- Now 15ml of anhydrous ethanol is added to the beaker. Then the beaker is covered with aluminium foil and shaken for 15 minutes mechanically.
(i.e place it on a flat surface that vibrates, although a stir plate & bar should work too in my opinion)
- The solution is left to settle for one hour before being run through another gravity filtration.
- The solvent (the liquid this time) is evaporated giving essentially pure pseudoephedrine hcl. If you're lucky you'll get crystals, otherwise it'll be a mass.
(In the likely scenario this doesn't happen, sorry to say you won't be able to extract the pseudo from the pills you bought as they've been changed to prevent this exact thing happening).
They didn't report a yield, but expect roughly 80% if the pills are possible to extract from. Also keep in mind if water is added at any point, just about every single pill will clog up due to the additives meant to prevent extraction.
Vacuum filtration is superior but make sure to be quick as acetone fumes in the compressor does not a good day make.
B - Iodine
Now, iodine can be prepared in several ways from several sources.
I've actually covered this before in detail ( /post/de835abcec47dbf75db8 ).
However, in this paper they briefly covered one of the most common ways it's done by amateurs and first-timers.
It's a bit more expensive but will work for small scale.
- Iodine tincture (7ml, 2.5%) and distilled water (7ml) are combined and mixed by swirling the bottle/beaker.
- 1ml of the conc. HCl (37%) is added dropwise while swirling.
- Then the peroxide is added, 7ml of chilled 6% H2O2, also while swirling. It might get a bit warm but at small scales it should be fine.
- Once it's all added it's poured into a beaker containing 50ml distilled water and left for 20 minutes to settle.
- Then the mixture is filtrated using gravity to reveal iodine crystals.
- This is transferred to an appropriate container. It will stain everything it touches and give off noxious fumes that you should NOT breathe in.
Of course, if you're just making small amounts, you could actually just buy pure iodine on amazon, ebay, etsy etc
by looking for it from the perspective of an element collector. This is cheaper and you can get 50g without raising any flags.
C - Red Phosphorous
There are plenty of ways to obtain this, but by far the most common one for us common folk is to get it from the strikers on matchbooks.
What you're looking for are striker strips that don't contain the hexagonal paper grid. The ones with a grid will still work but you'll get some contamination.
- Cut up the matchbox/book to separate the striker, then try to peel off just the paper and avoid the cardboard.
- Soak them for half an hour in a tiny amount of acetone (~10ml).
- Then just scrape it off and discard the paper.
- Then the phosphorous is washed with distilled water and left to dry.
- Next you make a 20% wt/vol solution of NaOH in water. 20ml is all we need for the next step, so you add 4g NaOH to 20ml of distilled water.
- The dry red phosphorous is placed in a beaker and the lye solution is added.
- The solution was placed on low heat for 2h. (They didn't specify but assume 40-60C)
- Then it's carefully filtered and the residue is washed with distilled water.
- The residue is then left to dry to a constant weight and transferred to an appropriate container. Red phosphorous is an extreme fire hazard, shock and friction sensitive too.
This can be a bit more difficult to get ahold of pure, even under the guise of element collecting, but obtaining from matchbox strikers is very easy.
Some pyrotechnic stores might sell you some but that varies a lot between country to country.
2. Methamphetamine (freebase)
Finally on to making the meth!
- 2g of pseudoephedrine hcl is added to a 100ml round bottom flask using a funnel, along with 0.6g red phosphorous, 4g of iodine and 2ml of distilled water.
- A reflux condenser is attached on top of the flask and the solution is refluxed for 24 hours.
- After 24 hours it is allowed to cool and then diluted with an equal volume of water before being filtered to remove the red phosphorous. (Very important step!)
- A few grams of Na2S2O3 is added to a fresh beaker and 8ml of a 25% wt/vol NaOH solution is added to basify the solution.
- This solution is then added to the filtered solution and swirled to reveal beautiful meth freebase as an oil which will float to the top.
To extract this, they're using toluene.
More on this in the next step
3. Methamphetamine (HCl)
- 20ml of toluene is added to the solution to extract the freebase. The toluene extract should be clear, possibly a light yellow tint.
(- Now if it isn't clear, you should either decant, or preferably use a sep. funnel to separate the toluene and the lower aqueous layer. You do not want water for the next step)
- Dry HCl gas is bubbled through the toluene to reveal a white precipitate, our Methamphetamine HCl.
- The solid is filtered out and dried under vacuum.
You should recrystalise it a few times to purify, although this should be more or less pure. Anyways, recrystallising will yield beautiful crystals of meth instead of just a white precipitate.
Now, they don't mention how to make the dry HCl gas as this is something most chemists will be well familiar with.
There are several ways but it has to be dry. We do not want any water contamination.
This means having as dry sulphuric as you can, 98% in other words.
Personally, -and this is unnecessary- if I'm preparing a HCl generator,
I use TCCA and HCl to make a small amount of chlorine gas to bubble through making sure the joints are properly lubricated with the sulphuric.
It's easier to see and smell chlorine in coming over. The little chlorine that does dissolve in the sulphuric is negligible and you can then switch over to whatever HCl you're using.
You could use other safer gases but when you're risking bleaching your eyebrows and lungs for a 6th time,
you tend to double, triple and quadruple check and pay more attention. At least I do.. now..
But the main reason is because whenever I've done this step before starting a HCl generator is because it has given better yields.
Whether it actually makes it more dry or not, I don't know. I won't question it.
I'm well aware of its insanity, but there is a lot of superstitious behaviour you'll find in most chemists that doesn't follow any real logic.
We had an autoclave in undergrad which would break if you didn't watch it the entire time you had it running. But that's a story for another day.
Point is: Make sure the seals are damn secure and don't let any air in.
There are plenty of ways to generate the gaseous HCl, which we'll cover at some other point (thanks leroy for reminding me we should do it).
Of course, you could just mix NaCl with sulphuric and then use that gas to salt out the meth and I suspect that's what they did in the paper as they include NaCl in the materials bought.
A guide for both NaCl + sulphuric and HCl + sulphuric will be made shortly and be linked in this post here and on the wiki when published.
Anyways, so what you'd do to set one of these generators up, well you could check youtube as there are plenty there and it's not something illegal,
but essentially assemble a two-necked bottle with a pressure-equalising addition funnel in one end and a gas adapter in the other,
with a tube leading into some concentrated sulphuric acid in a second bottle (make sure to use stoppers so no air gets in)
and have a second tube at the top to lead the dried HCl gas into the toluene solution with the methamphetamine freebase.
Just monitor the pressure and it'll be fine. Like leroy mentioned, (and this should be clear to most but I realise I should probably explain anyway),
the pressure will at first be higher as the HCl gas is being generated, but once it slows down and stops,
the pressure inside the sulphuric acid will decrease leading to the tube sucking up the toluene
(if it's in the toluene, if it's above in the air then obviously it'll just suck the air back).
If you use a third flask inbetween, the toluene/meth/meth hcl solution will simply land in the third container, safely,
but if it lands in the sulphuric, that's pretty much ruined and beyond saving. So it's definitely a good idea and will be covered in the HCl generator guide.
You could definitely DIY it with a few jugs and rubber stoppers you shove a tube through, but let's try to keep this a bit more scientific and less methhead-y.
If you're able to get your hands on pure pseudoephedrine hcl powder, then this whole writeup will work well.
Now, the paper doesn't list yields either as it focuses on how to solvents for the pseudo extraction affect the finished product,
but you could assume anything between 20 and 90%. So between half a gram and slightly below 2 grams per batch from step 2.
In the paper, they made 24 batches and did analysis on each and got plenty of nice graphs.
DOI 10.1007/s00216-012-6600-8 for those interested in the analysis.
They themselves based the procedure mostly from a few recipes in Uncle Fester's 9th volume of meth manufacturing book,
that thing is a goldmine despite being slightly outdated in a few parts.
Wrote this summary somewhat quickly so might edit it a bit later to clear things up and format it cleaner. Please stop sending all those AI generated trash, here's literally the pseudo route, and a safe benzaldehyde to p2p is available for the other route. Read and check our wiki instead of making 4 posts each.
