Meth

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Methamphetamine, or meth, is a powerful stimulant that can make you feel more awake and active.

NOTE: Follow this tutorials only if you are a true proffesional chemist, otherwise you would harm yourself

List of chemicals and materials:

-Diluted HCl: also called Muriatic acid, can be obtained from hardware stores, in the pool section - NaOH: also called lye

- Ethyl Ether: aka Diethyl Ether, Et-0-Et, can be obtained from engine starting fluid, usually from a large supermarket. Look for one that says "high ethyl ether content", such as Prestone

- Distilled water: it's really cheap, so you have no reason to use the nasty stuff from the tap. Do things right.

List of equipment

- A glass eyedropper

- Three small glass bottles with lids: (approx. 3 oz., but not important) one should be marked at 1.5oz, use tape on the outside to mark it (you might want to label it as ether). One should be clear (and it can't be the marked one).

- A Pyrex dish (the meatloaf one is suggested)

- A glass quart jar

- Sharp scissors

- Clean rubber gloves

- Coffee filters

- A measuring cup

- Measuring spoons

- Preparing your Lab:

Preparing Ethyl Ether:

WARNING: Ethyl Ether is very flammable and is heavier than air. Do not use ethyl ether near flame or non-sparkless motors. It is also an anaesthetic and can cause respiratory collapse if you inhale too much.

Take the unmarked small bottle and spray starter fluid in it until it looks half-full. Then fill the rest of the way with water, cap the bottle and shake for 5 minutes. Let it sit for a minute or two, and tap the side to try and separate the clear upper layer. Then, draw off the top (ether) layer with the eyedropper, and throw away the lower (water) and cloudy layer. Place the ether in the marked container. Repeat this until you have about 1.5 oz. of ether. Put the cap on it, and put it in the freezer if you can. Rinse the other bottle and let it stand. Also, Ethyl ether is very pungent. Even a small evaporated amount is quite noticeable.

- 1. Pour 1/8 teaspoon of the lye crystals into the bottle of ephedrine and agitate. Do this carefully, as the mixture will become hot, and give off hydrogen gas and/or steam. H2 gas is explosive and lighter than air, avoid any flames as usual. Repeat this step until the mixture remains cloudy. This step neutralizes the HCl in the salt, leaving the insoluble free base (l-desoxyephedrine) again. Why do we do this? So that we can get rid of any water-soluble impurities. For 3 oz. bottles, this should take only 3 repetitions or so.

- 2. Fill the bottle from step 5 up the rest of the way with ethyl ether. Cap the bottle, and agitate for about 8 minutes. It is very important to expose every molecule of the free-base to the ether for as long as possible. This will cause the free base to dissolve into the ether (it -is- soluble in ether).

- 3. Let the mixture settle. There will be a middle layer that is very thick. Tap the side of the bottle to get this layer as thin as possible. This is why this bottle should be clear.

- 4. Remove the top (ether) layer with the eyedropper, being careful not to get any of the middle layer in it. Place the removed ether layer into a third bottle.

- 5. Add to the third bottle enough water to fill it half-way and about 5 drops of muriatic acid. Cap it. Shake the bottle for 2 minutes. When it settles, remove the top layer and throw it away. The free base has now been bonded to the HCl again, forming a water soluble salt. This time, we're getting rid of ether-soluble impurities. Make sure to get rid of all the ether before going to step 11!

- 6. If there is anything left from step 3, repeat the procedure with it.

- 7. Evaporate the solution in the Pyrex dish on low heat. You can do this on the stove or nuke it in the microwave (be careful of splashing), but I have found that if you leave it on top of a hot-water heater (like the one that supplies hot water to your house) for about 2-3 days, the remaining crystals will be ephedrine HCl.

If you microwave it, I suggest no more than 5-10s at one time. If it starts "popping", that means you have too little liquid left to microwave. You can put it under a bright (100W) lamp instead. Microwaving can result in uneven heating, anyway.

First Batch: 120mg ephedrine HClEstimated: 300mg (100% of theoretical, disregarding HCl)

Now, Making Methamphetamine out of ephedrine by reducing it with Hydroiodic Acid and Red Phosphorus.

Items needed:

- Alot of matchbooks (the kind with the striking pad)

- Coffee filters (or filter paper)

- Something that measures ml and grams

- A flask (a small pot with a lid can be used)

- iodine

- Hydroiodic Acid (I will tell you how to make this)

- Red Phosphorus (I will tell you how to make this)

- Lye

- Optional (toluene and HCI gas)

Making Red Phosphorus:

The striking pad on books of matches is about 50% red phosphorus. The determined experimenter could obtain a pile of red phosphorus by scraping off the striking pads of matchbooks with a sharp knife. A typical composition of the striking pad is about 50% red phosphorus, along with about 30% antimony sulfide, and lesser amounts of glue, iron oxide, MnO2, and glass powder. I don't think these contaminants will seriously interfere with the reaction. Naturally, it is a tedious process to get large amounts of red phosphorus by scraping the striking pads off matchbooks, but who cares?

Making Hydroiodic Acid:

This is made by mixing iodine and red phosphorus. When making hydroiodic acid from iodine and red phosphorus, the acid is prepared first, and allowed to come to complete reaction for 20 minutes before adding the ephedrine to it. The way around the roadblock here is to just boil off some more of the water from the ephedrine extract, and make the acid mixture in fresh pure water. Since the production of HI from iodine and red phosphorus gives off a good deal of heat, it is wise to chill the mixture in ice, and slowly add the iodine crystals to the red phosphorus-water mixture.

Now, Making Methamphetamine:

To do the reaction, a 1000 ml round bottom flask is filled with 150 grams of ephedrine. Also added to the flask are 40 grams of red phosphorus and 340 ml of 47% hydroiodic acid. This same acid and red phosphorus mixture can be prepared from adding 150 grams of iodine crystals to 150 grams of red phosphorus in 300 ml of water. This should produce the strong hydroiodic acid solution needed. Exactly how strong the acid needs to be, I can't say . With the ingredients mixed together in the flask, a condenser is attached to the flask, and the mixture is boiled for one day. This length of time is needed for best yields and highest octane numbers on the product. While it is cooking, the mixture is quite red and messy looking from the red phosphorus floating around in it.When one day of boiling under reflux is up, the flask is allowed to cool, then it is diluted with an equal volume of water. Next, the red phosphorus is filtered out. A series of doubled up coffee filters will work to get out all the red phosphorus, but real filter paper is better. The filtered solution should look a golden color. A red color may indicate that all the red phosphorus is not yet out. If so, it is filtered again. The filtered-out phosphorus can be saved for use in the next batch. If filtering does not remove the red color, there may be iodine floating around the solution. It can be removed by adding a few dashes of sodium bisulfate or sodium thiosulfate.The next step in processing the batch is to neutralize the acid. A strong lye solution is mixed up and added to the batch while shaking until the batch is strongly basic. This brings the meth out as liquid free base floating on top of the water. The strongly basic solution is shaken vigorously to ensure that all the meth has been converted to the free base. You now can sell or use the free base for injection use or with free base meth now obtained, the next step you can do is to form the crystalline hydrochloride salt of meth. To do this, a few hundred mls of toluene is added to the batch, and the meth free base extracted out as usual. If the chemist's cooking has been careful, the color of the toluene extract will be clear to pale yellow. If this is the case, the product is sufficiently pure to make nice white crystals just by bubbling dry HCl gas through the toluene extract. If the toluene extract is darker colored, a distillation is called for to get pure meth free base. The yield of pure methamphetamine hydrochloride should be from 100 to 110 grams.