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Discussion => Drug safety => Topic started by: fractalglobal on January 04, 2013, 10:20 pm

Title: Seperating amphetamine and caffeine using tartaric acid?
Post by: fractalglobal on January 04, 2013, 10:20 pm
Just a thought I had, I have no formal education in chemistry but I do have quite a bit of experience in clandestine synthesis/extractions.  Just wondering if it would be possible to seperate amphetamine and caffeine using the somewhat popular resolution of dextro/levo amphetamine with tartaric acid.  Any chemist care to comment?
Title: Re: Seperating amphetamine and caffeine using tartaric acid?
Post by: gambino on January 05, 2013, 07:24 pm
No need to try to do an enantiomeric separation to get caffeine out of amphetamine.

Off the top of my head, an acid-base purification seems like a good try.  Dissolve the mixture in water, basify with NaOH solution, extract with an organic solvent, wash the organic layer several times with water to get rid of the caffeine.  Dry the solvent and crystalize the amphetamine with HCl.  You would need to chose the organic solvent carefully.  Ether would work best; toluene would also be fine.  Avoid dichloromethane and chloroform because caffeine is more soluble in those than it is in water.

You could also try to separate the caffeine by sublimation, preferably under vacuum. Caffeine will sublimate at 170 deg C at atmospheric, but more readily at 160-165 deg C at 1 mm Hg.  This might be a quick easy method, but I've never done it before.  You would have to be careful not to over heat as that could decompose your amphetamine.

These are pretty standard organic lab techniques, so will leave it to you to look up the details of them.  Suffice it to say, separation of caffeine from amphetamine should be pretty straightforward.
Title: Re: Seperating amphetamine and caffeine using tartaric acid?
Post by: fractalglobal on January 06, 2013, 11:58 am
A/B is something I'm extremely familiar with 8). I was under the impression that it wouldn't work for amphetamine/caffeine seperation though.  Caffeine is meant to be notoriously difficult to seperate from amphetamine, if something as simple as an A/B would work, I would have thought it would be somewhat common knowledge amongst tweakers.