Silk Road forums
Discussion => Drug safety => Topic started by: ValiantExplorer on November 22, 2012, 11:53 pm
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Of course, there is no 100% MDMA (that I know of), but what's the rest when they say 79% or 85%?
Thank you :).
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This is a common misconception around MDMA
Most people say mdma can only be 84% pure, that is because they are only weighing a certain part of the entire substance. When you produce mdma into crystals you get a compund called MDMA HCL. MDMA HCL is the entire substance that you consume. So if you were to consume "84% mdma" you are actually consuming 100% of the drug you want to (MDMA HCL).
The molar mass of MDMA is 193.
The molar mass of MDMA.HCl is 229.
100X(193/229) = 84%
So in your case, you would have molly that has 5% impurities.
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That could be part of the story, if the quantified meth instead of the .HCl salt by mistake.
But 'what is the rest' is generally a good question.
Basically it can be two things:
- a cutting agent, deliberately added similarly to how cocaine is cut for street sale
- leftover reactants from synthesis
In the latter case it depends on the synthesis route. It could just be pseudo-ephedrine that hasn't reacted, which isn't all that dangerous. It could, however, be any other reactant too if the synthesis was carried out badly, and the purification was done badly or mostly skipped completely.
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Most people say mdma can only be 84% pure, that is because they are only weighing a certain part of the entire substance. When you produce mdma into crystals you get a compund called MDMA HCL. MDMA HCL is the entire substance that you consume. So if you were to consume "84% mdma" you are actually consuming 100% of the drug you want to (MDMA HCL).
This is not really true. I don't feel like retyping this, so I'm going to copy and paste my post from this thread:
http://dkn255hz262ypmii.onion/index.php?topic=52648.45
Okay you all, I'm going to drop some chemistry knowledge on you.
First off, I'd be willing to bet that 99% of vendors that say 'lab tested, xx% pure" are completely full of shit.
Secondly, as far as the discussion with whether or not the salt counts in the percentage measurement, there are two numbers a lab would give relating to the purity of a powder like this. The actual purity, and the w/w ratio. You are correct in that if indeed the manufacturer used HCl to salt the final product, it could only reach an 84% w/w concentration (assuming your math is right, I didn't check it). However, that's not what a purity testing lab would do. If you were truly measuring purity, the weight of the HCl would be included in that number. Any vendor worth his salt would post the higher number, since most silk-roadians knowledge of this subject is fairly small.
When you buy Benadryl, the box doesn't read "diphenhydramine 25mg before adding the weight of HCl". No, the 25mg amount includes the HCl used for salting. And it is recorded as 99+% pure.
Why is MDMA never found in concentrations above 84%? My guess? Vendors think noone would believe them if they posted higher, since most pulled the number out of their ass to begin with.
It is possible, however, that MDMA.HCl is fairly hygroscopic, and some of the weight is water. That would leave the molly to be but 84% pure. Or it's just always cut below that. I don't know much about MDMA itself.
I guess my point is that those numbers are all bs anyways, don't listen to them. listen to reviews.
Want to test the absolute purity of your MDMA? Grab a small glass vial, a thermometer, and a pot of canola oil. Put a little of the molly in the glass vial, and place the glass vial and thermometer in the pot of canola oil. Put the canola oil on the stove. Slowly increase the temp of the oil so that it increases at a rate of about 1-2 deg cel per minute. At around 147 deg C, the molly should melt sharply over about a 1-2 degrees cel range. The more impure it is, the wider the range. How wide the range is depends on the melting point of the impurities, so its hard to get an exact purity out of this, but it will give you a good idea.
So what makes up impurities in street molly?
It's sort of like what goes into a hot dog. You really don't want to know.
Possibly water weight if its slightly hygroscopic. Possibly cuts to increase profit. Possibly cheap-ass RCs. Possibly unreacted starting material.
Assuming it's uncut and straight from the lab, any impurities are likely from compounds in the starting material (sassafras oil, typically), or reaction byproducts that are similar enough to the product to not get removed via a/b extraction and recrystallization.
Almost all chemical reactions do not proceed with a single outcome, they typically have several outcomes, and one is just more favored. A good reaction will strongly favor one product over the other, but there will always be some byproduct.
What IS this byproduct? It depends on the reaction, and the purification techniques used afterward. Good chemists will already know a reaction's byproducts and the typical impurities in the starting material; then design a purification technique to rid the final product and intermediates of these undesirables. Street chemists are rarely good chemists though, and honestly removing these compounds is a huge hassle, would likely involve chromatography, will hurt your yields, cost more, and decrease profit. These impurities could cause cancer, have neurotoxic effects, taste like banana, or be completely harmless. Depends on the impurity.
Just one more way the war on drugs causes more harm than good.
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Street chemists as you call them can be perfectly good chemists, but they still have to work with limited means and a different set of considerations compared to, for example, synthesizing drugs in a pharma company.
Very few chemical reactions have a yield that is 100%. The, valid, questions is "what is the rest?". And the answer to that also raises the question if you should consider purification, and if you do, how much it would cost (in terms of effort, materials, and perhaps loss of the wanted substance).
If you get a product that's 80% purity with the other 20% being inert material that would not affect performace nor compromise safety, that could be a good argument to leave the stuff as-is, and just mark it as 80% pure, or sell 1.25 times larger doses as 'equivalent to 100%'.
This very same thing happens in the legit pharmacological industry though. It is not that uncommon for medication to be active only in one chiral form, with the other one not causing any problem, but no effect either.An example of this is the very common anti-allergic drug cetirizine. This substance was produced, sold and marketed as a racemic mixture of 2 enantionmeres, and has proven to be very effective as such.
The inactive enantiomere doesn't have any effect, positive or negative. Several studies have been conducted to investigate this, yielding no conclusive evidence. Yet the pharma industry did something no street drug vendor wound even ponder: They registered levocetirizine (the active enantionmere) as a new drug, granting another decade and a half of patent protection. As the original drug was a racemic mixture and the 'new' one is only one enantiomere, the 'new' one is twice as effective per milligram ingested, but also 100 times more expensive.
This whole ordeal doesn't help consumers one bit though: taking the old version that is available as a dirt cheap generic is just as effective as taking the 'new' version at half the dose. The downside is that you pay 50 times too much for the 'new' version without getting any extra benefit, reduced side effect profile or other benefit. The only benefit goes to UCB pharma for inventing this trick, which brought them quite a bit of added revenue, using only a purification step that removes something that was not a problem to begin with.
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Thank you guys for the awesome informative replies :). I admit I am a bit worried when I read that leftover stuff in MDMA may cause cancer, but hey, anything can cause cancer :).
I guess this is a matter of pain vs gain, and personally, given the fact that I don't take substances too often, I am not very worried. I think I get more nasty shit in my system just from the food I buy in the store and I eat daily. This doesn't mean that I shouldn't minimize the risk anyway, but not at the expense of not being able to do MDMA ever again. That stuff is too awesome :D.
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Well, as far as the by products being carcinogenic: you shouldn't get overly worried about that, unless there is some reason the drugs have been poisoned deliberately. Leftover synthesis products are often rather safe (such as pseudoefedrine), and cutting substances are -usually- chosen just to increase the volume of the product. If distributors would cut their goods with harmful substances, chances are they would lose a significant part of their market due to users dying.