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All 6 posts Subject: Extracting Drugs/Metabolite Precursors from Urine Please login to post Down

nace
(Stranger)
06-16-03 03:41
No 440231
      Extracting Drugs/Metabolite Precursors from Urine

Hello all:

I'm a relative newcomer to this forum, as you all can see. The idea I'm interested in--recycling whole drugs or precursors from human urine--is not a new one, as my searches of the archives here have revealed. Some of you may remember the "urine enema" thread from a couple years back, or have heard the story yourselves. If not, well, I think the phrase "urine enema" is pretty much self-explanatory. There is also the perennial anecdote about some frosty Siberian folks supposedly drinking the urine of those who have ingested amanita muscaria for its psychoactive properties.

I am a relative newcomer to the sciences, as well, and the purpose of my posting is to get some feedback about this idea from folks who may be better versed in organic and biochemistry than I. I'm going to ramble on for a bit about how I think the process might work, and I would appreciate any feedback you might have--I've probably made some erroneous assumptions or downright false conclusions in here somewhere.

What I propose to do (hypothetically) is ingest a drug, recover its metabolites from my urine, and reconstitute the whole drug using relatively simple chemistry (as versus a complete or semisynthesis.) The drug I propose to experiment with first is cocaine, because its value is high and therefore more likely to be worth the considerable effort of going through this process. LSD would be an even better choice, by this reasoning, but A) I don't know anything about its metabolism and B) LSD is active in such low doses that the needle-in-a-haystack problem of recovering metabolites from urine becomes more of a needle-in-a-hayfield sort of problem.

Cocaine, then. One of the first questions that popped up in the 2000 thread about urine extractions of drugs was just how long metabolites of various drugs remain present in urine. No doubt the literature could provide average values for cocaine, MDMA, pot, and so forth, but given that folks metabolize at different rates, a more direct way would be to use commercially-available kits to test one's urine directly. Enzyme Multiplied Immunoassay Technique (EMIT) based test kits for the NIDA 5 (PCP, THC, opiates, cocaine, amphetamine) are commonly available on the internet and in head shops. So, you could (hypothetically) ingest some coke and then save your urine until it tests negative by EMIT. You could repeat this procedure every time you used, or you could just assume that your metabolic rate is consistent and just save urine for X hours every time.

Once you've got the urine, the chief problem in extracting the drugs and/or metabolite precursors is the large volume of fluid and the fact that it is, after all, urine. Liquid-liquid extractions would require ridiculous and expensive solvent volumes, and would be clunky and inefficient to say the least. What you really want is to remove the aqueous phase of the urine--i.e. to dry it--completely and cheaply, without boiling, which could cause undesirable hydrolysis of the target compounds and, almost certainly, an awful smell.

The first technique that occurred to me was lyophilization (i.e. freeze drying), in which the sample is frozen and the water sublimated off under vacuum, leaving you with instant just-add-water piss powder. It would then be a relatively simple matter of finding the right solvent or solvent system to extract the target compounds from the powder and leave behind the gaak. How picky you need to be in this process depends on the target drug and your preferred route of administration, and in this respect cocaine may be a bad choice, because it is generally sniffed or (god forbid) injected, and in either case it's probably safe to assume that you don't want a bunch of inactive excreta in there along with it. In the case of MDMA, however, one might simply lyophilize the urine, scrape up the powder into gel-caps, and eat them, skipping the extraction step altogether.

The problem with lyophilization is that it requires expensive equipment that is difficult or impossible to improvise. It could be done, but it would be way too much work and trouble to be worth it. If you're in a research or industrial situation and have access to a lyophilizer that can handle high volumes, then that would clearly be the best way to do it. But most of us don't, of course.

A more accessible solution, it seems to me, is salting-out. As I understand it, this process works to remove more weakly-solvated species from solution by replacing them with more strongly-solvated species, for example common table salt. Table salt is cheaply and readily available. The process might work like this: You ingest a drug, and thereafter when you pee you do so into a volumetric container. You then test the urine for your target compounds using EMIT strips (or other commercial bioassay), and if it's positive, you add X volume of table salt per Y volume of urine--enough to saturate the urine with table salt--and then gravity- or vacuum-filter to extract the precipitates. The filtrate is immediately flushed, and the process repeated until the urine tests negative (or slightly longer, if you want to be extra-sure). The precipitates are then pooled and extracted using appropriate solvents.

In the case of cocaine, the literature reports 80:20 methanol-chloroform as a good system for extracting the three principal urinary metabolites, which are whole cocaine (1%), benzoylecgonine(~66%), and methylecgonine (ecgonine methyl ester, ~30%) simultaneously. The methanol-chloroform system is almost quantitative for whole cocaine, recovers about 80% of benzoylecgonine, and only recovers about 40% of methylecgonine. These values are off the top of my head; if anybody wants the citation I can find it. Cocaine is methylbenzoylecgonine, and the process of reconstituting it from the urinary metabolites amounts to simple methylation and benzoylation. To enhance recovery, it occurs to me that one might perform the methylation and benzoylation on the unextracted urinary precipitates and then extract whole cocaine using methanol-chloroform afterwards, but I don't know if there might be any nasty side-reactions with other species present in the urine. Any biochemhacks out there have thoughts on this? Another possibility is hydrolyzing the benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine to ecgonine in the reconstituted piss-powder, extracting the ecgonine, and getting back to cocaine by methyl- and benzoylating that extract. The only reason to do so would be if ecgonine can be more efficiently extracted from the piss-powder than BE and/or ME, which is something I don't really know about.

Once again, cocaine is the only drug whose metabolism I am at all familiar with. I have heard, anecdotally, that large amounts of MDMA are excreted virtually unchanged in the urine; if that's so then MDMA may well be a better choice, especially given that the preferred route of administration is oral. There may be other drugs which are even more amenable to this technique. One of the most attractive aspects of the idea--which somebody in the earlier thread suggested calling the "waterworld technique"--is that it's subversive: The Drug Warriors have spent all this money on research to determine drugs of abuse in human urine, and I think it would be a wonderful irony if that research could be put to use to create a recycled source of abusable material. One might even pursue research toward this end using federal grant dollars under the auspices of forensic toxicology. The down side, of course, is that saving one's urine is, ah, eccentric to say the least, and if the technique became widespread it would provide one more negative stereotype of drug users for the Drug War Propaganda Machine (chomp, chomp, grind, grind) to run with. On the other hand, it's not as if we could be much worse off than we already are, on this front.

That's all I have. Thanks for providing a forum for me to rant. Any and all comments will be appreciated.

LaBTop
(Daddy)
06-16-03 04:13
No 440239
User Picture       You must be a Jewish Scotchman,

buying one time a gram of coke, and then hoping to quantitatively reconstitute (nifty word for recover, supposedly) the same gram over and over again.

My dear Watson, I presume that after 10 leaks, you wouldn't find a single microgram of coke again, you cheapskater. smile LT/

WISDOMwillWIN

ChemisTris
(Hive Bee)
06-16-03 04:39
No 440243
User Picture       hehe

It's an odd (and icky), yet somewhat interesting idea. I had to work with urine (someone else's) once (for a pharmacology lab) and was surprised by how unpleasant I found it. I'm certainly not going to bother working with urine to recover drugs, but I did have a conversation with a friend once - we decided it would be pretty funny if the nightclubs in Ibiza had an automated system for MDMA recovery laugh

I have heard, anecdotally, that large amounts of MDMA are excreted virtually unchanged in the urine
Yeah, about 66% is excreted unchanged and about 7% as MDA.

Got democracy?http://www.dhushara.com/book/multinet/democ/wed.htm

Rhodium
(Chief Bee)
06-16-03 09:27
No 440267
User Picture       A Sound Theory vs. The Cruel Reality

Read this hypothetical experiment: Post 367014 (Rhodium: "A Sound Theory vs. The Cruel Reality", Stimulants)

insane_tweeker25
(Stranger)
06-23-03 06:13
No 441869
      extracting drugs from piss (yuck)

one novel idea i had on the matter when i ponderd the idea (useing meth of course)pour (heavy)urine through a filtering proccess (deionized salt) to extract as much water as possible solvate remaining fluid (i would recomend dcm because off the purrification propperties)crystalize wash again with dcm(to get out remaining yukkies)crystalize again let dry the reason i use meth as a referance is if the user in ? is a heavy user you will see the 2 subbstances start to sepperate almost instantly after urination this is of course all hypothetical but i believe 99% this will be successful [quote]insanity is a privalidge use it wisely crazy crazy crazy [orange][blue][i]

Insane_tweeker25

unionpacific
06-27-03 08:34
      (above) were you tweaking when you thought of...
(Rated as: insignificant)

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	All 6 posts		Subject: Extracting Drugs/Metabolite Precursors from Urine		Please login to post		Down


		nace (Stranger) 06-16-03 03:41 No 440231				Extracting Drugs/Metabolite Precursors from Urine
						Hello all: I'm a relative newcomer to this forum, as you all can see. The idea I'm interested in--recycling whole drugs or precursors from human urine--is not a new one, as my searches of the archives here have revealed. Some of you may remember the "urine enema" thread from a couple years back, or have heard the story yourselves. If not, well, I think the phrase "urine enema" is pretty much self-explanatory. There is also the perennial anecdote about some frosty Siberian folks supposedly drinking the urine of those who have ingested amanita muscaria for its psychoactive properties. I am a relative newcomer to the sciences, as well, and the purpose of my posting is to get some feedback about this idea from folks who may be better versed in organic and biochemistry than I. I'm going to ramble on for a bit about how I think the process might work, and I would appreciate any feedback you might have--I've probably made some erroneous assumptions or downright false conclusions in here somewhere. What I propose to do (hypothetically) is ingest a drug, recover its metabolites from my urine, and reconstitute the whole drug using relatively simple chemistry (as versus a complete or semisynthesis.) The drug I propose to experiment with first is cocaine, because its value is high and therefore more likely to be worth the considerable effort of going through this process. LSD would be an even better choice, by this reasoning, but A) I don't know anything about its metabolism and B) LSD is active in such low doses that the needle-in-a-haystack problem of recovering metabolites from urine becomes more of a needle-in-a-hayfield sort of problem. Cocaine, then. One of the first questions that popped up in the 2000 thread about urine extractions of drugs was just how long metabolites of various drugs remain present in urine. No doubt the literature could provide average values for cocaine, MDMA, pot, and so forth, but given that folks metabolize at different rates, a more direct way would be to use commercially-available kits to test one's urine directly. Enzyme Multiplied Immunoassay Technique (EMIT) based test kits for the NIDA 5 (PCP, THC, opiates, cocaine, amphetamine) are commonly available on the internet and in head shops. So, you could (hypothetically) ingest some coke and then save your urine until it tests negative by EMIT. You could repeat this procedure every time you used, or you could just assume that your metabolic rate is consistent and just save urine for X hours every time. Once you've got the urine, the chief problem in extracting the drugs and/or metabolite precursors is the large volume of fluid and the fact that it is, after all, urine. Liquid-liquid extractions would require ridiculous and expensive solvent volumes, and would be clunky and inefficient to say the least. What you really want is to remove the aqueous phase of the urine--i.e. to dry it--completely and cheaply, without boiling, which could cause undesirable hydrolysis of the target compounds and, almost certainly, an awful smell. The first technique that occurred to me was lyophilization (i.e. freeze drying), in which the sample is frozen and the water sublimated off under vacuum, leaving you with instant just-add-water piss powder. It would then be a relatively simple matter of finding the right solvent or solvent system to extract the target compounds from the powder and leave behind the gaak. How picky you need to be in this process depends on the target drug and your preferred route of administration, and in this respect cocaine may be a bad choice, because it is generally sniffed or (god forbid) injected, and in either case it's probably safe to assume that you don't want a bunch of inactive excreta in there along with it. In the case of MDMA, however, one might simply lyophilize the urine, scrape up the powder into gel-caps, and eat them, skipping the extraction step altogether. The problem with lyophilization is that it requires expensive equipment that is difficult or impossible to improvise. It could be done, but it would be way too much work and trouble to be worth it. If you're in a research or industrial situation and have access to a lyophilizer that can handle high volumes, then that would clearly be the best way to do it. But most of us don't, of course. A more accessible solution, it seems to me, is salting-out. As I understand it, this process works to remove more weakly-solvated species from solution by replacing them with more strongly-solvated species, for example common table salt. Table salt is cheaply and readily available. The process might work like this: You ingest a drug, and thereafter when you pee you do so into a volumetric container. You then test the urine for your target compounds using EMIT strips (or other commercial bioassay), and if it's positive, you add X volume of table salt per Y volume of urine--enough to saturate the urine with table salt--and then gravity- or vacuum-filter to extract the precipitates. The filtrate is immediately flushed, and the process repeated until the urine tests negative (or slightly longer, if you want to be extra-sure). The precipitates are then pooled and extracted using appropriate solvents. In the case of cocaine, the literature reports 80:20 methanol-chloroform as a good system for extracting the three principal urinary metabolites, which are whole cocaine (1%), benzoylecgonine(~66%), and methylecgonine (ecgonine methyl ester, ~30%) simultaneously. The methanol-chloroform system is almost quantitative for whole cocaine, recovers about 80% of benzoylecgonine, and only recovers about 40% of methylecgonine. These values are off the top of my head; if anybody wants the citation I can find it. Cocaine is methylbenzoylecgonine, and the process of reconstituting it from the urinary metabolites amounts to simple methylation and benzoylation. To enhance recovery, it occurs to me that one might perform the methylation and benzoylation on the unextracted urinary precipitates and then extract whole cocaine using methanol-chloroform afterwards, but I don't know if there might be any nasty side-reactions with other species present in the urine. Any biochemhacks out there have thoughts on this? Another possibility is hydrolyzing the benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine to ecgonine in the reconstituted piss-powder, extracting the ecgonine, and getting back to cocaine by methyl- and benzoylating that extract. The only reason to do so would be if ecgonine can be more efficiently extracted from the piss-powder than BE and/or ME, which is something I don't really know about. Once again, cocaine is the only drug whose metabolism I am at all familiar with. I have heard, anecdotally, that large amounts of MDMA are excreted virtually unchanged in the urine; if that's so then MDMA may well be a better choice, especially given that the preferred route of administration is oral. There may be other drugs which are even more amenable to this technique. One of the most attractive aspects of the idea--which somebody in the earlier thread suggested calling the "waterworld technique"--is that it's subversive: The Drug Warriors have spent all this money on research to determine drugs of abuse in human urine, and I think it would be a wonderful irony if that research could be put to use to create a recycled source of abusable material. One might even pursue research toward this end using federal grant dollars under the auspices of forensic toxicology. The down side, of course, is that saving one's urine is, ah, eccentric to say the least, and if the technique became widespread it would provide one more negative stereotype of drug users for the Drug War Propaganda Machine (chomp, chomp, grind, grind) to run with. On the other hand, it's not as if we could be much worse off than we already are, on this front. That's all I have. Thanks for providing a forum for me to rant. Any and all comments will be appreciated.



		LaBTop (Daddy) 06-16-03 04:13 No 440239				You must be a Jewish Scotchman,
						buying one time a gram of coke, and then hoping to quantitatively reconstitute (nifty word for recover, supposedly) the same gram over and over again. My dear Watson, I presume that after 10 leaks, you wouldn't find a single microgram of coke again, you cheapskater. LT/ WISDOMwillWIN



		ChemisTris (Hive Bee) 06-16-03 04:39 No 440243				hehe
						It's an odd (and icky), yet somewhat interesting idea. I had to work with urine (someone else's) once (for a pharmacology lab) and was surprised by how unpleasant I found it. I'm certainly not going to bother working with urine to recover drugs, but I did have a conversation with a friend once - we decided it would be pretty funny if the nightclubs in Ibiza had an automated system for MDMA recovery I have heard, anecdotally, that large amounts of MDMA are excreted virtually unchanged in the urine Yeah, about 66% is excreted unchanged and about 7% as MDA. Got democracy?http://www.dhushara.com/book/multinet/democ/wed.htm



		Rhodium (Chief Bee) 06-16-03 09:27 No 440267				A Sound Theory vs. The Cruel Reality
						Read this hypothetical experiment: Post 367014 (Rhodium: "A Sound Theory vs. The Cruel Reality", Stimulants)



		insane_tweeker25 (Stranger) 06-23-03 06:13 No 441869				extracting drugs from piss (yuck)
						one novel idea i had on the matter when i ponderd the idea (useing meth of course)pour (heavy)urine through a filtering proccess (deionized salt) to extract as much water as possible solvate remaining fluid (i would recomend dcm because off the purrification propperties)crystalize wash again with dcm(to get out remaining yukkies)crystalize again let dry the reason i use meth as a referance is if the user in ? is a heavy user you will see the 2 subbstances start to sepperate almost instantly after urination this is of course all hypothetical but i believe 99% this will be successful [quote]insanity is a privalidge use it wisely[orange][blue][i] Insane_tweeker25



		unionpacific 06-27-03 08:34				(above) were you tweaking when you thought of... (Rated as: insignificant)

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