Oxidation is the process of losing electrons. Reduction is the process of gaining electrons. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------cations = positive ions. anions = negative ions. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------Molarity (M) = moles of solute (n) / liters of solution (V) i.e. one molar solution of NaCl 1 atom of Na = 22.989 amu (molecular weight/ atomic weight) 1 atom of Cl = 35.453 amu ______________________ 1 mole NaCl = 58.442 amu So, 58.442 grams NaCl plus enough solution added to make 1 liter total. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SYNTHESES THAT DON'T SUCK: One of the easiest ways to make methamphetamine is from amphetamine. Of course, this assumes you have amphetamine in the first place, but let's just pretend you have some and you want to spice it up a bit. The difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine is the addition of a single methyl group (CH3) to the amino group sticking off the middle carbon atom in the chain. Fortunately, substituting amines is really simple. Vaporize your amine (your amphetamine) with a bunch of vaporized chloromethane (CH3Cl, a solvent) and some gaseous pyridine (C5H5N)... voila, the amino group takes the methyl from the chloromethane and lets a hydrogen go. The hydrogen joins the liberated chlorine, and the resulting HCl is soaked up by the pyridine. The pyridine is optional. Adding it drives the reaction a bit by pulling the excess HCl out of the equation, but it's not neessary. Assuming you don't have amphetamine lying around, an easy synthesis with a very high yield is to reduce the condensation product of phenylacetone and methylamine. The benefit of this method is that different amines can be used to produce novel N-alkyl amphetamines (ethamphetamine, tert-butylamphetamine, etc) Making it from ephedrine or pseudoephedrine is possible. The only difference between methamphetamine and (pseudo)ephedrine is that damn alpha-hydroxy group. Reacting your ephedrine with thionyl chloride replaes the OH with Cl to produce N-methyl-alpha-chloroamphetamine as an intermediate. Hydrogenating this product is easy: use lithium aluminum hydride, sodium borohydride, or even hydrogen gas with nickel or platinum metal as a catalyst. The product of this step is N-methylamphetamine and HCl. Evaporate off the water and you have methamphetamine hydrochloride.
A surprisingly simple synthesis is possible from the amino acid phenylalanine, which is available at health food stores for about $14 for 100 tablets. Phenylalanine is 2-amino-3-phenylpropanoic acid, which is more or less amphetamine with a COOH where the CH3 should be at the end of the chain. Thionyl chloride (SOCl2) will replace the OH with a Cl, which falls off and is replaced by H when you give it lithium aluminum hydride, sodium borohydride, or hydrogen gas and nickel/platinum. If you use hydrogen and metal for that step, you'll have to reduce the carbonyl group with one of the hydrides, so best save time + effort and use them and do both reductions at once. When that carbonyl is reduced, you now have amphetamine. Go back up to that first one I mentioned for upgrading amphetamine into methamphetamine. Note that azll of these (and probably anything anyone ever comes up with) will give you a mix of d- and l- isomers. The d- is cool, the l- is shit, remember. If you have time, energy, and equipment, you can separate the two and reprocess the l- into d- by oxidizing it and re-aminating it as described in the "critique" of the Phrack synthesis. DIAGRAMS:
/ || || || \
/\\
\\ / | | | //
/ \
\// /\\
/ \
H NH
\ / | | CH3
amphetamine
H NCH3
/ \\ / \ / || | | || | | || | CH3 \ // C6H6CH2CH(NHCH3)CH3 \// OH | / \
/\\ / || || || \
/ || || ||
\\ / | | | //
H NCH3 \ / | | CH3
\// /\\
\\ / | | |
/ \
methamphetamine has a CH3 at N that amphetamine doesn't
ephedrine and pseudoephedrine the difference is whether the OH points up or down
H NH
\ / | | C=O
phenylalanine
\ // | C6H6CH2CH(NH2)COOH \// OH
compare to amphetamine
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(Speed Raver) wrote: **> **> **>
I'm sorry to say that no method attempting to directly reduce (pseudo)ephedrine's hydroxyl group is going to work.
Your post was interesting, but this is not quite true. Direct hydrogenation over Pd or Pd on a carrier is well known and facile. You add a little perchloric, phosphoric or sulphuric acid, which esterifies the-OH group that you're complaining about. Thus making the intermediate halide via SOCl2, like you mentioned, is unecessary. **> **> **>
Note that all of these (and probably anything anyone ever comes up with) will give you a mix of d- and l- isomers.
Hydrogenation starting with (-) ephedrine, whether direct or via the halide, will give d-meth. If you start with dl-ephedrine, you get dl-meth. Yogi ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------There are two common ways to make meth. One is with d-ephedrine or pseudo ephedrine. The other is with phenyl-2-propanone. The difference is that with ephedrine you get the d-isomer only while with p-2-p you get a mixture of both isomers. There is some discussion as to which is better but most "experts" prefer the p-2-p product. Okay. 1: ephedrine method. In a round bottom flask place 1000gms of ephedrine, 250 gms of red phosporus,1000ml of hydriotic acid and 1 oz of thiosodiumsulfate. Place a condenser on top of the flask and reflux the mixture for 48 hrs at 120 degrees C. Cool the mixture. Add a 10% solution of sodium hydroxide slowly since heat will be evolved until the Ph of the mixture is 14. You should have an upper and lower layer. Separate the upper(oil) layer from the lower (water) layer. Distill the oil layer (steam distillation is the best-go look it up). Mix the distillation product with a 10% hydrochloric acid solution until the Ph of the mixture is 8.0. Evaporate the water (steam bath) and the final product will crystallize. 2: p-2-p method. In a round bottom flask of suitable size place 400ml of p-2-p, 2000ml of ethyl alcohol (everclear works fine), 400 gms of aluminum (reynolds wrap or better yet 1100 grade aluminum foil or shavings) and 2000ml of 30% (not 40%) methylamine. Add 1/3 gram of mercuric chloride and
quickly fit the flask vertically with the biggest condenser you have. The reaction should get warm. If not heat it a little until it does. This reaction is VERY exothermic (gives off heat). As soon as the mixture starts to bubble and get warm get ready to put the flask in an ice bath to keep it under control. Let the reaction run its course until it starts to cool then heat it for another hour or so. Cool the reaction, filter the mixture with a buchner funnel under vacuum to remove the solid by-product. Place the clear filtered liquid in a flask set up for distillation and distill off the alcohol (under vacuum preferably). You will know when the alcohol is gone when the mixture becomes cloudy. Let the mixture sit and it will separate into two layers. The bottom layer is water (etc) and the top layer is Methamphetamine. Separate the top layer in a separatory funnel and (steam distill it first for the best results) mix it with 10% hydrochloric acid until the Ph of the mixture is 8.0. Evaporate the mixture on a steam bath ( Or a pyrex plate placed on top of a pot of boiling water) and it will crystallize into the final product. The whole key here is the purity of your starting ingredients. Pure material equals a pure product. Again this is for information only. To put this into practice is illegal and can result in fines and/or imprisonment. ephedrine is impractical to make. p-2-p can be made in many ways. It is NOT available otherwise . It can be made by reacting phenylacetic acid and lead acetate. Or better yet phenylacetic acid, acetic anhydride and sodium acetate. There are many other ways to make p-2-p (Thorium catalyst reduction of phenylacetic and acetic acids, The Bader and Nightingale aceto aceto nitrile reaction etc. Go to a college library. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(Anonymous) wrote: >1. Theoretically if one can to consense the product of methylamine and >phenylacetone into methamphetamine (rather simple really) then what >happens if you substitute methylamine.hcl in the reaction. Does the hcl >interfere with the rection?? If it makes methAmphetamine.hcl then this >would take ALOT of heat to boil before re-condensing? IS this in-fact >what happens? Or does it just screw things up.. > From what I know the reaction still works with meth HCl. You can read this up in the Chemical literature - it's been known about for well over 60 years. >2. If you wanted to change methylamine.hcl into methylamine, you could >disolve in water, make it basic with NaOH then what do you extract >with?? Yes. But MeNH2 is very soluble in water. 1 part of water dissolves 1000 parts of MeNH2. It is not at all soluble in organic solvents. >Chem references (online) are VERY short on detail when it comes >to agents that methylamine is solutable in. Look it up in a book - The Merck index should be available in your local library. If you post obviously silly questions like this people
will think that you are lazy or incompentant or both. They will not want to encourage your dependency on them by giving you answers that you can find out for yourself. Nevertheless I'll tell you - just this once. MeNH2 is not very soluble in orgainic solvents. eg. The solubility is only 10% in benzene. It is soluble in water and ethanol. It is not soluble in CHCl3, acetone, ether or ethyl acetate. You would not try to extract into an organic solvent as it wouldn't work. You could add base, increase the temperature and boil the MeNH2 off, collecting the gas produced. > >3. (Ok I lied there are 3 questions, so sue me) >I have seen 2 synthetic routes for P2P however both involve shall we say >difficult to obtain precursors. Are there any other synthetic routes?? > Yes. There are loads of possible routes. A good place to start is "Advanced Organic Chemistry" by Jerry March. This inexpensive book will keep you busy in the library for years - looking up the references. The simplest route to ketones is via the corresponding alcohol and the corresponding alcohol is often easy to make and, unlike P2P it is probably legal to possess! There appear to be another 100 routes to ketones mentioned. P2P is an easy ketone to make because it has only one functional group. Of course, I couldn't think of any reason why you would want to make P2P. Why not go straight to the chemical you really want by condensing the imine [produced from MeNH2 and acetaldehyde] with Benzyl Magnesium Halide in a Grignard reaction? No, I won't give you the literature reference to this reaction. It is obsure and you will need to search hard to find it. Clue. The time was between 1945 and 1955. >4. (Ok I lied again there are 4 questions.. really this is the last one) I never trust people who lie to me! Give up this bad habit unless you're realy desperate and you can't avoid it. I'm not moralising here - I'm just telling you that people don't do favours for people they don't trust. >Has anyone any thoughts on the reduction of (pseudo)ephedrine via either >iodine/phosphorous (red) or HI/phosphorous. I assume it racemizes the >product. Is this a correct assumption?? Also dies HI warrant the effort >or can Iodine/phosphorous be used instead, Does the additon of HI >significantly inprove the yield?? Yes, It's very messy. I suspect that it might be easier to reduce the ketone than it is the alcohol.
The Clemmensen reduction of aliphatic ketones to hydrocarbons uses amalgamated zinc and concentrated HCl. The 3rd edition of Vogel's Practical Organic Chemistry gives details of this. [but not for the compound you want. Although there's no reason why it shouldn't work] It too is a messy reaction [and that's why it is no longer used] but the reagents are much more easily available. > >elusius and steve quest your comments would be grately appreciated.. > My comments are: if you're going to mess about with HI or red P then you should be studying at a university.
