..............Scored
poppy..................... Raw opium..........................Black tar opium.............. 200g Spanish opium ball
Harvesting and processing
Raw opium may be sold to a merchant or broker on the black market, but it usually does not travel far from the field before it is refined into
morphine base, because pungent, jelly-like raw opium is bulkier and harder to smuggle. Crude laboratories in the field are capable of refining opium into morphine base by a simple
acid-base extraction. A sticky, brown paste, morphine base is pressed into bricks and sun-dried, and can either be smoked, prepared into other forms or processed into
heroin.
[7]
Other methods of preparation (besides smoking), include processing into regular opium
tincture (
tinctura opii),
laudanum,
paregoric (
tinctura opii camphorata),
herbal wine (eg
vinum opii), opium powder (
pulvis opii), opium
sirup (
sirupus opii) and opium extract (
extractum opii)
[71]. Vinum opii is made by combining
sugar,
white wine,
cinnamon, and
cloves. Opium sirup is made by combining 997.5 part sugar sirup with 2.5 parts opium extract. Opium extract (
extractum opii) finally can be made by macerating raw opium with water. To make opium extract, 20 parts water are combined with 1 part raw opium which has been boiled for 5 minutes (the latter to ease mixing).
The leading legal production method is the
Gregory process, whereby the entire poppy, excluding roots and leaves, is mashed and stewed in dilute acid solutions. The
alkaloids are then recovered via
acid-base extraction and purified. This process was developed in the UK during
World War II, when wartime shortages of many
essential drugs encouraged innovation in
pharmaceutical processing.
Acid-base extraction
is a procedure using sequential
liquid-liquid extractions to purify
acids and
bases from mixtures based on their chemical properties. Acid-base extraction is routinely performed during the
work-up after
chemical syntheses and for the
isolation of compounds and
natural products like
alkaloids from crude
extracts. The product is largely free of neutral and acidic or basic impurities. It is not possible to separate chemically similar acids or bases using this simple method.
Technique
Usually, the mixture is dissolved in a suitable solvent such as
dichloromethane or
diethyl ether (ether), and poured into a
separating funnel. An aqueous solution of the acid or base is added, and the pH of the aqueous phase is adjusted to bring the compound of interest into its required form. After shaking and allowing for phase separation, the phase containing the compound of interest is collected. The procedure is then repeated with this phase at the opposite pH range. The order of the step is not important and the process can be repeated to increase the separation. However, it is often convenient to have the compound dissolved the organic phase after the last step, so that
evaporation of the solvent yields the product.
Alternatives to acid-base extraction including:
- filtering the mixture through a plug of silica gel or alumina — charged salts tend to remain strongly adsorbed to the silica gel or alumina
- ion exchange chromatography can separate acids, bases, or mixtures of strong and weak acids and bases by their varying affinities to the column medium at different pH.
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