dried poppies, opium truth very nice

[opiatoker]

hey all. I'm new here, have been reading for some time, but just joined. i have read many things about the dried pods, much of which is not exactly true, some of it is way off, but some is valid.

SWIM has explained in vivid detail how he gets opium out of dried pods, and i figured i'd share.

first let me tell you, if you do it right, it is yummy!! if it didn't taste so damn bitter SWIM would gobble it up based purely on its enticing fragrance.

one of the biggest misconceptions i have noticed is everyone saying to not boil it. if you do a little research one will find out that the first thing they do in Afghanistan with the harvested opium is boil it! it is if you are taking it to a different level that you are not supposed to boil it. if you have M base, don't boil it. but for purposes of opium, the only thing boiling it does it take many many many less hours to complete the process.

Here is how SWIM does it, it took a couple tries to get it right, but now is a beautiful thing.

you grind up the pods as fine as possible, you then put in a large pot, fill about 2/3 to top of the dried material, with isopropal or denatured alcohol. the only reason for the alcohol is to make the evaporating go faster in the end. then you fill just above the plant material with water.

cover it then bring it to a boil, stirring often. then let it simmer for maybe an hour, you may have to add some water because the plant material swells and some water / alcohol evaporated.
if you use only alcohol, you will notice the filtered liquid is not very dark. with the addition of a little water to the plant material, the liquid becomes a very dark brown.

let it cool some as to not burn your hands, put a tee shirt or a piece of white linen into a big funnel, pour your stew through into anything big enough to hold it. then with all the plant material in the cloth, lift it up, pinning the top edges together with your hands, and squeeze with all your strength, twist, do anything you can to get as much out of it as possible. put it back into the pot, and add alcohol and water again. repeat entire process. the liquid you filter off this time will be brownish. put all the liquid into one container.

put 4 -6 coffee filters into your funnel, and pour the liquid through and into large pot. it will go slowly. when it gets super slow, move the filter so a different part of it is directly above the funnel hole, keep moving it around everytime it clogs. once you have poured it all through, take filter hold the top of it closed and carefully from top to bottom squeeze the liquid out of the sludge. the reason you used so many filters is so that you are able to squeeze with some force without it popping through.

after it has been filtered, SWIM then turns the burner to high, and lets it rip. he boils it all the way down to just water. that part goes quite fast, especially with a fan. make sure there is no flames anywhere within 10 feet from the pot. not even a hot water pilot light. the alcohol fumes go over the top of the pot, and straight down.

now comes the fun part. take the black liquid and pour it through a couple filters, squeezing out the last of the liquid at the end. then boil. boil boil boil. once you can tell it is beginning to thicken up, remove it from the heat. let it cool some, but not all the way.

this part was discovered by accident. but is the most important part to having it be perfect melting and not burning opium. doesnt matter what you use, isopropal, denatured alcohol, acetone, doesn't matter, choose one of the 3 mentioned, and pour some of it into the black liquid. you will see it transform. out of the black it will precipitate the plant matter and impurities. it will have white swirls or clouds. filter that off, and you have instead of muddy looking black liquid, you will have a deep dark red liquid that is so deep dark red, that it looks black. boil it down some more, remove from heat, and repeat the last step again. SWIM repeats it as many times as needed until no white gunk is precipitated.

then boil it down until it is a dark red / black tar. turn heat dpwn to low and let it slowly dry. it won't really completely dry easily until you scrape it up. once scraped up, it will become brittle but pliable. SWIM can make it long and thin like a little snake, and bend it slowly to any shape, but if he bends fast, it snaps clean in half and the broken edges look like deep dark red / black glass.

SWIM enjoys the chemistry of it all just as much as the final product.
from 4 dozen heads SWIM was able to extract about 20 grams of perfect "cooked" opium. this is tried and true method. although it was SWIM who did it, i know he is rock solid when it comes to anything he decides to take up as a hobby. maybe even a little obsessive until he has conquered the challenge.

i hope this helps some of you, and have fun!

[wendal]

Still, your not making TRUE opium. Your just making an extract of the pods and them slightly purifying it.

I find it rather unbelievable that you could smoke this.....but all I have is conjecture to go on.

The part where your adding iso, ethanol or acetone to the boiled down mix. It makes no sense that extracting with alcohol a second time would cause plant matter to crash out of the solution already made from alcohol.
Using the acetone, maybe some defatting/removal of plant matter would occur. But why with the same solvent you initially used?(ie: alcohol)

Unless you used allot of water for the initial extract. That must be why further defatting occurs. The initial water extracted oils are somewhat present. Right?

[skunkjar]

Sounds interesting, any other input?

[rocketman]

you are taking the long way around. youre making tea then extracting the tea with alcohol. you can save a step by just using alcohol to extract the pods. you end up with a black tar which is very potent. i have not tried smoking it in this form, but ill give it a shot one day.

i do agree with allowing the water to boil while making tea, it really doesnt hurt anything and makes for a better extraction.

extracting with water leaves a brown liquid that evaporates brown and smells like and looks like chocolate flavored instant coffee. it sure as hell doesnt taste that way as its very nasty. This material is concentrated but it is not the best route to go due to the taste from all the non actives pulled from the pods/stems.

doing an alcohol extraction without any heat leaves you with a dark black liquid. i used everclear. when the everclear evaporates you have a black sticky tar like substance that is consistant with other extracts i have done using various plants. The alcohol pulls the actives without pulling all the trash water pulls. a dime sized ball of this tar knocked me out, literally.

anyone experimenting with pods be careful as you can easily become addicted and if you overdose you can die.

[opiatoker]

Originally Posted by wendal

Still, your not making TRUE opium. Your just making an extract of the pods and them slightly purifying it.

I find it rather unbelievable that you could smoke this.....but all I have is conjecture to go on.

The part where your adding iso, ethanol or acetone to the boiled down mix. It makes no sense that extracting with alcohol a second time would cause plant matter to crash out of the solution already made from alcohol.
Using the acetone, maybe some defatting/removal of plant matter would occur. But why with the same solvent you initially used?(ie: alcohol)

Unless you used allot of water for the initial extract. That must be why further defatting occurs. The initial water extracted oils are somewhat present. Right?

SWIM had never tried ethanol, he doesn't know anything about it. but the reasons for the acetone (less recommended because it evaps too fast), or the denature or isopropal alcohol, isn't based on any reason except for the fact that it will evaporate extremely fast leaving you only to have to evap a relatively small amount of water. it's basically just a MAJOR time saver. You can use just water equally effective, only the evaporating and drying process will take several hours longer, thus also raising your electric bill possibly by quite a bit, due to several un necessary hours of having the (bunson) burner on high.

and toward the end, after you have evaporated most fluid, you hit it with alcohol or acetone for much the same reason. the very first time SWIM discovered this method, he was boiling down the liquid, and wanted (for no reason) to give it more time to boil (makes no sense to him why he wanted it to boil more, he was merely experimenting). he brought almost still boiling pan with the syrupy blackish liquid over to his cold (arrowhead) water dispenser and added cold water. and BAM! strings or undesireables. he literally used a fork to get most of it out, filtered the rest off, and finished the evap. (that was just to explain that it doesn't need to be alcohol or acetone at all, but it MUST be significantly colder than the rest in order to shock it into making the undesireables turn from fine particals that will go through any filter, into actual solids that can damn near be picked out by hand.) the difference was awesome. the reason for all the extra experimenting is because when smoking it would burn and leave a clump of hard ash at the end, and he was pretty certain that it shouldn't really turn solid like that. in the end, he could burn the end product directly with a lighter or small torch, it would bubble on the surface and after the slight boiling, it would just smooth back into the (i'll call it) opium. or melt it, and pinch off a piece that turns back into a solid piece of honey right in your fingers, 10 sec onds later, squeeze it again, and it will shatter. but burning it directly with flame will not leave any hard (carbon?) ash on the surface.

it smokes beautifully. SWIM highly recommends topping a small bowl of weed with it, nice subtle body high, and sleep extra good, and quite possibly have the kind of dreams you had when you were a kid. SWIM has smoked it all by itself, but since it is no longer a solid once heated, his success has been minimal, only because not using the proper smoking device.

if SWIY ever gets their hands on some dried poppies, tell them to give it a shot.

[opiatoker]

Originally Posted by rocketman

anyone experimenting with pods be careful as you can easily become addicted and if you overdose you can die.

that is the exact reason SWIM don't make tea. as smoking it, you'd have to do a LOT of smoking, and that means a lot of work, by after the first small bowl or two you know that you feel good and don't feel like packing another. with the tea, if you have too much op. in it, well, i guess you'd never know. because its all in you just like that, no deciding if you had enough or not enough, or worse, you'd never know if you had too much. but you'd definitely leave a disaster for your family or friends to have to deal with. yeah, i'll stick to smoking it.

[opiatoker]

one thing i can and will personally recommend is if by chance you happened to have a tiny bit of this dried honey, and if you happened to have the kind of night that i used to have all too often. the kind of night that doesn't end til the next night, due to recreational products you may have been experimenting with...

the next day you will typically not feel so great unless you kept the experiment going. when you aren't feeling so great and may be thinking about getting more recreational poison, if instead of ordering up another supply, just take one or 2 puffs of some of this stuff, and you no longer crave the poison, nor are you feeling like crap. in fact you will feel as if you actually slept all night. it kind of erases the poisons you ingested all night.

it does NOT erase it, nor do i recommend trying what i just described unless you made the mistake of experimenting all night. but please DO NOT experiment just to see if it works. that would technically render you a bonified idiot. look at it as a sort of morning after pill. it's not intended to be used as birth control for you to just be careless, but is for emergencies in case you messed up.

[wendal]

You are using ethanol if your using denatured.

Denatured alcohol is ethanol with a little bit of methanol added to it.

[rocketman]

But still, you are making tea first, then extracting the tea. You should be able to obtain the same result with ethanol directly to the ground pods and then shaking it a few times a day for a few days,.

Yes, your way may be faster, but I dont see it being more efficient. Your way should be a little cleaner due to the fact you tea it first, but still I dont think its worth it.

Speed of extraction is not a concern for me. I used everclear due to the fact of any unevaporated liquid would not pose any health risks.

You must be careful anytime you use denatured alcohol or iso to ensure complete evaporation. You must "work" the material exposing the inside of a given mass to air. Then unless enough time goes by you still dont know if its all gone or not.

[Oblivion]

Do you put enough everclear in to just cover the ground pods?

[rocketman]

Yes Oblivion, just about half an inch higher. You will have to use more after the pods absorb much of the liquid so be prepared to use quite a bit of everclear.

I tried to stretch it once by adding a little water (about a cup to 750ml of everclear) to the alcohol. Well that totally ruined it. My usual black tar was now brown and full of nasties. I wasted all that everclear and had the same outcome as a water extraction.

To be completely efficient you can make a tea from the pod material after letting it soak a few days in the everclear (shaking as often as you think of it. A couple of times a day will suffice.) Then you can evap down to the brown stuff, but there wont be much of it. I prefer to toss the grounds after the everclear extraction.

[Mshake]

What is the best method of evaporating the everclear/pod juice mix? When I did mine, i ended up with poppy-clear shots... the damn everclear would not evap! So we just got drunk AND messed up! what a week that was...

[Leftover Salmon]

Originally Posted by rocketman

Yes Oblivion, just about half an inch higher. You will have to use more after the pods absorb much of the liquid so be prepared to use quite a bit of everclear.

I tried to stretch it once by adding a little water (about a cup to 750ml of everclear) to the alcohol. Well that totally ruined it. My usual black tar was now brown and full of nasties. I wasted all that everclear and had the same outcome as a water extraction.

To be completely efficient you can make a tea from the pod material after letting it soak a few days in the everclear (shaking as often as you think of it. A couple of times a day will suffice.) Then you can evap down to the brown stuff, but there wont be much of it. I prefer to toss the grounds after the everclear extraction.

Hey thanks for this info Rocketman!

I have a few questions if ya don't mind...

To end up with a decent amount of extract; how much ground pod would I need to use? Do you press the ground pods after they soak? The resulting extract, is this smoked or ingested? Or both? Also do you happen to know which alkaloids are not extracted with the alcohol that are normally drawn out with water?

Thanks in advance.

[abaca]

I don't think you should use denatured alcohol in anything you intend to ingest. There are over 50 additives that can be used to denature ethanol The whole point of denatured ethanol is to make it unfit for humans to consume.

IMHO the best easy way to evaporate everclear is with a fan. I use a pyrex dish to increase the surface. You'll end up doing a little scraping but can evap a qt overnight. This is just fine for few extractions a year.

[opiatoker]

Originally Posted by rocketman

But still, you are making tea first, then extracting the tea. You should be able to obtain the same result with ethanol directly to the ground pods and then shaking it a few times a day for a few days,.

Yes, your way may be faster, but I dont see it being more efficient. Your way should be a little cleaner due to the fact you tea it first, but still I dont think its worth it.

Speed of extraction is not a concern for me. I used everclear due to the fact of any unevaporated liquid would not pose any health risks.

You must be careful anytime you use denatured alcohol or iso to ensure complete evaporation. You must "work" the material exposing the inside of a given mass to air. Then unless enough time goes by you still dont know if its all gone or not.

the alcohols are evaporated long long before the water. you can actually see the difference in the boiling when the alcohols are gone. it goes from quite small very rapid bubbles (with visible vapor) and once the water is all thats left, the bubbles are (if any) much larger and slower, without the settling vapor, the alcohols vapor will pool on top of the extract above the liquid and stopping at the top of the pot and flowing over the sides while the water vapor, well you know, steam rises. the water doesn't even begin to evaporate until the alcohols are gone.

[opiatoker]

Originally Posted by rocketman

Yes Oblivion, just about half an inch higher. You will have to use more after the pods absorb much of the liquid so be prepared to use quite a bit of everclear.

I tried to stretch it once by adding a little water (about a cup to 750ml of everclear) to the alcohol. Well that totally ruined it. My usual black tar was now brown and full of nasties. I wasted all that everclear and had the same outcome as a water extraction.

To be completely efficient you can make a tea from the pod material after letting it soak a few days in the everclear (shaking as often as you think of it. A couple of times a day will suffice.) Then you can evap down to the brown stuff, but there wont be much of it. I prefer to toss the grounds after the everclear extraction.

this is basucally the same exact thing SWIM does. as everclear is mostly alcohol with a very minute amount of water. the part you are missing is the end part....

except the fact that you didn't ruin the experiment, you very much improved it. you should have filtered the nasties out, and will have been left with what you were going after, and have obviously not experienced yet.

you will have the brown liquid, which while still hot, if hit with cold liquid, the particles that are making it brown, will all pull together in either sand size pieces that can then be filtered out, or if you swirl the hot liquid so it is spinning around the pot or boiling vessel, you then hit it with the cold liquid, the particles making it brown will pull together in strands looking like dental floss, either way the brown particles are no longer a brown liquid, but are now separated off white undesireables waiting to be filtered off, and the deep dark red / black beautiful tea, or if you keep boiling it away as sSWIM prefers to do, you end up with very nice sweet smelling "cooked opium" or "smokers opium"

try it next time, you'll be glad you did. even if you think im full of shit, trying it will in no way affect your experiment negatively. take the chance, you'll thank me for it. an open mind has sooo many benefits.

[Shamsu]

Originally Posted by wendal

Still, your not making TRUE opium. Your just making an extract of the pods and them slightly purifying it.

I find it rather unbelievable that you could smoke this.....but all I have is conjecture to go on.

The part where your adding iso, ethanol or acetone to the boiled down mix. It makes no sense that extracting with alcohol a second time would cause plant matter to crash out of the solution already made from alcohol.
Using the acetone, maybe some defatting/removal of plant matter would occur. But why with the same solvent you initially used?(ie: alcohol)

Unless you used allot of water for the initial extract. That must be why further defatting occurs. The initial water extracted oils are somewhat present. Right?

I agree. cooked smoking opium is collected sap from unripe pods. the extract you make, is smokable but it is not true opium. but unless you have an acher or more to plant a couple hundred to a few thousand plants you wont be getting any volume to make real opium. cooked smoking opium is roughly half the volume of the collected raw tar.

This year i said screw the opium tars and just used the pods fresh or dried them for latter. i use only what i need for a dose. and make a tea(cold or warm water extraction) out of it. A lot of people can not stand the taste of pod tea but i have come to like it and drink it straight. i used to use honey and orange juice to try and mask the flavor. now the tea is verry different from smoking. the effects come on slower( can take up to 2 hrs for full effect) but in my opinion can be stronger and last alot longer10-16 hrs. when the dose is properly titraited. and titrating the dose also helps avoid ODing which is much easier with the tea. but the extract you are making is verry refined and i also can back you up on the fact that it is much closer to the real thing than the regular water extraxt that hasnt been cooked. well ill stop my rant

good luck with the pod and remember to respect it, it can bite back.

[opiatoker]

yeah, you're right. about a year ago, i stumbled into an opium stash which weighed 65 grams. i found it in the least likely place, and the only thing that explains its presence is it must have been my uncles, who died many years ago. what i have read about opium not degrading if stored away is absolutely true. anyway, i "cooked" it, and got back 1/3 to 1/2 return, not exactly sure, because i was smoking and sharing a lot of it, was no investment so didn't bother re weighing. anyway, getting it to be perfectly clean dark solid perfect crystalline resin was a simple process, done in one session. the stuff from the poppies came out the same as the opium on the first batch, was perfect very easily. the second batch, i decided to double up my order because the first went so well.... this one is not going as great as should be. i keep breaking it doewn and filtering out undesireables.

my guess is that i messed up using so many solvents in the initial breakdown. the first was the same as what i did with the true opium. simply water and isopropal...

welll.... MEK is definitely out of the question next time!!!