Can you oxidise PPA into a cathinone like what you would with ephedrine?
would you get cathinone instead of methcathinone
would you get cathinone instead of methcathinone
Question Cathinone from Phenylpropanolamine
- Thread starter The Silent Chemist
- Start date
thats correct, youd get cathinone from PPA. To get methcathinone you oxidize ephedrine.
ive done it with jones reagent and also the potassium permanganate route... There have got to be better ways tho.... it was for my own use so i didnt care too much about yield. The better route to cathinone in high yields is to start with the over the counter propiophenone that can be acquired anywhere.. youll have to add bromine, but maybe you can use hydrobromic acid and slowly add hydrogen peroxide to liberate the bromine in the mixture so you dont have to dick around with elemental bromine.... Thats what i would try. then add ethanol saturated with ammonia. Only two major steps to this. I imagine it will be easy to do
ive done it with jones reagent and also the potassium permanganate route... There have got to be better ways tho.... it was for my own use so i didnt care too much about yield. The better route to cathinone in high yields is to start with the over the counter propiophenone that can be acquired anywhere.. youll have to add bromine, but maybe you can use hydrobromic acid and slowly add hydrogen peroxide to liberate the bromine in the mixture so you dont have to dick around with elemental bromine.... Thats what i would try. then add ethanol saturated with ammonia. Only two major steps to this. I imagine it will be easy to do
Thank you for your response, please elaborate how you oxidised your ephedrine with permangante ? I read this synthesis write up and it sounds relatively simple.
Was your procedure similar and if so what did you do differently. What can someone expect yields to be
Was your procedure similar and if so what did you do differently. What can someone expect yields to be
Last edited:
yes it was precisely this route that i tried. Same page from rhodium. This was several years ago during covid when i was a bit bonkers from all the free time in my lab and i was doing as many drugs as possible, for being pretty far gone i did pretty good i must admit lol (im off all hard drugs now )... But my point is, i cant exactly remember if there were any variations, i just know that it was this process that i made an iteration of in my lab. any modifications made were simply adaptations to the equipment i had. The purity of the ephedrine i had was maybe questionable, and i had maybe only a gram of it. The yields werent exciting but something was there and for that alone i was happy. the problem came when i tried to purify it and because its a cathinone, and has that carbonyl, it is soluble in both water and nonpolar solvents. and with the small amount that i had i basically lost it all in doing an A/B extraction.... By the time i figured out how to extract ephedrine with like 75% efficiency i was on to meth...
tbh the permanganate is pretty intense, and the jones reagent way was better. i remember thinking that much. i was able to get something with the jones reagent way that was significantly more than permanganate.. because you MUST purify, any residual permanganate leads to intense damage to the brain... and maybe that was it.
The jones reagent route isnt without its pitfalls either, with that method theres mention about this white or red "mass forming that is a sign of significantly reduced yield".... I could not avoid that, but still got some. However again im doing this in a 20ml test tube with like a gram at a time as a heavy drug user... so..... Oxidizing a hydroxy group at the benzylic position (what we are doing) is pretty easy from what i understand (its reducing it to meth that is notoriously difficult) and so there might be more friendly milder oxidizing agents out there that werent well known back during the rhodium times... things like pyridinium chlorochromate (PCC). but i have no idea about any of those possibilities to be honest....
tbh the permanganate is pretty intense, and the jones reagent way was better. i remember thinking that much. i was able to get something with the jones reagent way that was significantly more than permanganate.. because you MUST purify, any residual permanganate leads to intense damage to the brain... and maybe that was it.
The jones reagent route isnt without its pitfalls either, with that method theres mention about this white or red "mass forming that is a sign of significantly reduced yield".... I could not avoid that, but still got some. However again im doing this in a 20ml test tube with like a gram at a time as a heavy drug user... so..... Oxidizing a hydroxy group at the benzylic position (what we are doing) is pretty easy from what i understand (its reducing it to meth that is notoriously difficult) and so there might be more friendly milder oxidizing agents out there that werent well known back during the rhodium times... things like pyridinium chlorochromate (PCC). but i have no idea about any of those possibilities to be honest....
↑View previous replies…
Yea, i made it back then too.. it turned brown within a day or two lol.... i was so sad. so much work went into it. I had a hard time drying it and removing the hcl. i didnt have a vacuum filter either.. so i wasnt able to get powder and that probably didnt help.....but it was a nice bright orange..... for a day. I never got to use it...
- By HerrHaber
I was completely perplexed by the complexity of the molecules I synthesized with that lack of experience I had back then... my pemoline was a success even though there was not much of it and not due to the yield but because I just learned from professors that I should always try things on a small scale first.
wow pemoline, that looks like a fairly difficult molecule to make without experience. Good job lol... I cant imagine you'd find the ingredients for that over the counter. How was it?
Thats good advice, ive wasted a lot of chems figuring out i should do small scale first... In fact i noticed that if i do a small scale run first i jinx myself pretty much everytime because i could have used more chems cause it works great lol. Buts a great contrast to jinxing myself because i used too many chems and it failed.
Thats good advice, ive wasted a lot of chems figuring out i should do small scale first... In fact i noticed that if i do a small scale run first i jinx myself pretty much everytime because i could have used more chems cause it works great lol. Buts a great contrast to jinxing myself because i used too many chems and it failed.
I also performed an oxidation of ephedrine with some dichromate and yield was modest but success was a milestone since I was at my very beginning. I may suggest using ppa for aminorex (I synthesized pemoline back in the days but always was curious about aminorex which I never got to try). Kindest regards!