Supposedly, and this may be an urban legend, you can take over-the-counter asprin and derive codine from it in a fairly simple physical change. The idea is that you place about a bottle of asprin in a saucepan full of water, after the water has been preheated to just below boiling point. After stirring, supposedly all of the chemicals in the asprin will dissolve except some small traces of codine. You take this sediment and put it throught a coffee filter, letting the water filter through and the codine is now in the filter. You put the codine and filter in a plastic baggie, tie it off, and put that in an ice bath for a bit. When it hardens, you have codine. I want to know if this is true or not. Sounds bogus. Thanks.
I don’t think that’s likely. Pharmaceuticals are strictly regulated, and any codeine in aspirin pills would would have to be listed on the labels. Plus, I don’t think codeine is water-soluble, but I’m not sure on that point.
Ooops…must preview. That’s do think codeine is water-soluble.
this sounds like a process to get codeine out of tylenol 3. I don’t want to go into details and bring down the wrath of moderators everywhere, so i won’t.
but i will say that tylenol 3 is acetominophen and codeine. take enough to get a buzz-worthy dose of codeine, and you’ve also taken enough tylenol to crap out your kidneys. there’s a fairly simple method to separate the two, and that process seems to have been bastardized in this urban legend.
there is not codeine in aspirin.
jb
p.s.- but if you drop them babies into glass of coca-cola, i hear you get fizNUCKED!
Nope the story is that you can separate the codene out from codene & asprin tablets. It is probably true since codine is soluable but asprin is almost completely insoluable in water, by repeatedly diluting filtering and crystalising you could increase the relative consentration of codene to asprin, but the work would be very slow and you wouldn’t remove the tablet ‘filler’ materials so what you were left with wouldn’t be pure codine, but codine in lots of ‘filler’ and very little asprin.
Cheers, Bippy
You may have heard a garbled version of the process for extracting L-amphetamines from Vicks inhalers. Here’s a drug testing site’s take on inhaler amphetamines. Aspirin and codeine are chemically unrelated.
jb_farley is right on all counts, except for his PS which I cannot verify.
Um, ok help me here. Suppose you could do this. Why would someone want to?
Well, let’s say you wanted to abuse codeine. A Tylenol 3, with 30mg of codeine, is a controlled substance and would have to be stolen, scammed, or bought from a dealer if you didn’t have a legitimate prescription. On the other hand, they’ll sell you 50 tablets of acetaminophen with codeine over the counter. That’s 50x8=400 mg of codeine. So, you could spend (no idea on the numbers for street sales of prescription drugs so I’ll make one up) $5.00 each on 10 Tylenol 3 and get 300mg of codeine or $3.50 on one bottle with 400 mg. codeine.
So there’s that aspect. As was mentioned above, by the time you get enough codeine in you from those OTC pills to get a buzz you’ve also managed to pretty much destroy any chance your kidneys will work again because of the acetaminophen, which is the main ingredient.
If you’re a budget conscious narcotics abuser, it makes good sense to do this. Well, in a very specialized sense of “good sense”.
To recap: you’d want to do it because you were a cheap junkie.
Tylenol 3 and Acetaminophin w/ Codeine are the same thing. Tylenol 3 is the brand name, and Acet. w/ Codeine is the generic version of the drug. The 3 in the name comes from the fact that the amount of codeine in the tablet causes it to be labelled as a Class 3 narcotic by the DEA. You can’t buy any form of Codeine over the counter anywhere in America, especially Tylenol 3, Vicodin (contains Hydrocodone, a close cousin of Codeine), or any other narcotics for that matter. If a pharmacy sold narcotics as an OTC drug, the DEA would be on them quicker than white on rice… or something like that. If you’re looking for prescription narcotic to do, I would recommend you somehow get a hold of some Hydrocodone. Nobody stocks plain Hydrocodone, but the most common pain killer sold in Pharmacies is the Hydrocodone and Acetaminophin combo. They come in strenghts such as 7.5/750 (milligrams of hydrocodone and tylenol, respectively). One of the newer strengths is 10/500. 3 or 4 of those will get you pretty messed up. I took 8 once, but it was way too much.
In the UK and Australia, they won’t sell you more than one box or so of certain painkillers (including the paracetamol codeine ones) AFAIK for fear you are trying to commit suicide. Rather stupid, as a box of 48 would do you plenty enough damage anyway (if not kill you?) In addition to this, there are chemists all over the place, so you could just buy a box from every pharmacy up the street.
So maybe part of their rationale is to deter people from mass-buying and mass-producing some noxious substance from them?