Separation Testing AKA Liquid Chromatography
Original caption January 4 2021: These are clips of me doing mixture analysis via separation testing with a @bunkpolice kit. Takes about 45-60 minutes to do the whole process. It’s boring. I wish I had an FTIR spectrometer. I dislike using low-tech chemistry to try to figure out obscure contaminants/adulterants/diluterants in an obscure chemical. Especially if someone’s probably not even going to take it anyway.I think this was a test on methcathinone. What it did tell us was that there were 2 other chems in it, but no idea what because they didn’t react to any reagent and I hate doing math.
This is an extremely boring set of videos of me doing “separation testing” which is just Liquid Chromatography.
Do these tests work? Yes. Do you need these tests? In my opinion, no. Most of the LC tests we did were on substances that gave mixed reagent results, meaning they appeared adulterated. That is enough information for most people.
Out of ≈100 tests, we might’ve done 15 LC tests, primarily on cocaine and a small minority of ecstasy pills that gave bizarre regent test results. We were rarely able to drill down to naming individual adulterants with certainty.
If you use cocaine, there’s like 90%+ chance it will be cut with some other shit. This doesn’t always make the drugs “bad”, that’s just the nature of the illicit market for many types of drugs, so you either adapt to using impure drugs or refrain from using them at all. It could be creatine, vitamin C, MSM, aspirin/phenacetin, tons of relatively benign shit. Or it could be levamisole (in like 70% of US cocaine) or amphetamines, which are fairly easily detectable with reagents or test strips alone.
Here’s the thing about most drug checking tools–they’re not designed to accurately test adulterated illicit substances for your safety. They’re designed for punishment, for lack of a better word. Reagents, LC (in this context), and even many of the high performance spectrometers are designed for law enforcement use or important screenings. They don’t give a fuck about finding chemicals that aren’t going to deny someone access to something or put someone in jail.
Reagents don’t detect things like caffeine, many nutritional supplements or NPS. Drug testing labs don’t care about unscheduled chemicals like levamisole in your urine, just cocaine, meth, etc. You can buy levamisole at a pet store or online. Fentanyl test strips are designed for post-mortem forensics testing, which is why they can be tricky to use.
These tools are not designed to hyper analyze some random batch of drugs you want to consume or sell. People fail to understand the limitations of at-home testing. You can buy every kit on the market, but you’re going to hit a ceiling with how much more information you will be able to infer from these tests.
The Pernicious Myth of Fentanyl-Laced Cannabis
Drug Checking Tips Pt. 2
