Originally posted by reject
What's povidone
Its this strange wax like substance used in pills because its a great binding agent and acts as a buffer so when the pills break down it doesn't all hit you at once, instead your stomach is forced to break down this crap to get all the effect of the pill.
Its most commonly used in animal grade iodine for antiseptic use as "povidone iodide".
You are most likely to encounter it in a clandestine environment extracting pseudoephedrine containing pills. Its VERY difficult to remove, A/B will yield pseudoephedrine + povidone, you can reduce with hydriodic acid and the povidone will still be there. There are lots of tricks to removing it but it takes lots of work. It will be carried over with a steam distillation.
The only way to get rid of it is HOT BOILING Xylene, MEK, Ether, ethyl acetate (GET A FEW GALLONS!!) , tetrachloroethylene and complicated gravity separation/filtration. The theory is this;
Povidone is not dissolved or removed by solvent boils but it is more easily separated when its hot in a wax aggressive solvent. When its all melted and hot like this you can enhancement the hot pill mass and remove a great deal of it (its only hot for a few minutes).
The real trick is freebasing the pseudo with calcium carbonate, boiling in xylene, gas, enhancement hot and doing this 2 or 3 times. This is THE ONLY WAY to remove povidone. Every other pill extraction method will give you pseudo and povidone and a bunch of hydroscopic jello that traps the pseudofed so you can't react it or clean/extract
Its a synthetic polymer
(polyvinylpyrrolidone)
