How is pseudoephedrine made from the ephedra plant?

Question

And yes it does come from the ephedra plant.

Answer 1

It's not made from the ephedra plant. "Pseudo" is a prefix that means false or untrue. Pseudoephedrine doesn't have any ephedra in it.

Pseudoephedrine is commonly known as Sudafed.

Answer 2

Pseudoephedrine is a molecular analogue of ephedrine.

It is made synthetically, now; extracting the ephedrine from ephedra then converting it to pseudoephedrine is too costly to be worth the effort.

Ephedrine is the active ingredient in Ephedra (synonym: ma huang, among others); it is also produced synthetically, again because it's a heap cheaper to make it from off-the-shelf chemicals than to extract it and purify it to the required standards.

Because of the people using pseudoephedrine to make crystal meth, pseudoephedrine has gotten rather hard to buy; before long, the crystal meth clowns will be figuring a way to make the crystal meth from ephedrine, and that's going to get hard to buy, too.

Phenylephrine is starting to displace both of them, not because it is a superior drug (it isn't) but because the crystal meth makers will have a much harder time using it as a reagent in their little illegal labs...

Hope this clears up the confusion, here...

Answer 3

Although pseudoephedrine occurs naturally as an alkaloid in certain plant species (for example, as a constituent of extracts from the ephedra species, also known as Ma Huang, in which it occurs together with other isomers of ephedrine), the majority of pseudoephedrine produced for commercial use is derived from yeast fermentation of dextrose in the presence of benzaldehyde. In this process, specialized strains of yeast (typically a variety of Candida utilis or Saccharomyces cerevisiae) are added to large vats containing water, dextrose and the enzyme pyruvate decarboxylase (such as found in beets and other plants, inter alia). After the yeast has begun fermenting the dextrose, the benzaldehyde is added to the vats, and in this environment the yeast convert the precursor ingredients to l-phenylacetylcarbinol (L-PAC). L-PAC is then chemically converted to pseudoephedrine via reductive amination. (Oliver, 1999)

The bulk of pseudoephedrine is produced by commercial pharmaceutical manufacturers in India and China, where economic and industrial conditions favor the mass production of pseudoephedrine for export. (Suo, 2004)

Answer 4

After boiling the plant in a super-saturated glycerol solution for 314 minutes at sea-level, it floats to the top as a swirling, yellowish fluid. It can then be removed, skimming the surface with a piece of college-ruled notebook paper and placed in direct sunlight for no less than 22 hours, until crystallized... then you simply scrape and shake the crystals into an appropriate container with a packet of silica (don't eat that!). There, you have it.

Answer 5

Where Does Ephedrine Come From

Answer 6

Please see the webpage for more details on Pseudoehedrine.