CBD Crude vs Distillate vs Isolate for Isomerizations

What are the advantages and disadvantages to performing isomerization on less processed extracts (crude and distillate) vs taking the CBD all the way to isolate first?

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Is that always more difficulty to work around than any potential benefits and cost-savings? Everybody starts with isolate?

Which is easier: isolating your starting compound from everything or isolating your yield compound from all the shit that also gets converted? Until someone has mapped what’s on the other side of that yield arrow, I’d rather work with isolating from the known impurities than the unknown.

If I had a triple quad and NMR I might feel otherwise.

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I suppose part of my interest is in removing unsafe impurities. There are catalysts and acids with more focused effects, and it may be possible that only some of the impurities need to go. The input costs for crude or distillate are rather low now.

How problematic would impurities from BF3 in distillate be?

I’m not a chemist by trade and there are much more qualified people to weigh in here but boron and fluorine are not things that generally make nice things. I assume this would be for acetylation catalysis? There’s a pretty good discussion about things that can go wrong here: