Methyline Chloride(Dichloromethane)

This came back to me recently. Back in the mid-1990s, my brother, may he r.i.p., claimed he could make hash oil. How he found out, I wouldn’t know. He was very secretive(paranoid). So he tells me he extracted the oil with the chemical used to decaffeinate coffee. Methylene Chloride. It would take hours to cook off the solvent. The finished product would completely ruin you for a few hours. He said he could refine further to a “honey oil”. idk about that. Anyway, anybody out there can explain why it isn’t used today. Dichloromethane. Were we poisoning our lungs?

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DCM is a great solvent with a wild array of uses; its toxic; but it’s the least toxic of the chlorohydrocarbons; which isn’t saying much.

Its BP is just above pentanes; so purging would be relatively easy;I’m sure you still got trace amounts in your smoke; as for why it isn’t used today for bulk extracting is easy; it extracts too much; we use the solvents that we use because they are selective about what they pull into solution; DCM would pull a ton a lipids and whatnot with everything else; which at this stage in the game is considered undesirable.

Great solvent though; it finds uses in conversions.

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Off topic, but in case anyone began wondering more about decaffeinating coffee I got a tad bit more info on it :joy:

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During this decaffeination process, the coffee beans are soaked in hot water to extract much of the caffeine from the beans. The beans are then removed from the water and the methylene chloride solvent is added to bond with the caffeine. After the methylene chloride/caffeine compound is skimmed from the surface of the mixture, the beans are returned to reabsorb the liquid. This method of decaffeination (sometimes called the KVW method in Europe) removes between 96 and 97 percent of caffeine from a batch of coffee

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Better off using R14, it’s nonpolar again, just make sure you are getting quality and not garbage with oiils in it