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Extracting Psuedoephedrine from cold and sinus pills
Here's aghreich's method (from the hive), which has been known to work quite well:

1. Combine approximately the same volume of sodium carbonate as unground pill volume: put the pills in the blender, grab a handful of carbonate and toss an eyeballed estimate on top of the pills. A reasonable approximation for 1 box of 96 30mg “red hots” would be about 2.5- 3 tablespoons. Cover the blender, run on high for about 1 minute. Let stand 5 minutes before removing lid.

- Sodium carbonate is washing soda. You can also make it by placing sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda) in the oven for 2 hours at 200*C. Blender is not necessary, use a little container to shake it up if need be. Equal volumes of pill mass: sodium carbonate is key.

2. pour the powder created in step 1 into a dry glass beaker – the dry pill mass should not be more than 1/3 of the beaker volume.

3. Carefully hose the powder-in-beaker from step 2 with tetrachloroethylene straight from the can. Hint: direct the stream to the upper part of the beaker onto the glass wall to prevent scattering your dry pill mass. Otherwise, spray the tetra in a glass first, then pour into the beaker. Saturate the pill mass: this means that all of the powder should be wet, but there should be no free-running tetra. Tip the beaker just to make sure that the tetra doesn’t run. The mass should be one glorious whole. If you added to much tetra, the application of heat at this point is prudent – not only to evaporate the extra tetra, but to drive the tetra into the powder more thoroughly. 120mg pills can soak up quite a bit of tetra, so saturate, heat, and add more tetra until you reach this point of saturation. Extra tetra can be soaked up easily from the top of the pill mass with a couple of cotton balls.

- Meh. Just saturate it. Never bothered doing anything by heating it, then again never had the problem of the tetra running. It's easy to tell when it's saturated because the white spots of the pill/NaCO3 mass will be darker, while the lighter parts haven't soaked it up yet.

4. pour toluene into the beaker until the level of toluene is approximately 1” above the pill mass. This will vary with the overall magnitude of the extraction you are performing – experiment with 3 boxes of 96, using this one-inch approach. You have the option of using VM&P naphtha at this point instead of the toluene – in the precipitation stage, you’ll chill the naptha to crash the crystals. You’ll evap the toluene. Evaping hydrocarbon solvents is nasty business. Just ask Geez. The naptha chill takes 1-2 hours, possibly endangering your position. Your pays yo’ money, you takes yo’ shot.

- Naptha rocks. 1"? BAH. Whatever, just add a nice healthy portion and heat it up. The more naptha, the more pseudo you're pulling, in my opinion.

5. add a dash of water. (for 3 boxes of 96, use 2 tablespoons). Start with little h20 – you can always add more toluene and another shot of h20 if you want to try another pull. You’ll screw the whole gig if you add too much h20 for the first pull.

- 14-15 ml's per 100 pills works out. Less water the better, as mentioned.

6. Apply heat gently while stirring until the contents of the beaker are at the boiling point, then back off. Practice makes perfect. Keep the temperature just below that boiling point for 2 minutes (4 minutes if using 120mg 12-hour pills). Stir continuously with appropriate implement.

- I've never followed this step as mentioned. I just heat it up until the naptha begins to boil, and let it boil for awhile, constantly stirring it. Then I remove it from the heat, stir it up to slow down the boiling and make sure the bubbles aren't throwing nastiness everywhere. The pill mass/NaCO3 will turn orangeish yellow after awhile. Do at least another pull. Big quantities (300 pills worth), I do four pulls. Make sure when you're decanting that you don't get any of the crap in there. Use a filter if you wantr, which would prbably be a very good idea.

7. Remove beaker from heat source and let settle for 1 minute.
8. decant all liquid from beaker into a suitable heat-resistant glass pan, bowl, etc. Visionware rules the roost. You may choose to decant through a filter/funnel, or just keep a cotton ball at the lip of the beaker as you pour.
9. Evap the toluene on low heat for clean crystals easily lifted. Or if using VM&P naphtha, place in freezer for 2 hours, filter, and place the crystals on a coffee filter to dry.

I average about a 60-70 % yield of clean pseudo. Not the greatest, but that's only because I am particularly lazy when it comes to following soem of these steps to the point. I need a mesh screen, once the mass turns orangish you can see how many pill chunks I THOUGHT I had crushed...Afterwards, I add HCl to the based pseudo to convert it to the HCl (mega laziness), filter (lots of goop that isn't pseudo), evaporate and flash with acetone. Filter this and use it in the RX. I average about a 60% yield using the pseudo extracted via this method. Not bad at all for my laziness! But the pseudo is often very very clean by using this method, UNLESS it's slightly orange which means you allowed some of the pill/NaCO3 mass to come off while decanting. Use a filter!

hah. I once forgot to add the tetra, and I added the naptha...Foolish me. So then I added the tetra, just an approxiamation and I STILL got some clean pseudo out of it. bahaha! This extraction is very flexible, anyone can do it. But be warned, too much water means certain death! OH OH. When you do mucho pills (300 per se), I tend to add about 4-5 ml's on the 3rd pull. Second pulls, with smaller quantites, could use an extra 1-2 ml's, but it isn't necessary.