Pangea, at first I didn't put together your name an username here, I put it together about half way through our discussion. You aren't the only person on IC claiming such purity without having a proper analysis, so this wasn't a personal rant about you, I was simply offering my opinion which goes beyond you to all who are doing the same.
Sure, making THCA crystals is 'cool' and 'neat' as far as experiments go, but I question both the need to do so and the safety of not only the process, but the end result in terms of purity.
I don't think there is any debate that leaving jars of slowly evaporating butane around the house or your shop is a potential recipe for disaster. It definitely falls well, well outside the range of "safe laboratory practices". This type of extraction needs to be done in a suitably rated sparkless fume hood, that is what I meant in saying this type of extraction should fall under regulation; you can see all over the world, people are blowing themselves up making cannabis extracts because they are following unsafe protocols in unsafe environments.
The second half of the argument is the one of purity, you say yourself that the crystals are 96% total cannabinoids, and 94+% THCA (your claims - I've never seen the lab report). So what makes up the other 4% of your "medicine"? You don't know, but you assume that its pure enough and safe enough to put in another users hands? That's irresponsible.
You have claimed to me in private : "We've had them analysed at XX labs in XXXXXX to confirm their identity and purity. If you are interested in checking them out, I would be happy to share a small sample of them with you?"
It's unethical, in my opinion, to be putting products in the hands of other users when you don't know what is in the product, or without warning them of the lack of purity. You have no idea what other molecules could have been created during your process, nor do you know the pharmacological properties of any of those impurities. This is straight up "bro science", and to be perfectly honest I'm shocked and amazed that it is you that is putting this out there, I had a lot more respect for you and thought you would be more consistent and responsible in your experiments and teachings, than to offer out compounds with unreported purities to others in the community.
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Here is where I am coming from. I used to work in a Parkinson's disease research lab, and we used this chemical called MPTP. We would inject mice with MPTP, and the mice would get Parkinson-like symptoms. As part of trying to figure out the molecular underpinnings of the progression of the disease, we would try various interventions to see if we could slow or stop the progression of the disease symptoms, this is how drug research is done. So where did MPTP come from and how did we discover it?
In the 70's and 80's, tragically a few people tried to synthisize an opioid analog called Desmethylprodine. Instead, due to faults in their process, they ended up with an impurity called MPTP, or (1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine), which it turns out degrades into a very potent neurotoxin called MPP+ that selectively destroys dopamine producing neurons in a brain region called the substantia nigra. These poor, unknowing, ignorant fools took the faulty synthesized opioid drug cocktail, and within 3 days developed Parkinson's like symptoms. Their tragedy was the Parkinson's disease researcher's luck, in that we now have a very accurate and effective mouse model for Parkinson's research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPTP
These are the types of reasons why activities such as these need to be highly regulated in society, to protect the consumers from the compounds, but also to protect the ignorant, unqualified "extraction artists" that will attempts to make these extractions under unsafe conditions. The fact that we celebratize these "extraction artists", and put faith in them as some type of shamanic-hero simply blows me away. So someone made a crystal; it doesn't make them a medicine man. You haven't even yet produced a crystal of known purity, so how can you be ok in sending private communications saying you have THCA of known identity and purity? That's a pretty big stretch, and having met you albeit years ago, I know that you should know better.
You can try to couch this whole discussion as somehow "Chimera doesnt fully understand the science and nature of crystallization itself", but we both know that that's a complete red-herring of an argument to the very valid points I was making earlier and again repeated above.
On top of the valid discussion on the inherent risks of your process,
the fact remains that compounds produced through chemistry (yes, this bro science qualifies as chemistry) should be fully characterized and analyzed by a validated laboratory for their full chemical complement before being provided to other people to consume as "medicine". Sure, your "lab test" got a high number to flash in front on the masses as some mistaken form of credibility, but from a product safety standpoint your lab results only demonstrate the inadequacies of such testing- vis a vis you don't know what is in the unidentified fraction of the sample.
Incidental? That's just more bro science. There's a difference between "THCA is safe", and "this crystal I have in my hand that is 96% THCA, is safe", when you don't know what's in the unidentified 4%, you have no idea whether it's safe or not, and that's a pretty big assumption to be playing with someone else's health.
On the "formulating" discussion, that you need 99% pure compounds for formulation is a complete fallacy. You can accurately formulate mixtures with oils and concentrates of any known analyzed quantities with a few calculations.
-Chimera
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