This method is similar to all the endless parade of solvent boil techniques out there with clever names, except this is specific to a particular pill that is everywhere right now (2020), and someone else might find this useful someday. This is specific to the brand name Fexofenadine/Pseudoephedrine 120mg 12hr bilayer tablets. Mine are from Canada, not sure if that matters
Here goes:
Materials:
12hr Fexofenadine/pseudoephedrine (120mg PSE) BRAND NAME ONLY
Xylene
Dry Acetone*
Dry Methanol*
Plate
Small ceramic bowl
Hotplate
Collander
Paper towels
Spoon
Funnel
Coffee filters
*: It's of the utmost importance that your solvents, save for Xylene which is usually very dry to begin with, have been dessicated with dried Magnesium Sulfate. It will not work well if you don't take the time to do this. I don't use molecular sieves because of the contaminants like clay etc that end up in my solvents.
++Don't perform this procedure over an open flame for fucks sake++
1) punch all your tablets out into your collander. Rinse all tablets under faucet until white side of bilayer tablet is totally dissolved and down the drain. All you will have left is the yellow half of the tablet. Water can't touch the pse, don't worry. It's suspended in some kind of wax matrix that we are about to deal with.
2) thoroughly dry each remaining tablet half and put in a ceramic bowl. Pour enough xylene into the bowl to cover the pills.
3) place bowl on hotplate and set for medium heat. Stir often. you will see the xylene slowly turning yellow, and eventually the waxy half tablets will be just white powder on the bottom of the bowl, and the now very yellow xylene will have dissolved all the wax.
It's very important that NONE of the wax remains after this step, so do not move on if there are any recognizable pills still in the bowl, they should all be just powder.
4) carefully decant the wax laden xylene and return bowl with white powder to hotplate. Make sure you decant this shit somewhere you can make a mess, this xylene is basically molten wax at this point and quickly cools to form a waxy mess wherever it drips.
5) let the pill mass fully dry, then add dry acetone to the bowl, covering the top of the tablets. Heat the mixture for about 5-7 mins stirring constantly. The acetone will be cloudy. Decant it, and allow pill mass to dry same as before.
6) add a few ml of dry methanol to the remaining pill mass in the bowl, and swirl vigorously. Decant this liquid thru a coffee filter in a funnel, into a cup and then pour it onto a dinner plate. Repeat this two more times to ensure maximum yield.
7) put the methanol laden plate on your hotplate on medium heat. Occasionally swirl the mixture around the plate to prevent burning and speed up the evaporation. Once it's dry, this crystalline substance can be scraped up off the plate, admired, and thrown into a one pot, causing the fuel to actually go black for once, since it's not full of birch killing polymers!
I don't know what the purity of the resulting "pseudoephedrine" is, but I do know that it makes some clean lovely ass dope, and most of the inhibitors, tamper resistant polymers and other nonsense is clearly gone. Enjoy, and please make sure, if you share this method elsewhere, that you NEVER publish the brand name of the pills. This will ensure that this method works for as long as possible.
The resulting PSE can be further purified via A/B extraction and/or recrystallization, though I've never bothered, as I am a one pot bee