One simple method of cleaning your drugs is called an acetone wash, a type of solvent wash. This will improve the purity of several drugs (the less soluble in acetone the better) if done correctly, but won’t remove any impurities that are also not soluble in acetone - for this you’re better off with a different solvent, or a different cleaning method altogether.
A non-exhaustive list of drugs it can potentially help with:
<aside> 🚨 Without lab testing, you as a layman can mostly only guess at purity and composition of substances. Reagent color change tests can help to identify pure substances, but are unhelpful at identifying mixtures - thin layer chromatography, which can be done at home with a lot, is better, but far from perfect.. Judging purity by weighing what you get out of a wash doesn't work, either— there's no guarantee that the residue is the drug that you think it is. Bioassay ("tasting it") isn't of any use because of the number of chemicals that can look and act similarly to each other. Acetone and other solvent washes are meant to remove certain cuts you know have been added (or impurities from the synthesis that weren’t removed), not to purify or isolate amphetamine or cocaine out of a mystery mix (for purification of amphetamine out of mystery mixtures, acid/base extraction is the gold standard). You can send drugs— pills, powders, or pastes— to Drugdata or Energy Control if you want professional GC/MS testing—this is the only kind of test that will tell you exactly what substances are in your drug. It's anonymous and worth the money.
</aside>
<aside> ⚠️ Acetone and other solvents are flammable and should never be used around sparks or open flames (refrigerators, freezers, electric motors, furnaces). The vapours are volatile and can flash back to the container and cause a boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion. Always work with acetone in a well ventilated area and avoid inhaling the fumes. Have something to clean up spills, like vermiculite or cat litter (or paper towels or sawdust or something else absorbent) and wet it with cold water. Remember, acetone will eat many plastics, paints, and varnishes.
</aside>
Well, the drugs you’d be washing in acetone aren’t very soluble in acetone, if at all, but a lot of impurities that might be in your drugs are! So the aim is to get the stuff you DON’T want dissolved in the acetone, while the drugs you DO want are left behind.
Supplies:
IF YOU ARE GOING TO DRY YOUR ACETONE (highly recommended):
Dry acetone has no water in it. Water in your acetone is less than ideal because even a little bit will cause you to lose some of your drugs. Acetone likes to hold on to water, and most of the drugs you’d be washing this way are also pretty soluble in water—cocaine especially, at roughly 2 grams per mL of water! That would amount to 50 mg out of a gram if the acetone had 0.5% water content and you used 5 mL of acetone—maybe not a huge amount to sacrifice for many, but if you can avoid it by simply taking the time to dehydrate your acetone, why not? It can be time consuming, but once it’s done, it’s done until you need to make another batch. Still, it is ultimately optional if you don’t mind this potential loss.