Shitpost Tuesday: Chloroform

Shitpost Tuesday where I force myself to write whatever in an attempt to stop thinking so much about qUaLiTy. Today’s post is about choloform!

What should I write about today? How about chloroform? I made some two weeks ago. That sounds like a fun topic.

My therapist gave me some questioning looks when I mentioned I was going to make chloroform. I kinda forgot the stigma chloroform has in society since I’ve been in chemical/science mode for about five years now. To me it’s just a curious chemical that has fallen out of regular medical use. An old-school 19th century anesthetic that somewhat revolutionized the medical field back in the day. I’d forgotten that chloroform is that chemical from TV shows. You know what I’m talking about: the cloth rag soaked in the stuff, the friendly but kinda creepy dude acting awkward around some women in the middle of nowhere — maybe her car broke down and she’s alone on the side of the road, at night of course — and you know it’s coming before it happens. He sneaks up behind her, forces the chloroform-soaked rag in front of her face, and in a few seconds she’s passed out. What happens next depends on what sort of show you’re watching.

And no, even a cursory search shows that it takes a few minutes to knock someone out with chloroform. It doesn’t work like the media depicts, just like a car’s gas tank doesn’t explode when you shoot it with a gun. I doubt my therapist thought I was going to embark on a raping spree, maybe she was just worried for my sanity, but it’s all part of my curiosity. Baking bread, making soap, tinkering with my vapes, and making chloroform all comes from the same place; curiosity. My continual wondering “Why not?” This is what I told her as well. It’s a hobby, it’s fun, it keeps me busy on the weekend, and as questionable as making chloroform sounds it’s a hell of a lot better than binge drinking my Saturdays and Sundays away.

Chloroform is really easy to make too! You add acetone to bleach and that’s about it. I watched a good ole Nile Red YouTube video about it and you have to appreciate how simple the process is. Way simpler than making pepper spray from dried chilis. It was simpler than electrolyzing lye from salt water. And it was a hell of a lot simpler than baking my own bread. You mix the two in the correct proportion and let it sit. No preheating an oven or rolling dough or working a mixer or washing dishes!

Wikipedia says chloroform has a very potent flowery and sweet smell. Obviously I’ve never smelled chloroform before so didn’t know what it actually smelled like. Wikipedia is correct though; after pouring off the excess bleach I was hit with a very strong smell. Very sweet, potent, but with a very chemical scent to it. It smelled like a potent form of acetone but sweeter, but maybe there was some acetone still mixed in with it.

Right away I could tell why this shit was used as a 19th century anesthetic. Just from pouring the stuff into a container and being hit with the smell made me slightly light headed and funny-feeling, kinda like I was in a dream or something. I couldn’t tell if this was a placebo effect though.

I put my chloroform in a mason jar (because that’s always classy as fuck) and added some hand sanitizer to it. Apparently alcohol, the ethyl version, stabilizes chloroform and prevents it from degrading. This could be a serious problem because chloroform breaks down into toxic phosgene gas, a gas used in World War I as a chemical weapon. That’s not the sort of thing I want brewing in my basement; chloroform is sketchy enough but let’s not go full poisonous gas now. I also covered it in aluminum foil because even sunlight causes chloroform to degrade. And by the way, a mason jar wrapped in aluminum foil in a basement looks about as shady as you can imagine.

I took a few legit whiffs of it and, yeah, I can totally see why it was used as an anesthetic. You feel like you’re in a dream and your body becomes numb. Mild dissociation in small amounts, larger amounts I’m not going to try. Feeling like you’re a meat puppet walking around or something. The effects don’t last for long though, a good thing, and five or ten minutes later I was back to normal. It’s similar to nitrous oxide that you might’ve gotten from the dentist; you need a constant source of it to be sedated enough for surgery which probably played into it being phased out (that and its likely toxicity). It’s nothing like whatever they gave me when my wisdom teeth were taken out. One shot of whatever that was put me right out. One and done is easier than gassing someone for the whole operation.

Outside of my curiosity of actually making/having some chloroform I have no actual use for it. It’s there in the basement wrapped in foil just chilling, but it is pretty cool to be able to say you have chloroform in your possession. Its humourous to suggest choloform to people as well. “Oh, you’re kids are being annoying? Well, I got some choloform you can borrow if you want…” And maybe if I need to do mild surgery on myself someday or have some really intense pain I can bust it out, I don’t know. Not sure how operating on yourself would work out, but whatever. Thanks for reading!

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