Umm... IDK much about GHB, but I think it's a fairly stupid drug - kind of like ethanol in terms of addiction, effects, and ease of overdosing except
that an overdose of GHB is a lot lower volume. Just go have a nice martini or something instead if you want to make GHB.
That said, there is a book called Purification of Laboratory Chemicals by Armareggo and Chai that you can read. The latest edition is expensive, but
you can probably find it in some library, and I've seen PDF copies of older editions floating around online. It outlines literature procedures on how
to purify the vast majority of chemicals that you might come into contact with. The standard method for purifying sodium hydroxide is to recrystallize
it from ethanol to eliminate carbonates and then heat it under vacuum to eliminate the ethanol of crystallization. If you really need it super-pure,
you should do the entire procedure in a glovebox flooded with inert gas. If you just need to eliminate carbonates, you can just dissolve the sodium
hydroxide in anhydrous ethanol, filter, add water, and boil off the ethanol without letting any carbon dioxide get into the apparatus, then titrate.
Purifying sodium hydroxide is generally more work than it's worth IMHO, especially considering that it slowly dissolves glass in the presence of
water, but legitimate reasons for preparing pure sodium hydroxide do exist.
Anhydrous ethanol is not really that hard to prepare.
A vacuum desiccator is not a super-advanced piece of equipment, but not everyone has one. If you don't have one, you can use a round-bottom flask or a
filtration flask and pull a vacuum on it.
I've never needed really pure CaCl2 for anything, but I think you can recrystallize the higher hydrates from water then heat the crystals to drive off
most of the water, then dry the product in a crucible. Purification of Laboratory Chemicals might have some ideas.
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