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To make an example out of them and discourage others, prevent a cottage industry from forming. LSD manufacturing scales immensely. One lone wolf could create en

• voldacar 6y ago
  > LSD manufacturing scales immensely ergotamine doesn't grow on trees lol
  • freeone3000 6y ago
    No, it grows on rye.
  • zelly 6y ago
    With some "seed money" I'm sure you could get a lot of it in India or China. The people who work in those factories are the same people who put lead paint on children's toys to save a few dollars. Its precursor literally does grow on wheat plants but I digress.
• kitteh 6y ago
  You also need precursors (like ET) which is difficult to get. Though China is a pretty good source if you can pull it off (and for other things like safrole, etc.).
  • akiselev 6y ago
    Difficulty is relative. Laundering Sigma Aldrich purchases at scale is challenging but not out of the realm for the level of resources + expertise needed for an LSD manufacturer. It's not "backyard meth lab ordering 40ft container of pseudoephedrine" levels of ridiculous.
  • d33 6y ago
    What's ET? It's pretty difficult for me to Google this acronym given that it mostly finds "et al" when I couple this with LSD queries. Is it ergotamine from the other subthreads here?
    • najtdale 6y ago
      ergotamine
    • simlevesque 6y ago
      Something that comes from ergot.
    • a2h 6y ago
      Ergotamine Tartrate. Interestingly, ET is used to treat cluster headaches and migraines.
      • zelly 6y ago
        LSD treats cluster headaches, for some people permanently: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/06/lsd-alleviates-suicide-headaches https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/06/lsd-alleviates-suici...
        • detritus 6y ago
          As does Psilocybin in Magic Mushrooms. Back when we used to sell the stuff (UK, 2005 or so), we had a small 'lab' (a grand term) run by someone who suffered serious cluster headaches and had gotten involved with us through our selling of 'shrooms. We used to sell to quite a few people who similarly suffered from the condition, and used mushrooms to treat it - but it was an impossible thing for us to market or advertise, due to the way the MHRA (Medicines and Health Regulatory Agency) dictates what beneficial claims can be stated about retailed items. - ed typo, grammar
        • arpa 6y ago
          On the other hand if you have a migraine while tripping, it's not great. Taking triptanes is, well, risky as their interaction has not been thoroughly researched (i wonder why) and they both do stuff to HT receptors - so it's probably safer to endure the trip and take drugs afterwards. Good thing is that on LSD it is not "you"that suffers, just someones' body ;)
  • Nursie 6y ago
    Various parties have pulled it off in recent years, as AL-LAD, 1P-LSD and a couple of other very close relatives (not prohibited at the time in various countries), have been produced and sold (mostly) legally in a variety of countries.
  • mlonkibjuyhv 6y ago
    I wonder if Ergotamine could be an Amine from Ergot. Should probably be abbreviated EA in that case.
    • mallomarmeasle 6y ago
      ET = ergotamine tartarate, the typical salt
      • corobo 6y ago
        It's been a while since I've done chemistry- does typical mean something in the context of chemistry? If someone asked me what the typical salt was I'd say table salt
        • gallexme 6y ago
          Typical cause that's the end result of most commonly used mass synthesis Lsd is also exclusively sold as tartrate
        • jschwartzi 6y ago
          Organic chemicals are often “salted” to cause them to precipitate out of the solution they’re synthesized in. It’s a salt in the chemical sense, but not in the culinary sense.
        • kerkeslager 6y ago
          The way I learned it, if you mix an acid and a base, you get a salt and water. Table salt (NaCl) is the result of mixing hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sodium hydroxide (NaOH): HCl + NaOH -> HOH (water) + NaCl But if you mix a different acid and a different base, you'll get a different salt, for example if you mix sulphuric acid and calcium hydroxide, you get calcium sulfate: H2SO4 + Ca(OH)2 -> 2(HOH) + CaSO4 Calcium sulfate is just a different salt.
    • kerkeslager 6y ago
      Considering that this is coming from the same drug culture that uses the word "molly" refer to "some mixture of empatheogenic drugs and possibly some amphetamine", expecting specificity from your terminology is a bit unrealistic. I'm not (just) being judgmental here: volunteering harm reduction at festivals, the number 1 problem we had was that users had no idea what they had put into their bodies. Actual chemists, no doubt, don't use any of this terminology since chemical reactions don't produce the desired results if you're vague about what you put into them.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• 082349872349872 6y ago
  A friend of mine once asked his TA about (my memory fails here) either how to activate a leaving group or set up a protecting group at a given hypothetical structure. The TA, without batting an eyelid, responded "I think you'll find all the precursors are scheduled, too." The next lab, the TA, presumably having reflected a bit and in the middle of an unrelated discourse, added "remember, always characterise any synthesis you undertake." Edit: (ratelimit, sorry) group: small chemical structure manipulated in a single synthetic step. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_group scheduling: I have no idea, but it seems likely that at least all the easy precursors were. (ChemE, like systems CS, is all about tradeoffs. It's unlikely anyone bothers to schedule precursors along very difficult synthetic routes. Just like CS people have the IOCCC, synthetic chemists sometimes do small batches with pathways no ChemE would use, just because they're there.) characterisation: One should do this anyways, to discover if what one has made is what one had intended to make. (compare with unit testing) In the context, I'd consider it a warning that one should especially do this if one plans to partake product. TA: teaching assistant (post- or just pre-MS in this case, definitely with lab experience) The punchline is that the TA could guess the intended product given only a single synthesis step for a partial structure. (To be fair, computer geeks love discussing black hat activities, so it shouldn't be any surprise chemists are up on the "abuses" of their science to the same degree.)
  • jacobush 6y ago
    What is a group? (Group of people, or some chemical compound, or some kind of corporate structure, protecting possibly illegal stuff going on in one of the groups?) Are all the precursors scheduled, or is the punchline that the TA was wrong? Why would one do well to remember to characterise any synthesis undertaken? To protect oneself against legal action by showing that the labs purpose was synthesising legal compounds? Is "TA" the same as Tax Attorney?
    • gspr 6y ago
      I'm guessing TA is teaching assistant.
• tutfbhuf 6y ago
  Are the mexican drug cartels able to manufacture LSD in scale and export cross-border?
  • flywheel 6y ago
    LSD is not something Mexican cartels would be interested in. It is far, far more difficult to manufacture than growing plants (marijuana, cocaine, heroin). And the demand is nowhere near as much as the drugs they typically sell. LSD is also not addictive and thus not nearly profitable enough for them to consider.
  • praptak 6y ago
    It doesn't make sense to smuggle a drug that can be manufactured in the country.
  • gverrilla 6y ago
    demand for lsd is low nowadays. doesn't compare too cannabis or cocaine or mdma. it's not a very good party drug lmao
    • nyolfen 6y ago
      LSD use is actually higher than it has ever been in the US. i apologize for lacking a source, but this was something i saw about a week ago, in the context of highlighting its relative popularity with young, college-educated americans. that said, it’s hardly a cash cow in the way meth and fentanyl are; and as someone said elsewhere on this thread, one person could probably suppy the whole country.
      • gverrilla 6y ago
        I'm 99,9% positive demand for LSD is not higher than it has ever been in the US because of the hippie era, when it was huge. The problem with LSD as a product is not only that few people use it. Amongst those that use it, most won't use many times. Compared to my social circle I'm a pretty heavy user, had around 30 trips in the span of almost 15 years. Most people I have met didn't trip more than 3 or 4 times in their lifetime. A few from 5-10, and only 2 or 3 over that. The only reason LSD is and was in the past cheap is because of how easy it is to scale it's production + how high the barriers for production are. Otherwise a hit would cost very very high, considering the economics of the matter.
• skissane 6y ago
  In the 1970s, my father worked as a research chemist for CSIRO (Australian government research lab), doing research into new pharmaceutical products. One of his colleagues decided it would be fun to manufacture some LSD after hours for personal use. The colleague made an error in calculating the quantities involved and ended up taking an accidental overdose. It didn’t kill him, but he spent some time in a psychiatric ward as a result. (I’m pretty sure my father was too responsible to try any himself.) My brother did chemistry at university too. Did an internship at an Australian government laboratory (National Measurement Institute) at which he got to manufacture MDMA - completely legally, it was part of a research project into different synthesis routes, so that by measuring traces they could determine how street samples were manufactured. He must be one of the few people in the whole country to synthesise ecstasy without breaking any laws in doing so. (They were very careful to ensure none of the staff sampled the product; it was all weighed very precisely and signed off by multiple people from precursors to synthesis to analysis to destruction.)
  • plmu 6y ago
    There have been reports of huge overdosis, e.g. by miscalculation by a factor of 1000 or even more. The physical harm was little to none. The mental harm varied greatly, there were even some people who got improvements in pre-existing mental conditions; with lsd in general, but also with large overdoses in particular.
    • skissane 6y ago
      A case report from 1974 says that massive LSD overdoses can cause bleeding and hyperthermia, symptoms which could potentially be fatal without medical attention (but, in this case, medical attention was received and all survived) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1129381/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1129381/
      • zelly 6y ago
        Wow, I wonder if they spoke about it publicly after the fact. There aren't a lot of stories like this. Did they remember the experience? Was it really a coma or some out of body experience? It would be interesting to see how differently their lives went versus their peers.
• Dumblydorr 6y ago
  Do criminals actually respond to deterrents though? Sam Harris argues otherwise in a couple of podcasts and I tend to agree...people break the law constantly without thought of the penalties. People text while driving when that could kill someone else.
  • melq 6y ago
    I don't believe they do either. For example, it's often said that the death penalty is used as a deterrent, though it is clear from the data that isn't true. https://www.aclu.org/other/death-penalty-questions-and-answers https://www.aclu.org/other/death-penalty-questions-and-answe...
  • smabie 6y ago
    I don't really believe anyone reacts to harsh deterrents for a low probability outcome. The only way is to increase the probability of being caught, but that's super super hard. So instead, we just throw the people we do catch in jail for life. It's so fucked up, it makes me disgusted even thinking about it.
• refurb 6y ago
  My friend who is a pharmaceutical chemist said LSD is actually quite difficult to make, compared to other illicit drugs: - Lysergic acid is a relatively fragile molecule and will fall apart if exposed to harsh reaction conditions. Compare that to say methamphetamine which can survive strong acids/bases. - It’s also light sensitive, so you need to protect from light which is why you see the red light setup in LSD labs - Purification is challenging as well.