93 ms·
The main thing about Phenylacetone meth is that there's so much of it
- fitzn 5y ago> There’s an impressive project in Europe to measure drug use from biomarkers in sewage. There's actually a US company doing this as well: https://biobot.io/ https://biobot.io/
- debacle 5y agoI've looked into the logistics of "cooking" meth and it is a complex process that, were I not an expert, wouldn't create something I would be comfortable putting into my body. How is meth "industrially" produced? Is it Walter White-esque clandestine factories? Is it clever people in their garages? Is it done over the border?
- eoinbmorg 5y agoThe thing with cooking meth is that you don't have to be comfortable putting it in your body. You just have to be comfortable selling it to someone else who will put it in their body! Unfortunately, for many meth producers/dealers that bar is not very high.
- throwawayyy181 5y agoMaybe at the top of the food chain, but a lot of lower level people are addicts working to support a habit by pinching from wholesale
- 323 5y agoThe cartels are hiring professional chemists: > The chemist, a burly man with a master’s degree in biochemical engineering described the industry’s transformation, as the pair worked at an outside table. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/08/mexico-cartel-project-synthetic-opioid-fentanyl-drugs https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/08/mexico-cartel-...
- perardi 5y agoThe Atlantic has a decent summary. (If a bit of an over-the-top headline.) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
- mhh__ 5y agoLSD is probably even more naughty. As far as I'm aware it's not a trivial synthesis by any means, so exactly where the supply comes from is probably a fascinating story never to be fully told. Buddhist Walter White's around the world, perhaps.
- hilbert42 5y ago"exactly where the supply comes from is probably a fascinating story never to be fully told." Where it's made is one matter but I'd imagine its only significant precursor would be ergotamine tartrate (a la Hoffman), as ergotamine is a commonly available drug for migraine (although somewhat less so than some years back, as it's been largely superceded by sumatriptan). The next alternative I'd imagine would be to get 'raw' ergot and process it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot although I'd guess that gathering and refining the fungus would be no mean feat for any backyard manufacturer. It's hard to imagine there being any other major human-manufactured precursor due to the complexity of the molecule. Moreover, refined ergotamine for medical use is a mixture of various ergot alkaloids. Presumably, this would complicate the synthesis but I've never bothered to think about how it would or to what extent.
- quesera 5y agoWilliam Leonard Pickard and Owsley Stanley have interesting stories, some of which have been told.
- loves_mangoes 5y agoWith the rise of online shopping, the big suppliers are a lot more visible than they were before. I like to read stories on forums sometimes. It turns out there are more than a couple LSD labs, some having a bigger internet presence than others. Suppliers will not sell directly to random people, but as it turns out their approved resellers are happy to offer spoonfuls of LSD in powder form to anyone who asks! https://imgur.com/a/r2FkJOD https://imgur.com/a/r2FkJOD (not my picture)
- loeg 5y agoThe DEA (so, not exactly a reliable source) claims Pickard was producing most of it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard
- hilbert42 5y ago"How is meth "industrially" produced? Is it Walter White-esque clandestine factories?" I've never produced it and as you'd be aware it'd be stupid of me to offer advice based on chemical knowledge as it's manufacture is illegal - despite the fact that the various methods are widely known. From time to time, I've seen busts of clandestine labs on TV and it's easily doable in a garage or shed. Seems the smell of volatiles often gives them away (e.g.: propan-2-one or similar reagents), or they catch fire (seeming a common occurrence) which burns the place down thus attracts attention. As an expert, you'd know that a racemic mixture results. As backyard-ers don't have the means to separate the enantiomers, law enforcement uses the fact to determine whether stuff they've collected originated in a backyard lab of from a pharmaceutical complex. Nevertheless, I gather from the article that's narrowed. It seems, that when one's made enough money manufacturing gets reasonably sophisticated.
- dynm 5y agoAround a week ago, I came across this link here on HN that suggested that there's a new form of meth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28938888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28938888 The theory is that new meth is based on a synthesis using a chemical called P2P rather than the old synthesis that used ephedrine. There are claims that this new form of meth is chemically different in some what that started creating schizophrenia around 2017. However, when I looked into it, there doesn't seem to be much support for this idea. Current meth is more pure than ever before. Some people suggest that the use of lead could be responsible, but not all P2P syntheses use that, and it wasn't common in 2017. Instead, it seems like the explanation is just the obvious one: P2P synthesis has resulted in people doing much, much more meth than ever before.
- seattle_spring 5y agoReally interesting read. Thank you for sharing. For some reason this sort of information about street drugs and science/culture surround it fascinates me.
- throwaway103954 5y agoFascinating read! I really appreciated the graphs, which give insight to market dynamics that are often quite opaque to us outsiders. If you're curious, read up on some of the synthesis methods for P2P. Chemists are continually honing their craft to provide superior purity and price: https://erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/phenylacetone.html https://erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/phenylacetone.h... Aside from the often amateurish reduction of (pseudo)ephedrine to methamphetamine, the most popular precursor to amphetamine and methamphetamine is phenyl-2-propanone (also called P2P, BMK, Benzyl Methyl Ketone or Phenylacetone). There is an astounding array of synthetic routes to this compound, both due to the relative simple structure of the compound, and also because of its popularity. [...] Here is a collection of some of the possible methods of synthesizing phenyl-2-propanone, ranging from simple one-step methods to elaborate multi-step variants, and from the very easy to the very complicated. Welcome to the world of P2P. Once you've got P2P, the end product isn't too far behind: https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/p2p-meth.html https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/p2p-meth.ht...
- Factorium 5y agoFrom a societal POV, we need a Government-regulated drug harder than Alcohol or Tobacco. Similar in function to Soma. Maybe marijuana can fit the bill. It doesn't make sense to 'outsource' production of narcotics to antagonistic nations or criminal enterprises.
- asdff 5y agoYou can get edibles now that are dosed at 5mg increments and are the size of an antihistamine.
- semanticjudo 5y agoBy just about any measure alcohol is a "harder" drug than marijuana but certainly more broadly acceptable.
- foolfoolz 5y agoi have had a theory for years if you sold any drug like meth or cocaine in an advil bottle with a label on the side saying “take at most 1 tablet every 4 hours, do not exceed 6 tablets in one day. do not use for more than 2 days in a row” etc then the vast majority of people would not have any issue with it. the people who are already abusing it would continue to abuse it. most people can be around hard addictive drugs ingrained in society like alcohol and do just fine
- crate_barre 5y agoMeth in a bottle is called Adderral. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/94rk1a/how_is_meth_different_from_adhd_meds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/94rk1a/how_is_m...
- dkdk8283 5y agoAnd us socially acceptable in the bay area to be dependent
- 5y ago
- __blockcipher__ 5y agoOh wow. I saw the title and was ready to explain how the cartels had perfected p2p synths such that they yield almost exclusively pure d-methamphetamine, but before explaining that I was going to need to explain the general concept of chirality and enantiomers, and the fact that for amphetamines (especially meth) the d-entantiomer is always the "one you want" and the l-entantiomer is always the less desirable, less powerful form that causes peripheral stimulation but no cerebral effects, and as an anecdote I was going to mention that vics vapo inhaler (commonly used at raves, although people don't actually know what they're inhaling) is levomethamphetamine, and I was even going to mention the humorous fact that they label it "levmetamfetamine" to make the spelling as distinct as possible. Then imagine my surprise when I open the article and it literally covers every one of those points, section by section. Brilliant. I guess the only minor thing I'd add is that the way the cartels (and others) are getting pure d-meth is by bubbling through d-tartaric acid or the like at the end of the process, which separates the racemic meth into its l and d enantiomers respectively. I'm glad this article debunked the fallacious "new meth" article that cropped up here the other day. --- EDIT: Oh and one more thing. There's a common myth among tweakers about "n-iso", which is structurally very similar to methamphetamine - similar enough that it will join the crystal lattice - but it is at best inert, but might actually cause undesirable side effects. The fact that n-iso exists is real, but if you look online you'll see tons of tweakers convinced that they've been smoking n-iso and that it's why they smoke meth and just get a headache and other bad physical side effects but don't get the stimulation or the pleasurable rush. What's actually happening is that they've spiked their tolerance so high that they're getting almost exclusively the bad effects. It's analogous to how if someone takes MDMA for 4 days straight, by the end of it they're not going to "roll" at all because they've acutely downregulated their serotonin (and dopamine) receptors, and furthermore that they've literally (almost) exhausted their current pool of neurotransmitters, which need to be re-synthesized by the body. When looking at the DEA seizure data it's clear that meth is one of the most pure and potent (wrt methamphetamine, the dea defines purity as what % of the compound is meth, meaning either levo or dextro methamphetamine, whereas potency only factors in the d-meth content, since d-meth is the enantiomer that actually gets you cerebrally high) street drugs out there. By comparison, cocaine is one of the most disgusting, cut at the source level with stuff like levamisole (which is thought to be disastrous to health, ie it's not just inert), and then further cut every step down the chain, albeit usually with inert cuts (baby powder, baking soda, glucose, creatine, that kinda stuff) the lower down the chain you get. Seriously kids, don't do cocaine. It's overhyped and a waste of money. So anyway, as I said two paragraphs above, n-iso is real but the idea that there's tons of n-iso crystal floating around is just an urban legend promulgated by tweakers who spiked their tolerance the moon and refuse to see that fact.
- throwaway81523 5y agoIn the article, "P2P" is an abbreviation for Phenylacetone, a precursor to meth (the drug). It's not "peer to peer" so that solved a lot of puzzling over what the headline could mean.
- dylan604 5y agoClearly, anyone questioning peer-to-peer has not watched Breaking Bad
- DarmokJalad1701 5y agoWhen I read the headline, the idea I had in my head was of some kind of crowdsourced meth production system.
- stcredzero 5y agoI thought someone had decided to be edgy, and named their project, "meth"!
- __blockcipher__ 5y agoOn MacOS I use an app called Amphetamine to prevent my computer from sleeping. I got a real kick out of that. I got a further kick when I learned that Amphetamine was the successor to the earlier version, which was called Caffeine.
- lamontcg 5y agoApple, of course, was not amused by that name: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25618245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25618245
- edgyquant 5y agoI don’t think that would be a bad description of the state of meth manufacturing in the Midwest during the 2000s and early 2010s. Users would source together (one person buys the Sudafed, another the chemicals, etc) to make meth and then they would trade with each other, etc. The rise of super labs and purity levels the average meth head couldn’t achieve basically killed the peer-to-peer meth business. At least this was my experience with my addicted cousins back home (in the Midwest.)
- crazy_horse 5y agoI know Vince Gilligan did his research prior to Breaking Bad but st strikes me how on the nose it was. BB came out in 2008 and must have been in production a few years earlier but the increase in actual purity pretty much matches the show coming out. I also recall the show depicting meth users having all those problems - Jesse is paranoid the missionaries are bikers, there's that guy digging a hole in his front yard, Spooe and his head, etc Seems like the drug was fucking people up way prior to the last few years in fiction.
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago> I also recall the show depicting meth users having all those problems - Jesse is paranoid the missionaries are bikers, there's that guy digging a hole in his front yard, Spooe and his head, etc > Seems like the drug was fucking people up way prior to the last few years in fiction. Meth has always, always, always been known to cause those behaviors/effects since it first became widespread. Breaking bad shows those behaviors because they're classic tweaker behaviors. The scene where Jesse distracts the guy by digging is super spot on. Brilliant scene. So yep, the paranoia, hallucinations etc have nothing to do with "new meth", they're just what happens when someone abuses sufficient amounts of meth. And the more potent the meth, the easier it is to get to that threshold. But note that you still need to be smoking or injecting quite a bit. The people exhibiting psychosis and the like are using hundreds of milligrams per session.
- d23 5y agoI happen to be re-watching this right now, and it blew my mind to see those graphs and not see the show lagging a few years behind the reality. How is this possible? It borderline seems like the background research for the show must have actually talked to the mass manufacturers of the stuff...
- edgyquant 5y agoThe transition to super labs, and away from small time Sudafed based meth production, happened prior to the release of Breaking Bad. They based their show on what was occurring in the real world.
- bteitelb 5y agoA curious footnote: Sam Quinones argues that P2P meth is part of the explanation for the proliferation of tents in homeless encampments, because it causes users withdraw socially in ways that earlier meth didn't. This is what he means by it "brought you inside". Users want to be alone (i.e. in a tent) with their paranoid schizophrenic hallucinations.
- notJim 5y agoThat's a bizarre argument. All humans need shelter, whether it's a tent or a house.
- stcredzero 5y agoWhat's cheaper than a tent? 1/2 or 1/3rd of a tent. That's enough if shelter is the only issue. If there is a need for the poorest to have solitude, there's going to be a proliferation in the number of tents.
- MikeBVaughn 5y agoAnecdata: I'm not on meth and I strongly prefer an entire tent to a partial tent.
- stcredzero 5y agoBut, are you so poor, that it would constitute a significant expense?
- MikeBVaughn 5y agoI mean, given the choice of two explanatory models: 1.) Even in cases of extreme poverty, people will put in significant effort and sacrifice to secure some degree of privacy, because it's a basic human desire (a desire I've seen in nearly every person I've ever met.) 2.) ULTRA-METH PSYCHOSIS I'm strongly inclined to favor 1 over 2 until I see some very, very compelling evidence otherwise.
- monkmartinez 5y agoThe reason Meth use is going up is not due to Meth itself. It counter balances the effects of Fentanyl. I regularly go to Fentanyl overdoses where the bystanders tell me they ran out of "G" or "Glass" and simply overdid it with the "M30's"... Its a fucking nightmare. It used to be "meth" users would say..."At least I am not a dope junky using H." Heroin users would say... "At least I am not a tweaker." Now they are one in the same when I see them, which is generally cyanotic, apneic, and have been down for a while. We don't have enough Narcan to counter a bad batch of "M30" pills. Talk to your kids and tell them not to use any pills, not even once.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> counter balances the effects of Fentanyl Could this explain the falling prices described in the article? Fentanyl is the money maker. Meth is being priced to encourage more opioid use?
- e40 5y ago> Talk to your kids and tell them not to use any pills, not even once. Can you elaborate? I have no idea what this is about. I thought meth was smoked.
- __blockcipher__ 5y agoMeth doesn't have to be smoked, you can just eat the crystals orally, but meth abusers uusally don't do that because it's not nearly as fun. The pills they're referring to, 30 M (https://www.drugs.com/imprints/30-m-8232.html https://www.drugs.com/imprints/30-m-8232.html), are oxycodone pills (a powerful opioid), but he's likely actually specifically referring to pressed fent (or fent analogue) pills that are made to look like real oxycodone pills. Or perhaps a mixture of meth and fentanyl, such as what George Floyd was taking the day he died (see https://interactive.kare11.com/pdfs/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.pdf https://interactive.kare11.com/pdfs/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.... as well as the other evidence around the case) There's a big problem where, now that the government has really cracked down on so-called "pill mills" - which like all of the war on drugs was the worst thing they could have done, because now the demand is being filled by fentanyl and fentanyl analogues that are pressed to look like oxy pills, but aren't. Oxy alone can be dangerous, but fent is another beast (particularly illicit). As one anecdote I just had a friend-of-a-friend (I didn't know them personally) die of an overdose earlier this year. They took "oxys" orally which were actually pure fent analogue, and now they're dead. They are yet another fatality of the war on drugs (and also the war on COVID since the lockdowns were the proximate cause of them picking up their opioid habit again) -- Oh, and to elaborate on the GP's point about overdoses being the result of running out of meth, methamphetamine increases respiration rate, which will theoretically counteract the respiratory depression induced by opioids (which are how opioids always kill, with the one exception that fent and related analogues can possibly kill by an addition mechanism of action known as wooden chest syndrome)
- scythe 5y agoOne very strong reason to doubt that heavy metals, such as lead or mercury, play a large role in the meth crisis, is that heavy metal poisoning has telltale signs and symptoms that would not go unnoticed. Furthermore, we have excellent methods for the determination of Pb and Hg in the bloodstream, and there simply isn't any corresponding epidemic of heavy metal poisoning. Also, a nitpick: the author refers to the condensation product of benzaldehyde and nitroethane, which is phenyl-2-nitropropene, abbreviated P2NP, incorrectly. He calls it "nitrostyrene (NTS)", which is the one-carbon-shorter homolog. The other thing to keep in mind is that higher production volumes mean longer supply chains, and with illegal drugs longer supply chains mean more cuts (usually sugars, rarely toxic per se), and more cuts means an increased variance in the potency of the retail product, and variance in potency leads to users accidentally taking more than they intended to. The toxic effects of most drugs have a supralinear dose-response relationship, so these unexpectedly high doses can lead to problems that don't "average out". Often we over-focus on toxic fillers, but forget the risks created even by nontoxic fillers.
- dynm 5y ago> Also, a nitpick: the author refers to the condensation product of benzaldehyde and nitroethane, which is phenyl-2-nitropropene, abbreviated P2NP, incorrectly. He calls it "nitrostyrene (NTS)", which is the one-carbon-shorter homolog. Can you give a bit more detail about what's wrong here, and how it might be fixed? Are all mentions to nitrostyrene/NTS incorrect? This is used repeatedly in the cited papers, so I'm confused if they are also wrong, or the post has mangled usage, or what.
- scythe 5y ago"Nitrostyrene" is sometimes used to refer to the whole class of chemicals featuring the phenyl-ethylene-nitro linkage. So it's not wrong to call it "the nitrostyrene method". But the specific nitrostyrene that is a precursor to methamphetamine is 1-phenyl-2-nitro-propene, while the parent compound "nitrostyrene" is 1-phenyl-2-nitro-ethene.
- rkk3 5y agoThis article seems to be fundamentally mistaken/misrepresenting Sam Quinones's Theory. P2P Meth started after Ephedrine was banned in Mexico in 2008 not 2017. > He suggests that new meth might be chemically different in a way that caused people to go crazy, starting around 2017 2017 is not a significant year, it's just the year of one of his anecdotes. A small town in West Virginia didn't have a meth problem and then in 2017 it had a meth problem and a mental health problem. "Southwest Virginia hadn’t seen much meth for almost a decade when suddenly, in about 2017, “we started to see people go into the state mental-hospital system who were just grossly psychotic” [1] He has other anecdotes from much earlier. "Susan Partovi has been a physician for homeless people in Los Angeles since 2003. She noticed increasing mental illness—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder—at her clinics around the city starting in about 2012" [1] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
- elliekelly 5y agoThe Mental Health Parity and a Addiction Equity Act increased access to this kind of treatment. The first interim rules under the Act went into effect for new plan years starting on or after July 2010. Many insurance plans (particularly Medicare and Medicaid plans in certain states) dragged their feet in implementing the required changes. This was problematic because, despite being a federal law, state insurance regulators are the primary enforcers. In 2016 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid finally started to crack down with their investigations and enforcement and issued compliance guidance and toolkits to help states fully implement the required coverage. Is it possible the upticks don’t represent a new group of addicts so much as they represent a new group of people who are eligible for affordable treatment? It doesn’t seem terribly far-fetched to me that CA would have implemented the required coverage in their Medicare & Medicaid plans fairly quickly while West Virginia’s plans would have waited as long as possible to comply.
- kens 5y agoThe article mentions the ban in 2006 of over-the-counter sales of Sudafed (pseudoephedrine). One of my favorite satirical articles is "A simple and convenient synthesis of pseudoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine". (The joke being that Sudafed is now hard to purchase while meth is readily available.) https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume19/v19i3/Pseudoephedrine.pdf https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume19/v19i3...
- adolph 5y agoIn the below podcast an author of a book about recent meth developments talks about the ban of Sudafed entirely in Mexico lead to a change in the market toward fentanyl. Author and journalist Sam Quinones talks about his book, The Least of Us, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Quinones focuses on the devastation caused by methamphetamine and fentanyl, the latest evolution of innovation in the supply of mind-altering drugs in the United States. The latest versions of meth, he argues, are more emotionally damaging than before and have played a central role in the expansion of the homeless in tent encampments in American cities. The conversation includes an exploration of the rising number of overdose deaths in the United States and what role community and other institutions might play in reducing the death toll. https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-the-least-of-us/ https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-t...
- hackeraccount 5y agoI heard that. Interesting discussion.
- pinewurst 5y agoThis book was abstracted into a great Atlantic article mentioned at the beginning of the original post. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
- lachstar-x 5y agoGood article. A similar thing happened here when the Australian Federal Police enacted an operation in Cambodia and similar areas to shut down the production of safrole, extracted from the root of the Sassafras tree (also the flavouring in root beer and sarsparilla). Ecstasy became much harder to get on the street and pushed users towards harder drugs like meth and heroin (resulting in a large number of addictions and increase in overall crime).
- Synaesthesia 5y agoMeth is just a very harmful drug, which can cause psychosis. I don't know if I buy this theory that it's a different drug.
- 1MachineElf 5y agoMore about the impact of P2P meth: https://www.hmpgloballearningnetwork.com/site/ap/news/stimulant-summit-quinones-p2p-methamphetamine-creating-complex-challenges https://www.hmpgloballearningnetwork.com/site/ap/news/stimul...
- golemiprague 5y ago
- cyounkins 5y agoCan anyone comment on how producers could be isolating the the 'd' enantiomer? Are they using enzymes? Steve Mould has a great video [1] on homochirality in nature and says, "Why are all the sugar molecules that you buy from the shops right-handed? ... If you were to make some sugar for yourself in a chemistry lab by mixing some chemicals together, you would get a 50/50 mix of left-handed sugar and right-handed sugar." He goes on to describe how enzymes in nature exclusively make homochiral molecules, and since all our sugar is made by enzymes, all our sugar is homochiral. Later in the video he describes how you can filter enantiomers by finding an enzyme in nature that 'eats' the undesired enantiomer, finding the DNA for it, and coercing bacteria into producing that enzyme. This seems quite complicated and potentially out of reach for a clandestine drug-making operation. Is there another way? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKhcan8pk2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKhcan8pk2w
- gpcr1949 5y agoThey are most likely using resolution via the Pope–Peachey Method. There was supporting evidence found in a laboratory in Guadalajara[0]. It is possible to do asymmetric reductive amination using enzymes but this is out of the scope of clandestine producers. Likewise a chemical and not enzymatic asymmetric reductive amination would be easy in a bench lab, probably to expensive and impractical in a clandestine setting. [0] Joseph S. Bozenko, "Clandestine Enantiomeric Enrichment of d–Methamphetamine via Tartaric Acid Resolution", JCLIC, 2008, vol.3 (not publicly accessible but you can find this if you know where to look)
- gavinray 5y agoI did not know it had a name. TIL. I will back the Tartaric Acid hypothesis. If it's being done, this is the only way it makes sense. It requires nearly nothing but the D-Tartaric Acid and Ethanol/Methanol + basic glassware. Disclaimer: Am not a chemist.
- gavinray 5y agoMethamphetamine synthesized from pseudoephedrine gives enantiomerically pure Dextro-methamphetamine. Phenylacetone synthesis yields racemic methamphetamine. You can actually use a laptop screen, and polarized sunglass lenses to check the optical rotation at home, cheap polarimeter. As far as purifying enantiomer with amphetamine and methamphetamine goes: It can be done relatively easily with just D-tartaric Acid. Look up "Procedures for the Resolution of Racemic Amphetamines" https://erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/amphetamine.resolution.html https://erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/amphetamine.res... I do not believe this practice is in use in illicit drug manufacture. There's no economic incentive and it requires some braincells. From "Selective Crystallization of Methamphetamine with d-Tartaric Acid:" Phenylisopropylmethylamine was resolved by treatment with 0.4-6 moles of dextro tartaric acid in water or aqueous ethanol containing 0.4-6 moles hydrogen chloride. A mixture of phenylisopropylmethylamine 150, d-tartaric acid 82.5, and H2O 330 g was treated with HCl to pH 4 to deposit 120 g L-phenylisopropylmethylamine-d-tartrate salt, which gave 88 g L-phenylisopropylmethylamine. The D-enantiomer (58 g as the HCl salt) was isolated from the filtrate.
- perardi 5y agoBit of a tangential rant: meth is actually truly really bad, and I wish our drug education growing up hadn’t painted this nebulous concept of “drugs”, because there’s gradations of harm. I’m approaching 40. (Ugh, I hate to admit that.) I grew up during the D.A.R.E. era. Just Say No. Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. “Drugs” were this boogeyman, and whatever they were, they would turn you into a junkie instantly. I have no idea how you’d study this, as I think this was a pretty much cross-cultural message, but I wonder what would have happened if we could have educated teenagers that, well, “we know you’re going to do drugs, they all have side effects, but some are not that bad, and some will absolutely ruin you.” Because: I have done a lot drugs in my 30s. Pretty much the full club drug buffet, with the exception of meth and opiates. (Also never smoked a cigarette yet.) And you know what? There are varying degrees of bad. There’s this jaded sense that you build up, that you’re a bit bitter that you wasted quite a lot of your childhood education in D.A.R.E. I wonder if we could have possibly successfully pulled off harm reduction education in drugs, and given people a better set of mental tools to understand what drugs are truly bad, namely meth and opiates, and which drugs are quite honestly far less deleterious than vodka. (You cannot tell me, with a straight face, that weed is physically and socially more harmful than drinking.)
- brighton36 5y agoContemporary social policy as a whole appears to be a cycle of reaction and hysteria. There's very little substance to this process, in the form of empiricism or evidenced-based feedback. This cycle appears to be a by-product of our modern information mediums. I think that generations prior to ours (I too am approaching 40) weren't as vulnerable to the whims of society's most easily frightened and manipulated members. I think the only solution is to vote with our feet, and leave the hysterics behind. I suspect this process is well underway, now that the more educated members of society have the ability to work from home.
- Lammy 5y agoD.A.R.E. did a great job of teaching us that any drug user has made a conscious choice toward moral failure. Couple that with knowledge of which groups were most heavily impacted by the drug epidemics of the 1980s and you can see an esoteric goal for D.A.R.E.
- JudasGoat 5y agoFrom what I read, the P2P method isn't new. "Preisler, who works at an electroplating factory and has been arrested twice in the U.S. for his work with methamphetamine, says he isn't surprised traffickers have turned to P2P. "P2P is old school," he said. "Hell, I used to cook by that route circa 1980." The fight has come full circle. In the 1980s, the U.S. government severely restricted access to P2P seeking to curtail methamphetamine production. Meth makers shifted to ephedrine, which could be found in common cold remedies. When authorities cracked down on ephedrine, they switched to pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed and other decongestants." https://www.cleveland.com/world/2009/12/old_school_meth_method_mexican.html https://www.cleveland.com/world/2009/12/old_school_meth_meth...
- cwkoss 5y agoPriesler goes by "Uncle Fester", and wrote "Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture" - he's effectively the expert on clandestine meth manufacturing. He writes some interesting, and kind of terrifying, books. https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/attach/130/130179_Secrets_of_Meth_Manufacture_StevenPreisler.pdf https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/attach/130/130179_Secrets_of_M...
- hilbert42 5y agoJust taken a brief look at that link. It's no wonder Wikileaks doesn't endear itself to many. That said, I suppose in reality it's just a more in-your-face presentation of what's already in many organic chemistry textbook in any number of libraries. Frankly, I reckon there's little that can be done to stop the illicit manufacture of these drugs for the logical reason that they're such simple molecules. Many are just minor variations on the basic d-enantiomer (dexamphetamine) which essentially is only a benzene ring with a single branch containing a CH3 methyl and a NH2 amine group. So it stands to reason that there are many comparatively simple ways to synthesize them and that more are likely to be found. Moreover, the more precursors there are, the harder it becomes to ban them all, as eventually we'll hit the point where certain precursors are too ubiquitous and or important to ban. It seems to me that if we're to take harm minimization seriously then we need to take a more sophisticated approach. For staters, we need much more efficient public health measures to detect and separate out genuine self-medicatiors from the partygoers who take illicit drugs. As we know, these sympathomimetic amines have been prescribed by the medical profession for decades for certain depressive illnesses, ADHD, etc., but because of their their potential for abuse - not to mention certain moralistic attitudes among many politicians - these drugs have a horrible stigma attached to them and that has stopped many undiagnosed people from being prescribed them legally. The consequence is that many of them self-medicate with illegal drugs and the outcomes are often dire. I think that taking a serious approach to medicalizing the problem would help very significantly. This would also include distinguishing the amines from the opiates. Whilst the medical profession understands fundamental difference between these two classes of drugs, public policy often doesn't and the drug problem ends up as an amorphous mess that becomes even harder to sort out than it otherwise would have been. Therefore, there needs to be a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding amongst the general community to the effect that someone who turns to illicit amines is likely doing so for fundamentally different reasons to another who has turned to opiates. A more sophisticated approach to the drug problem would lead to better outcomes for not only those addicted to drugs but also for society in general.
- cwkoss 5y agoRE: Quantity section. I wonder if the pharmaceutical amphetamines and/or novel 'research chemical' amphetamines metabolize into the same compounds that are being quantified in sewage. Are they detecting 'meth' specifically or amphetamines generally? > only $1k per pound now. Wow that's crazy. An equivalent quantity of generic adderall would cost ~$20k. Meth is effectively at commodity-level prices, if true - the drug war premium seems gone. I'm skeptical about overdose rates being attributed to meth. Meth is fairly hard to OD on - it'll ruin your life and brain, but rarely kills acutely. I suspect meth being used as an adulterant mixed with other drugs (esp opioids), or novel non-meth psychostimulants, play a significant role in the increase of psychostimulant ODs by ~9x over the last 10 years. I think a lot of this data is getting mixed up with the (at the time quasi-legal) pyrovalerones and cathinones that were widely available through the clearnet over the past 5 years. Those have much greater acute risks and were highly accessible to people without drug connections. --- However, I'm skeptical of the initial premise of the article: > Ephedrine meth was like a party drug. […] You could normally kind of more or less hang onto your life. You had a house, you had a job. […] P2P meth was nothing like that. It was a very sinister drug. Tweakers have been around for decades, I suspect this is just misleading anecdata.
- 01100011 5y agoAnecdotal tidbit: father in law was a casual meth user for decades until life stress pushed him to start shooting it up around 1996. That's when the real breakdown started (paranoid hallucinations and fantastical delusions). There's something to be said for dosages and delivery mechanisms, which to some degree are driven by culture, pricing and availability.
- trhway 5y agoI think P2P was the main type of meth in 196x-198x.
- okareaman 5y agoI think the same analogy can be made for social media. We had Myspace and Friendster, but social networks didn't become a problem until we had so much of it - always internet connected little computers with us every waking hour.
- oceanghost 5y ago> But there are many reports out there of people taking 500 mg of meth at a time without overdosing An "acquaintance" of mine who is a well seasoned meth user did ~1.5g and didn't die. She certainly wasn't better off for it.
- kemiller 5y agoDoes this mean we can have Sudafed back?
- caymanjim 5y agoSo the meth is cheaper, more abundant, more physically dangerous, and more socially destructive than it was before they banned ephedrine. Can we get our good decongestants back now please?
- hilbert42 5y agoYou probably don't have to (unless you live in the US), as xylometazoline HCl works exceptionality well and is readily available OTC sans script: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylometazoline https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylometazoline P.S.: If you live in the US, then it's readily available from Canada.
- fithisux 5y agoThe anecodte is that in Ancient Greek meth-ee (μέθη) means being high (by alcohol or weed).