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Not-such-better-living through chemistry
- Metacelsus 4y agoAs a soon-to-be PhD graduate, I'm perversely curious as to how much these clandestine chemistry jobs actually pay . . .
- passwordoops 4y agoA start-up offer from a loose acquaintance came my way 2006-ish and it was quite lucrative. But seeing what happened to the dude long-term proved to me the power and importance of "No"
- api 4y agoMany years ago in college I was offered a job doing IT and infosec/opsec for an interesting group of people. Turned it down for many reasons including not wanting to live in constant paranoia, but it was suggested that the pay would be excellent.
- cjbgkagh 4y agoReminds me of the bit on Clerks about contractors passing on dangerous jobs with the second Death Star as an example.
- h2odragon 4y agothe pay can be quite good; but don't go bringing any other concerns to the HR department.
- fisherjeff 4y agoI believe the severance packages also tend to be pretty bad
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MengerSponge 4y ago"Take whatever you want, I-I have money, I have a lot of money. I have... um... Please, don't do this. You don't- You... Y-You don't have to do this..."
- bell-cot 4y agoPlus issues with what to put on your resume, and getting references.
- api 4y agoI’m guessing the hells angels do not have a diversity policy or a policy on harassment?
- cjbgkagh 4y agoI’m pretty sure the Hells Angels have a policy on harassment, you could say it’s almost a job requirement.
- kevinmchugh 4y agoThey have a two letter diversity policy: "No".
- hotpotamus 4y agoEver watch Breaking Bad?
- liveoneggs 4y agoPay is great but the non-compete is a little aggressive. Don't bring up the NDA as it's even worse.
- starkd 4y agoI suspect that once you start working in the field, there's no walking away. You will be a slave scientist. The cartls won't let you walk away from it.
- photochemsyn 4y agoMaking opiates for the Sackler family with the blessing of the US government for distribution to addicts via 'pain clinics' probably pays about the same as making opiates for the Guzman cartel down in Mexico for transport over the border into the US for distribution to addicts on street corners. In both cases you probably want to keep paying your taxes, however. In the latter case you'll need some cover story to explain where you got the money from. Really the drug situation in the USA is pretty farcical. You can manufacture amphetamines and opiates at scale for the ADHD/chronic pain market, with relatively few restrictions, but the prisons are full of people involved in the clandestine trade in the very same substances.
- fuzzfactor 4y agoWell before you earn your PhD I would expect you to be able to make other types of chemicals which are not illegal, even though they may be equally as toxic and only about 10X less profitable. But you could sell more than 10X as many kilos of legitimate materials and not be limited to only a clandestine supply chain, so the financial upside alone is way better by comparison. Criminal organizations are limited to the clandestine activities and prefer them anyway, you've got to figure they're making lots more money per kilo, but sometimes I would think they might only be coming out ahead by not paying any taxes. I do think they spend a lot of money on "insurance" but it's not going to legitimate insurance companies either. As a professional you'll never need to stoop that low, and they'll never be able to reach as high as your actual baseline.
- Damogran6 4y agoGreat. Now I'm on a list. (Honestly, I find it interesting that things mentioned in the article seem like plot points in the Vince Gilligan universe of Netflix shows.)
- kevinmchugh 4y agoGilligan and crew did research. The economics of production are important parts of the plot.
- nullc 4y agoThere is a point in breaking bad where walt rants something like "since our synthesis isn't stereospecific, explain how our product is enantiomerically pure?"
- j_m_b 4y agoIt's interesting to note that as methamphetamine and amphetamine were more regulated in the 50s and 60s, it became more prevalent. Then in order to stamp out illegal production, the precursor chemicals were monitored. So what happens? Production becomes more dangerous. Solution: Just make every kind of drug legal to produce, but regulate the purity. Be very explicit about the dangers. The only thing prohibition does is make drug consumption and production dangerous and needlessly expensive.
- alpineidyll3 4y agoAdderall anyone? There's a panoply of legal ways to obtain amphetamines, but the US medical system is far less competent at customer service than the black market due to regulatory capture. I think it's critical to appreciate that Physician Regulations, the AMA, etc. are the main culprits here. How they avoid getting properly blamed for things like the opioid epidemic, I have no idea.
- brookst 4y agoI suspect that most people who understand the role AMA plays in prohibition and drug abuse also aren’t super interested in focusing on blame. The whole thing is a complicated system of perverse incentives and counterproductive policies. It doesn’t really matter if the AMA is 20% or 60% to blame.
- alpineidyll3 4y agoBlame is a poor choice of words. Ideally we could stop letting physicians write their own regulations, and instead have at least one mechanism with incentive to promote national health, rather than the medical industry complex.
- starkd 4y agoTraditionally, doctors, as men of science, have been given wide latitude to prescribe, since there is no one treatment that is good for everyone. Unfortunately, that seems to be changing, as doctors are expected to adhere to a standard regimen of treatment options. It is the dangers of institutionalization of our healthcare.
- hotpotamus 4y agoI'm surprised to read that there are recent innovations in illicit techniques of making methamphetamine that mirror legitimate pharmaceutical methods, but only because I thought methamphetamine was already a legitimate pharmaceutical to some extent. https://www.goodrx.com/methamphetamine https://www.goodrx.com/methamphetamine Other amphetamines are quite well represented at the average pharmacy at least.
- blanketlamp 4y agoI think it’s more that Eli Lilly and co don’t need to deal with the same supply issues/challenges that warrant the innovation. If they want to make Meth, they can probably just get a bunch of pseudoephedrine delivered.
- kevinmchugh 4y agoI don't know chemistry but my reading of the article makes me think the pharmaceutical meth is just the decongestant (L) isomer
- notamy 4y agoPrescription methamphetamine is Desoxyn, which is a CNS stimulant and thus schedule II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desoxyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desoxyn
- jagraff 4y agoYou can buy the L isomer OTC as a decongestant, but desoxyn is the D isomer, a stimulant, perscribed for ADHD and narcolepsy.
- refurb 4y agoThere used to be a very active forum on clandestine chemistry (The Hive) that eventually got shut down when Strike (who ran the forum) got busted. I cant remember the details (it’s been almost 20 years) but I think 60 Minutes did a report on it and he was anonymously interviewed? He also wrote a couple books on it. The Rhodium archives were also a nice collection of scientific papers on synthesis routes combined with first hand reports on success/failure. It was a pretty comprehensive site. I believe the archives are still hosted somewhere.
- nibbleshifter 4y agoThere were a great number of successor forums to the Hive. Some are still active, some even are clearnet sites you can find when searching for archives of the Hive.
- sciencemadness 4y agoYou can find it here, minus the posts from the private forums: https://the-hive.archive.erowid.org/ https://the-hive.archive.erowid.org/ also see https://archive.erowid.org/ https://archive.erowid.org/
- gavinray 4y agoThe optical resolution of racemic amphetamine/methamphetamine has been known for years. https://erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/amphetamine.resolution.html https://erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/amphetamine.res... What has surprised me is how infrequently it seems to be carried out, given the materials required for it. This is all you need: - D-Tartaric Acid (You can buy it from import sites in bulk for $30-60/kg) - Lye/Sodrium Hydroxide - Ethanol/Everclear (if you're converting meth, you'll also need Methanol) - Glassware - Distilled Water The process is stupid-simple and takes a matter of hours, any idiot could do it, and the difference it makes in effects (racemic vs optically-pure D-Amphetamine vs D-Methamphetamine) is obscene. It seems like many of the clandestine chemists are behind the curve in the same way that LAMP-stack shops are in terms of the HN crowd in tech. Source: Originally was an organic chemistry major with an intent to pursue psychopharmacology
- logifail 4y ago> The process is stupid-simple and takes a matter of hours, any idiot could do it, and the difference it makes in effects (racemic vs optically-pure D-Amphetamine vs D-Methamphetamine) is obscene (My organic chemistry is very rusty, and my knowledge of amphetamines is non-existant.) I'm assuming from what you wrote that the D- enantiomer is one you want. What does the L- enantiomer do, if anything?
- gavinray 4y agoThe L-enantiomer is actually readily available for purchase over-the-counter. Vicks Vapor rub/inhalers and other decongestants use L-methamphetamine. The D-enantiomer causes CNS stimulation. The L-enantiomer causes only PNS (Peripheral Nervous System) stimulation, so it produces no euphoria or enjoyable effects. Only unpleasant side effects, like tachycardia and anxiety, etc. This is why racemic amphetamine/methamphetamine is so (comparatively) unpleasant, and the pure D-enantiomer is superior and "cleaner" feeling. Racemic amphetamines have a much higher chance of inducing psychosis.
- programmer_dude 4y ago
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoI have a friend who, fortunately, escaped the drug world and is happily recovered now. One of the many interesting things I learned through talking to him and his friends is the pervasive idea among addicted that street drugs were always better in the past. Everyone vividly remembers their drug being much better when they first got into drugs, with steadily declining effects over the years. Many of them had elaborate theories about changing synthesis or chirality or cutting agents or active impurities. They would even have theories about modern prescription Adderall or prescription opioids being 1/4 as powerful as in the past due to conspiracies by manufacturers. The drugs may have changed slightly over the years, but the sad reality is that the real change was their accumulated tolerance and long term damage from drug abuse had blunted their response so much that they could barely feel the drugs any more. For some, this blunted reward response carried over to daily life, with depression and a hedonic being pervasive among the long term users. A sobering reminder that the negative effects of recreational drugs last long after the hangover. I’m seeing an alarming trend of young people reading “harm reduction” material online and assuming they know the full picture of the risks of drug use. Seeing addicts (most of whom assumed they were using intelligently and practicing “harm reduction”) discuss their long term effects is a sad look into the realities of drug use. There is no free lunch.
- blanketlamp 4y ago> A sobering reminder that the negative effects of recreational drugs last long after the hangover. I’m seeing an alarming trend of young people reading “harm reduction” material online and assuming they know the full picture of the risks of drug use. I don't think that's ever been in question. Harm reduction isn't some utopian ideal that safe drug use == nobody ever suffers long-term negative effects. Conquering those demons takes a lot of time, introspection, and often outside help. Harm reduction is about making sure you live long enough to hopefully get there.
- starkd 4y agoTrue, but you are saying that with more awareness than many young people have when they are first looking into it. The brain tends to assume "risk reduction" means "risk approaches zero" and thus negligeable risk.
- taxicabjesus 4y agoI don't have any personal experience with amphetamines, or any of the stimulants other than caffeine. But plenty of my passengers were struggling with substance addictions. I had a passenger who was whacked out on something. He disappeared real quick - I couldn't figure out how he got over that wall... One of my passengers, whom I helped get off alcohol, said her downward spiral started with stimulants. Her husband had brought cocaine home from 'work' in California. He had emotional problems related to childhood. When cocaine got expensive they switched to meth amphetamine. She realized it was causing problems for her when she realized she'd been short with her youngest child. At one point her other boy was prescribed Adderall (amphetamine) for ADD. That experiment only lasted for two weeks. She kept these Adderall pills on reserve, and used them to wean herself off the methamphetamine. That's when her anxiety started. After a few months of medical treatment, she found the 'anxiety' was perfectly relieved with alcohol. Whoops. [She ran back to the bottle every time she got a little stressed. I eventually encouraged her to use cannabis to mellow out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21889546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21889546 ] Our dear leaders should come out of their ivory towers and figure out what actually happens on the streets. The War on Drugs has been ongoing for over a hundred years. People cycle in and out of jail/prison, but they don't get better from being mickeyed up (incarcerated). From my perspective as a simple former taxi driver, the drug war is just a make-work program for public defenders: the bad chemicals get confiscated and the bad people get locked up, but people still have the same amount of unaddressed distress. People are usually worse off after getting corrected than they were before. Two of my passengers informed me that cocaine is a much more pleasant drug than meth amphetamine. I don't have any reports about heroin vs. fentanyl. [Someone on twitter pointed out the drug cartels transitioned to Fentanyl when it became apparent that Afghanistan's heroin production was going to go offline.] Bringing back cheap plant-based drugs (cocaine, heroin, etc) is an important step of harm reduction while society figures out how to effectively address the reasons behind our suffering.
- annoyingnoob 4y agoNixon declared the War on Drugs in 1971. https://www.britannica.com/topic/war-on-drugs https://www.britannica.com/topic/war-on-drugs
- cat_plus_plus 4y agoLegislating morality is like casting pearls before swine, best to focus on helping those who want to live decent lives voluntarily. Part of that can be accomplished with designated methamphetamine or whatever dens where adults can get high and then sober up before being allowed into family neighborhoods. Without legal fears, it should be easier for addicts to get in touch with those who offer rehab services or harm reduction replacement therapies such as methadone. But mostly we want to enable parents who don't want their kids to be offered drugs keep it this way, and same for other deranged excesses of our days.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago> But a human-designed synthetic process can always be human-redesigned. It happens constantly in the drug industry - the production of such a common drug as ibuprofen changed completely in the early 1990s, for example (a story for another time). For an illegal drug, that means that law enforcement will always be a step or two behind as new methods come on line. And it means that stopping the supply of such a drug will be difficult-to-impossible as well. 1) I wish he would have provided a link for the ibuprofen story. 2) With regards to the very last bit, You'll never stop the production. Ironically, "the war on drugs" has meant more and higher quality drugs. What might be possible is mitigating the financial incentives. It might also be a good time (read: long over due) to ask: why so many people have so much pain (i.e., physical or emotional) that they require a persistent altered state of mind (to defuse the pain)? I'm not talking about prevention. I'm talking about a society / culture that is as good at generating customers for these substances as the producer are good at meeting those needs.
- gpcr1949 4y agoYou can read about the development of this new route and its advantages here [0]. Ctrl+F for ibuprofen or go to p.54. https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/B978-0-12-804190-1.00004-5 https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/B978-0-12-804190-1.00004-5
- eternalban 4y agoLoved the author’s writing style. He strikes a nearly perfect balance of casual and humorous with precise domain jargon.
- latchkey 4y agoRead his other pieces... he's been writing for 20 years now... https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline?AfterYear=2003&AfterMonth=1&BeforeYear=2003&BeforeMonth=1 https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline?AfterYear=2003&AfterM... His 'Things I won't work with' posts are classics. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-work-hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
- eternalban 4y agoThanks!
- astrange 4y agoSomeone finally made thioacetone recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmAG8-V_WQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmAG8-V_WQY But I'm still waiting to find out what isocyanide smells like. His old posts tend to just be flowery without actually explaining anything.
- vermilingua 4y agoWhenever chemistry posts pop up on the front page, if they’re from science.org they’re probably by Derek Lowe and I know that I’m in for a great read, even if I understand nothing in the article.
- VLM 4y agoThe teaser line about ibuprofen synthesis is interesting because he didn't put enough "tease" into it for non-chemists to understand the kind of funny analogy. Superficially, one would not expect that a "green" synthesis would start with HF acid, but here it is anyway and it works. A "you gotta be kidding me" moment that makes sense after thinking about it. I think that's the analogy he was trying to make in the article that only chemists would "get" about the innovation of chiral resolution, I have to admit the first time I read about that I was like "you gotta be kidding" but after thinking, it makes sense. I'm trying to think of a similar "you gotta be kidding" in CS/IT, but its too early in the morning.
- photochemsyn 4y ago"Green synthesis" in chemistry should probably be renamed. "Closed-loop synthesis" is closer to what it's about. The fundamental concept is that you're not producing any waste products or unwanted side reactions, and all the reagents and catalysts are recycled back to their original state at the end of the reaction. This typically involves synthetic routes that start with small molecules and build larger molecules from them in a specific manner (rather than say, cleaving a large molecule and then having to throw away part of it as waste). With something highly reactive like HF acid, it might mean generating the HF from a fluoride salt, using it in the reaction, then converting any leftover HF back to the salt at then end of the process.
- VLM 4y agoI agree with you completely in a technical sense although greenwashing has become enough of a cultural icon that its hilarious to contemplate "watch me do something green" start with cracking open a container of HF, LOL.
- sitkack 4y agoThat layout has more of an impact on perf than -O3 to -O1?
- ck2 4y agoWhat if instead of all the money poured into law enforcement and prosecution we instead make treatment for addiction completely frictionless, effortless and guilt-less. Like walking into a supermarket easy. Of course progressives have been begging for that to happen with mental health in the USA for decades, so all this is a fantasy to try to help people in society.
- blfr 4y agoWe do not have the technology to make mental health care supermarket easy. Psychiatric drugs have NNTs in the dozens, terrible side effects, or both. It's a fantasy because it has no chance of working even before you consider the enormous amount of resources it would require. I strongly suspect the same about just letting people do copious amounts of legal drugs and then trying to fix addictions they develop. Stepping in after the damage is done is usually both much more expensive and way less effective. Ounce of prevention and all that.
- tchaffee 4y agoThe ounce of prevention doesn't work. Prohibition has been a huge failure.
- starkd 4y agoThat might work if drugs were as easy to stop than start. Addiction treatment has a very low success rate with high relapse rate, and its incredibly expensive per user. The best treatment remains not starting in the first place.
- tchaffee 4y agoProhibition doesn't work at all at stopping people from starting in the first place. It has over a hundred years of failure. Switzerland hugely reduced an endemic heroin problem in part by making it a health issue instead of a criminal issue. And Portugal has shown a lot of success in decriminalization of most drugs. Illegal drugs are perhaps the 2nd largest business globally, after petroleum. Prohibition is an abject failure at "not starting in the first place".
- photochemsyn 4y agoChirality is an interesting topic, and controlled chiral synthesis is pretty cutting-edge chemistry. The real masters of this art are biological enzymes, i.e. the proteins that catalyze all chemical reactions. A lot of the modern catalysts used in chiral synthesis are themselves chiral, which is essentially mimicing the biochemical approach. For this to work, however, the starting molecule needs to be what called pro-chiral. For illustration, imagine a flat triangular sheet of paper with three different elements at the points. How could you only label one side of that sheet? Well, if you take a copy of that triangle and glue one side to a table, then there's only one orientation in which all three points of the other triangle will make a one-to-one correspondence. This corresponds to the enzyme (glued to the table) specifically binding the pro-chiral molecule (i.e. a carbon atom with three different substituents) and then the free surface of the triangle is where the reaction takes place. I suppose someone could develop such a system for amphetamine synthesis and it would qualify as 'green chemistry' (which really just means producing the desired product without generating a waste stream via a closed-loop process), and this might even be how it's done in the legal pharmaceutical world today (methamphetamine is sold as Desoxyn for ADHD treatment). There are better things for chemists to put their time and energy towards, in my opinion. As far as the legality and safety of drugs, it seems pretty clear that criminalization just fills prisons while generating large profits for organized crime cartels, with many associated problems (i.e. violent crime), while not reducing the population of drug addicts. A public health approach based on educating people about the very negative health and social effects of drug and alcohol addiction seems like the more reasonable approach. Bans on advertising and promotion of drugs might be wise as well, as has happened with tobacco and alcohol to some extent.
- Octokiddie 4y ago> ... Methamphetamine has a chiral center, so you can produce the pure (D) isomer, the pure (L), the exact 50/50 racemic mixture, or anything in between. (L) methamphetamine is a pretty good decongestant, but it is otherwise unenjoyable and has no market as a drug of abuse. The classic P2P reductive amination will of course give you the racemate; there’s nothing chiral about the synthesis at all. At the other end of the scale, reduction of pseudoephedrine starts with a pure chiral material, and you get only (D) methamphetamine as a product. What he's talking about is molecular mirror images. Our bodies can tell the difference between the (L) and the (D) form. The former drains your sinuses and the latter gets you high. This is a tangential plot point in Breaking Bad. In the episode "Boxcutter," Walter White asks: "If our reduction is not stereospecific, then how can our product be enantiomerically pure?" There's a lot to unpack there, but it implies that Walt is isolating (D) methamphetamine exclusively. It also implies that this is occurring through a selective reductive procedure. The first few seasons established that the synthesis relies on methylamine through a reductive procedure called P2P. But that procedure produces (D) and (L) forms in equal quantities. What Walt is revealing in that one sentence is that he's developed a way to do the reductive amination step in the P2P cook such that just the (D) form is isolated. His use of the term "stereospecific," implies that the selectivity is close to 100% in the bond-forming step itself. The process therefore doesn't just produce highly pure product, but does so very efficiently. At the time period of the show, such a reaction would have been very close to cutting edge research.
- RichardCA 4y agoI'm sure they used real chemists to help with the screenplays, but it's more akin to Michael Crichton levels of sophistry. I also recall reading that they had someone at the DEA to vet each episode to make sure they never gave out a workable recipe, but I can't find a source for that, that isn't SEO clickbait.
- w1nst0nsm1th 4y agoI don't know about where street drug trafficking were heading these last 8 years since I didn't met a real life drug dealer since 2014, I only heard from (ex)-drug users, social workers, ex-dealer, and of course, the press. That in northern europe... The current thing on the rise here seems to be ketamine, according to a social workers. There was in local news papers article about gangs shooting (and launching grenades?) at each other after confiscated cocaine shipment... And Stephen Colbert joked about Belgium asking for help to distroy cocaine seizure. I met people who did jail time for various substances trafficking. I met people who were in recovery for cocaine addiction. I even met with someone advocating for drug legalization... And I know for sure some ex-neihbours set up a phony business to launder years of pot trafficking benefices. But I never met, heard or read or whatever or whoever having encountered methamphetamine in any way (or someone having met someone else having encoutered methamphetamine)... And I live 30 minutes away in train from the closest dutch city. I also live in the city with the (reportedly) highest number of drug users (and dealers?) per capita in the country. So I don't know what to think about d-tartric acid seizure in holland and belgium, and where the corresponding drug is sold, but methamphetamine is definitively not a thing here.
- klooney 4y agoMeth is super common in Northern California, I live on the outskirts of silicon valley and the local paper's police blotter is always "meth, drunk, meth, drunk, stolen property from car".
- mjcohen 4y agoRemember: without chemistry, life itself would be unprofitable.
- worik 4y agoMethamphetamine is a troubling drug. As difficult as vodka socially, and much easier to consume. As a example of "better living through chemistry" it is really a counter example. (I think that was the point) But there are so many better examples: * MDMA LSD Viagra * Methylphenidate MDMA in particular revolutionizes social interaction in the same way as alcohol, with fewer health consequences, albethey not zero. For some people Methylphenidate is a wonderful brain tonic. (Ritalin) Better living through chemistry is possible. Professional labs, quality control et etcetera are required, not prohibition and sketchy underground chemists
- novok 4y agoReally? You can't take a higher does of ritalin to get a similar abuser profile as meth at lower doses?
- CamperBob2 4y agoThere's an amusing hyperlink ("drastically wrong") in his post -- the replies from the chemist who runs the blog at that link are hilarious. I won't post it here because it goes to a page describing exactly how to cook meth, but it's amusing enough to be worth following the bread crumb left by Derek.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- labrador 4y ago> In fact, the quest to learn more about these [consciousness-altering] substances has been one of the things driving progress in organic chemistry over the centuries. Wow, didn't know this.