I'm not sure what the goal of this project is. It seems to be to produce psilocybin and MDMA, but it fails to mention why this would be necessary, or why they'd

I'm not sure what the goal of this project is. It seems to be to produce psilocybin and MDMA, but it fails to mention why this would be necessary, or why they'd need any money to do so at all (apart from the modest cost of precursor). I'll admit that I don't know much about synthetic psilocybin manufacturing, so I'm talking about MDMA mostly. (but until last year, you could buy 'only add water' growing sets for shrooms in smart shops here (=Netherlands), so how hard can it be?) Either way, there are many syntheses known, most of them (although I'm not a chemist, so I don't have first hand knowledge) available to chemists with very modest understandings of chemistry and rudimentary equipment needs. I'd imagine they already have labs in which they can produce high quality product using high-yield syntheses. With the right paperwork (which you'd need to get access to this project's product), any researcher could just as easily get access to precursor and make exactly what they want (be it MDMA, MDA, MDME, or any other variation Shulgin described, or invented afterwards by others). Plus it's easier to get licensed for owning e.g. saffrole than it is to import MDMA! So maybe he's saying that they can do it cheaper? I doubt so, or at least I doubt that the price difference would be relevant. MDMA available underground in Europe has been more pure and cheaper than it ever was before; a gram of pure MDMA costs 20 euros retail (that's about 10 doses) if you're buying from the most expensive guy you can find. If you buy by the 100 grams, you can get it for half or a quarter of that price. So we're talking less than a euro per dose here - at a worst case estimate. After taking everything into account, I have a hard time imagining cost being a factor here (the low price on the underground market being a fascinating topic itself here - how can these clandestine manufacturing gangs make real money on their operations, after counting for the high cost of doing business?) (and before anyone says that you don't know the quality of what you buy on the black market, these people are professional pharmacologists, they could easily check quality of a sample - until a few years ago, you could get your pills checked at raves for free FFS). Now if they're looking for a million dollars to fund drug legalization work, then fine, that's a worthy goal in itself - but that's listed only in passing in the project. So the only conclusion left is that this project is a PR stunt, where they're using a headline grabbing project description to fund much less exotic advocacy work. (my comments in this thread make it seem that I have first hand knowledge about these things, but it's been well over 15 years since I last used or even saw illegal drugs. I just have a an interest in the economics and law of underground (drug) markets, and I read case law, reports from our equivalent of the DoJ, papers from academic researchers and government drug monitoring agencies to keep up to date. Hey, other people collect stamps.)