I've often wondered about the source of methylamine used for crazy Dutch MDMA production. I guess when you've got the kind of money large MDMA syndicates do methylamine is easy to source or produce.
Well, I think it’s a good educated guess that substandard methylamine production techniques will lead to the byproducts,
dimethylamine and
trimethylamine, alongside the target reagent:
methylamine. Producing methylamine outside of the legit chemical production industry is challenging, tedious, and perilous in many ways, so this wouldn’t surprise me if it were true. This, in turn, would presumably lead to
MDDMA and MDTMA byproducts from the reaction and they will be very difficult and resource intensive to separate.
There’s legit lab-based evidence to suggest either byproduct will bind competitively at the
5-HT transporter, inhibiting 5-HT reuptake while also blocking MDMA from traveling up the transporter to the presynaptic storage to exhibit its hallmark action of massive serotonin release. Forgive me if you know all this already, but I’m also posting the knowledge in general…
I always used KMNO3 due to it's easy availability.
Yeah potassium permanganate is used to clean pools and it can be used to filter undrinkable water into clean, potable water for instance as needed in underdeveloped parts of the world. There
is a thing called
permanganate poisoning to be aware of (though it’s rarely fatal).
Right, so as I recall, the reaction needed to be cooled externally by water bath or placement in a fridge or something. This prevents pot. perm. from oxidizing
the living shit out of the ephedrine molecules, cleaving off
all the carbon chains and excess hydrogens from the targeted compound’s phenyl ring, and rendering sweet, almond-smelling benzene instead. In the end, it was more rewarding to convert that same ephedrine to d-methamphetamine via Birch reduction or the Nagai route, instead, but those were different times.
Did you have good yields with the KMNO₃ method? Chromium salts are used for tanning leather, btw. Easy to procure and also handy if you have some leather that needs tanning, which
sounds suggestive (like the word, “kumquat”) but was meant literally here…
But yeah I think the Dutch Chemists are probably massively producing their own methylamine… that, or, they could be sourcing through China, but one would think they would know to question the purity of something critical like that coming from labs of questionable international legality in China…