And what of the future, synthetically? For decades, most LSD has been produced in clandestine labs in large glass reactors, hydrolyzing as much as one kilogram of ET at once, followed by weeks of further reactions and purification processes, all while the manufacturing chemist is exposed to the effects of LSD. Any single site at this level is estimated to produce less than a few kilograms annually, as noted earlier in the various lab seizures since the 1960s. However, in recent trials government witnesses described the appearance of new technologies that may be employed by more sophisticated organizations that reduce or eliminate the exposure problem while automating the synthesis into a scalable pilot plant or industrial procedure.
In that, for LSD, a pilot process would produce in excess of ten kilograms per year, the advent of microreactors in the pharmaceutical industry must be addressed. A bank of microreactors is a fully automated, computer controlled, tabletop-size machine that produces a few milligrams of a substance with each cycle, perhaps employing the same reagents and syntheses previously discussed, although on a very small scale. However, this cycling of a bank of microreactors producing a few milligrams is repeated indefinitely with hundreds of small reactions by each microreactor daily, yielding, for example, 10–30 grams of product each day. For the pharmaceutical industry, microreactor arrays have produced hundreds of kilograms each year of highly specialized pharmaceuticals that are otherwise difficult to synthesize or problematic due to exposure of workers to toxic effects. This technology—while requiring highly skilled individuals and having significant costs of entry—is easily adapted to current syntheses for LSD and may result in the first automatic process for its production, with routine bench procedures being relegated to smaller, conventional labs.
