Agreed wholeheartedly on the prohibition statement. We need to rethink public policy on recreational drugs with tolerance and respect. Public opinion needs to change and society has to stop viewing responsible drug-use by adults as criminal.
But you lost me on the sentiment toward crank, which is ironically a good example of prohibition leading to impure drugs on the market. "Crank" from ~1960 – 1995 was typically racemic methamphetamine synthesized from P-2-P via reductive amination with methylamine. According to legend, west coast
bike gangs in the U.S. would
run the reaction in a 55-gallon steel drum, mixing P-2-P + methylamine in the presence of an Al/Hg amalgam, which is
exothermic to the point that the steel drum became dangerously pressurized and too hot to touch. So,
for cooling, the bikers would drop the sealed barrel into a river before it got too hot. They would
tie a large chain around it and connect that to a nearby tree to keep it situated as it churned along, processing the reaction and sending up steam from the river water around it. Picture that.
Post-reaction clean-up skills could vary quite a bit from "cook" to "cook". What's more,
the product would be racemic (50/50 d- to l-isomer), and isomeric resolution was not nearly as common in the underground scene. "Ice", "glass", "Tina", "shards", or aka pure d-methamphetamine didn't hit the streets in the U.S. until the mid-90s when a legendary underground chemist figured out a brilliant way of applying
the Birch reduction to ephedrine to produce very pure d-methamphetamine in
high yields and in relatively short reaction times. The mass proliferation of Internet access facilitated the rapid spread of this new method – among others – and before you knew it, every hick town across the U.S. had at a least a handful of hillbillies whipping up pyrex dishes of aesthetically pleasing, clear-white crystals. It also fueled the first major U.S. meth epidemic that would persist until after 9/11. That's when police budgets swelled as George W Bush & Co. starting milking the Clinton administration's Federal budget surplus. Also tighter regulation of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine put a chokehold on domestic production of methamphetamine, but this only removed the supply, not the demand.
The demand was filled by Mexican crime syndicates / "cartels" with existing routes for smuggling large quantities of contraband into the U.S. They setup giant "super lab" operations capable of producing vast quantities of highly pure d-methamphetamine. Initially this was done by reducing ephedrine extracted from imported Chinese Ma Huang, the ephedra plant, but over time the precursor and synthesis have had to change and adapt to shifting LE tactics and various new disruptive policies.
My point is: “crank” is inferior to shards of pure d-methamphetamine. I was not sad to see it go. With MDA and MDMA though, the racemate is what’s most commonly encountered, by far, but I’m super interested in R-MDA.HCl which is purportedly stronger and more euphoric. Meanwhile, I wonder if the same holds true for MDMA.hcl?
EDIT: btw, cool username