Agreed. I work in the kratom industry and that vast amount of people I come into contact with are fucking total scumbags who want 1 thing. Your money. They do not care about your well being or safety.
Case in point I was working as a chemist for a company setting up a pretty large 7-oh factory (30kg/week) and what happened was this. I was using the synthetic oxone route which very simple, quick, and safe as long as you have good ventilation/no sparks. It provides a very consistent but medium yield of 50% at 63% purity. I'm pretty sure the main impurity was a heterodimer of mitragynine and a related structure which could have been hydrolyzed back into mitragynine simply refluxing in ethanol and HCL.
Another chemist came in alerted the owners that there was another synthetic route utilizing PIFA (Phenyliodine bis(trifluoroacetate) in acetonitrile (so toxic) which had a higher yield of 75-80% typically but creates a very nasty carcinogen called iodobenzene. I knew this way ahead of time. Due to this, in mid construction of the lab, I was fired (I also had issues with the owners cuz they were scumbags), they poached the team I had recruited, tore down what we had built and switched to the PIFA route spending several hundred thousand in the process. Well it turns out the other "chemist" didn't know how to remove iodobenzene in a cost effective manner. It took them several months to develop a process where it was non detect. In that time though, they sold it anyway to keep money flowing.
That's the kind of people that run this industry.
It turns out iodobenzene is unstable in UV 254nm. So the easy solution would have been to just run it through a continous clear line blasting it with UV light. I was tempted to call them and tell them this, but I was very bitter at the other chemist (an ex-rm of mine) and i loved watching him and the company flounder. (Maybe I could be more ethical too I dunno) But I loved watching the company fail, and shortly after they figured it out, the state I live in began to regulate 7, so I was laughing when I watched them spend millions to have to tear everything down and move it to Texas. They were operational for about a year before the federal ban was announced so they prolly made their money back. But last I heard, that company was on the brink of bankruptcy, which I still laugh at today, even right now.
I do believe in karma to an extent.
I do apologize for my role in popularizing the compound and contributing to addiction, but in the moment, I knew other people were gonna do it (probably cutting corners) and I wanted to do it right. That's not the first time I've influenced an entire industry and thus the world, and I doubt it will be my last.
