EADD-Heroin-Discussion-v-XXIII-New shit - same old problems

[BecomingJulie]

Despite a visit to the dentist today, I have not been out and scored. I feel a little bit pleased with myself .....

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

That IM/accidental IV happened several times just over the last couple of days, and twice today, once in each arse cheek. Had made up a shot of morphine for IM and thought it felt weird, cold almost, like when one is on mushrooms etc. and feels like there is water running over one's hands, arms, face etc., so I checked to make sure the needle was actually in again, it was, and there had been no wastage by spilling. Next thing I know, face started prickling, and a huge rush, everything turning all warm and fuzzy and my eyelids began drooping, while I've been lazing around on the sofa playing a cracked download of sid meir's civilization III, with a cold bottle of coke and a tub of cream cheese to snack on, after I add some other bits and pieces; some cimetidine, for CYP-P450 pathway inhibition/substrate purposes to slow metabolism of morphine, a couple of lines of oxy, some pramipexole, clonidine and chlormethiazole.

Quite a welcome surprise

Wasn't thinking of diconal, just dipipanone HCl that'd never see tabletting adjuvants in its existence. No point looking on the street for dikes by questioning random hobos ;P and I do not see doctors as likely to hand me any. It'd require some creativity to get any dipipanone, but it would not be an impossibility. Just...take some time and effort and a fair bit of reading about methadone.

So got to try it some time. I've heard way too many 'oh my fucking christ' kinds of comments about even the pharmaceutical pill version. So something like 20-30mg/ml amps in saline, if solubility allows (haven't checked it yet, got other things on me plate to keep in mind atm, and I don't want to over-stretch myself, had too much of that to begin with of late.

As for another acyl group on morphine, no. There are two phenolic groups, meaning two places which may be esterified.
There is the amino nitrogen, which strictly speaking could be acylated, to form an amide, but thats really not the sort of thing thats done when morphine is acylated. Pretty sure the amino nitrogen isn't going play well in respect of binding when converted to an amide.

And the ester groups aren't quite as cut and dried in their effects as first thought..it isn't just a matter of lipophilicity increasing and thus enhancing penetration of the BBB. They quite surely impart selectivity in determination of receptor binding on a sub-subtype level, to different exon splice variants of the MOR gene transcript with features like for example, an altered, truncated C-terminus on some variant Mu-opioid receptor isoforms.

This difference is thought to be one, however not the only factor, responsible for incomplete crosstolerance between opioids in users starting on one, becoming tolerant or dependent and switching to certain others.

Also in subjects dependent on morphine, intriguingly, H and 6-monoacetylmorphine do not act identically either, both undergo a switch in affinities, and begin binding to delta opioid receptors, which play a role in modulating responses to MOR activation amongst other things, coactivation of MOR and DOR resulting in profound antinociception, and also lessening respiratory depression induced by the MOR agonist. The unexpected thing is that 6-MAM and 3,6-diacetylmorphine differentially activate DOR subtypes, one (always forget which way round) selectively agonizing DOR1 and the other, DOR2.

Also, there isn't a strict linear progression with increasing length of the carbon chain of the ester groups (at least not in the case of symmetrical diesters, I've never investigated diformylmorphine however) But potency increases of course from morphine to diamorphine, then again, significantly more potent and a great deal longer lasting than diamorphine is dipropionylmorphine. The latter can last 15 hours, perhaps longer when dosed IV, IM or SC and compared to H, is as potent again, and then perhaps 3/4x to 1.5x again on top of that, but in the case of 3,-di-(n)-butyrylmorphine that great extension of its duration of action drops back down to nothing special, just typical morphine/H levels, and it carries no increase, rather the opposite, in potency compared to dipropionylmorphine. Same goes for dibenzoylmorphine, neither of them are anything special at all.

 

[BecomingJulie]

What about the methanoyl analogues? Somewhere between morphine and H? Or does some other reaction happen instead when you try to make them?

 

[th3 s1aught3r]

Saw a documentary recently about Fentanyl. Looks like dangerous stuff, lots of a addicts going over on it....
I wouldnt fancy buying H and not knowing that was in it....

Although people seem addicted to F in its own right

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

The name for the methanecarboxylic substituent is 'formyl', becomingjulie, derived formally speaking from formic acid (formic anhydride, isn't an acid anhydride, for formic acid is HCOOH, dehydration of formic acid gives CO, carbon monoxide, and formyl halides are not stable, the dihalides are damn dangerous, C=OCl2 is commonly known as phosgene and it is an extremely poisonous, sneaky, insidious gas with very little warning properties [if you can smell it, I have, once, lets just say I'm lucky I'm still here, then its more than dangerous. You are lucky to get out alive, and there is nothing that can be done for a poisoning victim. No warning at the time, turns to acid in your lungs and you die hours later of pulmonary oedema, drowning in your own blood plasma. Phosgene is fucking nasty shit. There are alternatives for formylation of various substrates, and phosgene equivalents such as diphosgene, a volatile liquid rather than a gas, or triphosgene, a volatile crystalline solid, although with a significant vapor pressure. Less dangerous than phosgene, but they still really aren't friendly little fuckers. If I was going to try, I might try using a formate or possibly carbonate ester, because I've no real desire to put me bollocks on a chopping block with di- or triphosgene. Safer or not, phosgene itself isn't setting the bar very high at all.

Never tried di- or -monoformylmorphine, not yet anyhow.

And yeah, fent is fucking dangerous stuff, I've encountered it in street gear, and got on to drug worker teams in the area to pass the alert, after everybody, users, dealers, gobetweens, all disappeared within a couple of weeks of the stuff surfacing, never heard from anybody that touched it after. Just dropped off the face of the earth they did. I'm the only one I know of that touched that particular lot of gear thats still alive. Tolerance and being very careful undoubtly saved my balls, a few grains of the stuff; vaped from a piece of glass tubing blown into a pipe was enough to knock me out cold. At the time, had near 8-10x £20-bags plus a tenbag the dealer threw me in for free, one of those bags ought to have lasted a few hours, if it were good H, but this stuff lasted days. And fuck me if even with a tolerance equal at the time to shooting up 1g of dipropionylmorphine or more that those few little specks of street gear, talking say, divide a grain of rice into three equal pieces and a bit about that size, two toots off that in the pipe and it'd put me flat on my back.

Fucks cunting sake I was still catching the odd hit off the empty pipe, reheating the borosilicate tubing, for at least a month, getting a tiny whisp of vapor out of the smoked residue was more than enough to still pack a fuck of a punch after all those bags had been tooted up. Any motherfucker could go over on it and not come back.

Sure as shit wouldn't want to get a habit on the stuff, since it drives tolerance up fast, and produces a lot of tachyphylaxis too, and with a duration of action of a few hours, that could go downhill, real quick, real fucking ugly if it did too. Bet fentanyls have been responsible for more than a few of those monstrous gorilla habits you hear about people getting on their backs, the poor fucking bastards, producing the kind of thing that methadone just doesn't touch, has people killing themselves over etc.

And sadly, despite being potent as fucking shit; theres bollocks all warmth to it, its cold, clinical and not particularly euphoric. I got given a script for the shit once, for chronic pain management and I ended up going back to the doctors within a day and asking for the oxy rx I had been on before the fent rx back instead. That worked out pretty well since I'd picked up my oxy on the monday, went in about the pain management on tuesday, got given the fent then, and went back on wednesday that week to get switched back, and they gave me an entire new script for oxy 80s after forgetting I'd had anything on monday.

 

[chemfast]

@steewith2ees Geeze what do you mean for 'chaotic needle fixation'? But you are totally wrong, Amps are just as quick as any other IV MOR agonist and have a high effect. I had a prescription for Methadone amps and oral 'juice'. There was no comparison. I used the juice just to tie me over to the next script and could hardly get out of bed, just helped with the pain and the sleep. On the contrary, the shots I prepared with 100mg Methadone, 8 x 10 mg dextroamphetamine crushed tabs and 2 mg Rohypnol crushed and passed had me walking on the floor like a frog and I often thought I was somewhere else doing something else with some famous personality of the time. I had this script because I was addicted to Heroin/Cocaine speedball and nothing orally could keep me off the streets. I abused the script and got into even more trouble. As I said I did not close an eye for 14 days when I kicked that chemical concoction. Thank the Lord this was in 1995-96. I did go back to my 1/2 gr heroin + 1/2 gram Cocaine p/day habit for some years but eventually kicked that too in 3 days with the Ibogaine. That was in 2001 and even with the post recovery hardships and odd brief relapses never touched a needle again. I definitely did not have a 'chaotic needle fixation', just an intense MOR agonist fixation coupled with a need for a strong upper effect to have the illusion of being able to perform normal functions whilst maintaining such a habit.

 

[th3 s1aught3r]

Is there anyway to test gear to find out whats in it ? I mean other than seeing the effect its having on other people. Is it Russian Roulette ?

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

Well there are drug testing services where samples can be sent, no?

Advice if your taking the stuff, knowingly or otherwise-start with a bit of the 'H' that could not possibly be active, if it were pure, uncut med-grade diamorphine. Smoked. If that is active, then it means whatever is in there is not heroin, since were the dose entirely heroin it would have been without effect. And I mean, a TINY quantity, loaded into the pipe off the end of a pin point, with any street dope, and work up, until its fairly obvious you aren't handling an anti-tank mine in a sack full of ferrets with their tails tied together. Although if multiple people are going to be taking it, it IS of course wise not to be the first one to take it. And smoking is safer than IV.

Thats the kind of reason I don't go for street gear anymore. I want to know where its come from and exactly what is in it. Even if it means considerable extra effort, that way I'm not going to find some badly cut fent in something and get knocked off. IMO spending a fair bit of time waiting for resources, and more to put them to use, is worth it, not only because it means access to things I'd never have a cat in hell's chance of seeing otherwise, like getting to experiment with alpha-chloromorphide, the intermediate to desomorphine, and finding it to be a truly weird psychostimulant rather than a traditional opioid. (I suspect it is likely to be a delta opioid receptor agonist, although I would need a radiolabelled selective ligand for DOR1 and DOR2, as well as to transfect a cell line with the receptor gene and promoter region for it to confirm my hypothesis) It has got me mighty curious however)

 

[steewith2ees]

Is there anyway to test gear to find out whats in it ? I mean other than seeing the effect its having on other people. Is it Russian Roulette ?

WEDINOS mate.

'Welsh Emerging Drugs & Identification of Novel Substances Project'. Arguably the best HR website on the net. Between their website and service, and Bluelight, one has the ultimate drug hobbyists safety kit. They will identify what drugs (if any) are in your sample but not the amount

Click here

www.wedinos.org

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

Rather than quantifying the amount, will they provide ratios (in cases where say heroin is cut with fentanyl), or tell if asked whether contamination is say 'low/medium/high/very severe'

Do they tell what substances are present as a whole? E.g if speed was cut with a sugar, to report whether it was glucose, mannitol, sucrose, erythritol)?

 

[steewith2ees]

Rather than quantifying the amount, will they provide ratios (in cases where say heroin is cut with fentanyl), or tell if asked whether contamination is say 'low/medium/high/very severe'

Do they tell what substances are present as a whole? E.g if speed was cut with a sugar, to report whether it was glucose, mannitol, sucrose, erythritol)?

They will identify any active drugs in the sample along with significant cuts / contaminants. How they justify the range of different substances is beyond me however, for instance, the last sample of No. 3 heroin tested was reported as containing heroin, paracetamol, caffeine, noscapine, papaverine, 6-Acetylcodeine, which to me appears fairly typical for street gear with caffeine being well known as being added to help the powder 'run' when melted and smoked and I imagine the stuff like noscapine and and papaverine are alkaloid by-products of the clandestine synthesis (?) - Limpet - you have forgotten more about organic and drug chemistry than I will ever know so I leave you to elaborate and correct me on the above.

Unusually, the last sample tested identified the presence of cocaine alone (bizarrely, the drug was allegedly supplied as 2C - B). I would have thought that even high purity cocaine would have at least have some cut to it, so am I wrong and this is a 100% purity sample (which would make it very odd to try and pass it off as 2C -B) or would there likely have been at least a few irrelevant and / or inert bits and bobs that just were not worth reporting. I'm not that bothered with cocaine - I stopped buying powder coke in the UK over a decade ago so I honestly am clueless as to how pure top tier cocaine generally is.

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

That was what I meant. Was thinking along the lines of helping distinguish whether a 6-monoacyl, 3-monoacyl or diacylmorphine was the predominant result in acylated (pharm) morphine products from the acid chloride vs the anhydride, and in each case, in the presence and absence of abraded electroplated nickel-silver.

Noscapine, papaverine are minor alkaloids in opium poppy, like thebaine and oripavine are, rather than byproducts of synthesis, the 6-acetylcodeine will have resulted from a side reaction during acetylation, when the codeine is not removed, the acetic anhydride or acetyl chloride doing exactly the same thing as to H, as a portion of the morphine tends to react incompletely, giving 6-monoacetylmorphine, and to a lesser extent, 3-monoacetylmorphine. Although only the phenolic position can form an ester, not the position where in codeine, it is masked by the methyl ether.


Coke as 2C-B? that is peculiar. And my guess is that given the purity, somebody buggered up somewhere, and had recrystallized and purified some of their own coke to real primo stuff, and accidentally supplied the person sending in the sample with their own cleaned up coke instead of 2C-B. At least thats what I'd assume, since street coke is not going to be 100 percent, SOMEONE cleaned it up, and thats something they would do for either themselves or a friend, not to supply the streets. Probably picked up the wrong vial. And not impossibly got rather more than they bargained for if they did the other way around too, if they went and railed a couple of hundred mg of 2C-B. Bet that would have been a pretty hefty kick in the ass.

And stee-why not just study? I haven't had the benefit of courses in chemistry, only high school education in that respect, and effectively I missed out entirely on all but a couple of years of that; reason being the first secondary school I went to was a classic autism special school, and they hadn't got any science facilities bar a few AA batteries, bits of wire and a couple of lightbulbs. Yeah, I know. Thats IT. All they had. I had a better lab than THAT before I ever WENT to school, christ. And rather than giving lessons with them they just put them out in trays and expected kids to do it all themselves, didn't even bother to explain the polarity of batteries. They had a 'science room' but they shouldn't have bothered, since it was just another room people could color in bloody worksheets, which themselves were barely considerable as such.

Did once show us, from a great distance, a drop of iodine tincture touched to a potato slice, but that was it, for the entire time I was there. The other spesh school I went to after was an improvement, they had a fume hood etc. But they were overcautious (I mean, insisting on tweezers for handling solid shot-forms/pelleted metals, of things like copper and zinc.) although at least had access to some basic glassware. I wish I could have brought my own supplies, but it was rather problematic given I had to take a flight across the country to get to the school (boarder) or sometimes by rail, and I wasn't about to risk some lazy porter throwing suitcases full of glassware, or tossing something containing a hunk of sodium the size of a brick. Big enough mess in its own right, but should that hit anything in aqueous solution, or worse, acid spill from the same cause, it wouldn't have done my glassware and chemicals any good at all. And at that age, that much sodium metal wasn't trivial to produce since I was unaware at the time of the trick developed within the last few years by someone by the name of 'nurdrage' for alkali metal production by means of dehydration of undiluted antifreeze concentrate (ethylene glycol, some use diethylene glycol however, the former is needed) and bog cleaner grade concentrated H2SO4 (I can of course buy fuming sulfuric acid if I want it, of good grade, in this case its taking advantage of OTC availability, since the crap, dyes etc. do not carry over, so its to take advantage of readily available OTCs and turn shit into sugar), distilling 1,4-dioxane off, using the sulfuric to dehydrate and condense two molecules of ethylene glycol together to one of 1,4-dioxane, which has perfect properties for the job, being just right, to liberate alkali metals from the ground up cement-like slag produced when igniting a 'thermite' of the alkali metal hydroxide, finely powdered and dried, in a crucible using an intimate mixture of magnesium dust as the reducing agent, which is cheap enough on ebay, with something like a slab of concrete put on top and weighted down to avoid the sodium, potassium etc. just boiling off as vapor), resulting in a solid slag of magnesium oxide containing dispersed alkali metal, which can be put into a blender in chunks, the blender purged with argon welding gas to improve the yield, although the inventor of the process, nurdrage, didn't, he just stuck it in there and accepted a portion of oxidation. As I see it though, the argon is a good idea, the more yield of sodium, potassium, rubidium, caesium etc. the better, especially in the latter two cases given the high price of rubidium and caesium compounds and metal, which is vastly greater than for the equivalent lithium, sodium or potassium compounds or metals. 100g caesium metal in an ampoule under inert gas would easily fetch over a grand. Compounds are cheaper but they are disproportionaly more expensive than Li/Na/K metal or compound of them, very, very much so, so in their case, any losses are completely unacceptable. After all, who wants a £50-100 to up in smoke in a matter of seconds? might be acceptable to a cokehead, but personally that is a fair bit of new lab glassware and both new reagents and restocking on those things I am running low on at any time such a sum would be better spent on. Not to mention, I am no more immune from having food and drink as basic requirements than is anybody else, so make that new labware, fresh consumables for the lab and consumables for its owner too ;P)

Heating the powdered slag under 1,4-dioxane, first vaporises some dioxane, giving a heavy blanket of vapor to protect the metal, and allows, through its ideal physical properties, be it surface tension, BP, density etc. into the flask space, and for whatever reasons make it so ideal for this process, allows the metal to melt into globules, rather than stay finely dispersed, and a long bit of wire can be used to poke them around under the surface, into each other, to result in larger ones, although remelting might be needed so as to allow the resulting metal to be divided into pieces small enough to be recovered through the neck of the flask. The limit being the neck width really in that respect, as to how much you can take out in one lump.

And the solvent (the dioxane) can be reused too, the neat thing being that excess aggregate slag will dry it out, and during the process, the dioxane isn't going to peroxidize, since its being refluxed over sodium, potassium etc [its a cyclic ether, and ethers have a nasty habit of peroxidation over time when O2 is available, forming nasty shock/friction/static discharge-sensitive ether peroxides and hydroperoxides (and everything else-sensitive, up to and including just not liking your face, you forgetting to say three 'ave maria's, passing wind within the last week, rude words spoken in the lab...those damn things don't really NEED a reason to go off like a bucket of grenades on a bonfire, other than 'they felt like blasting the windows out of the room and launching the fridge the contaminated ether/s were stored in through the ceiling like a shotgun blast using little bits of fridge like buckshot.' (yes, I've seen just that. Not a lab I had any connection to, just an incident report online of a uni/college/research lab having such an event take place, and result in a room that wouldn't look out of place in one of the shittier/shittiest areas of syria featuring an ISIS-owned chemical toilet and resulting contamination by the fumes from the excrement produced by a large number of steaming piles of swarthy, sweaty camelfucker faeces in between the latter's murder campaigns and desecrations of ancient archaeological sites. The lab had some ether peroxidize due to inadequate diligence in monitoring regularly and if found, destroying peroxides before they can build up to dangerous levels, and after it went off, inside a fridge, reduced the room to something best described as 'ground zero', and the fridge itself being blown upwards through the ceiling, in lots of little pieces, along with a few larger chunks of twisted, warped and shattered metal. IIRC nobody hurt, since nobody was in there at the time, but it sure as hell made a big fuck of a mess.)

The neat thing is that one procedure to destroy peroxides in ethers is allowing them to stand over, then distilling from an alkali metal, so the procedure as a whole, if making one's own dioxane, even gives some spare sodium, potassium etc. to store in the dioxane in between runs, so as to alleviate formation of those nasty little bugger peroxides. Kill 'em off as they try to form.


Just had a rather nice surprise from one of my doctors after an appointment at the surgery. I was going about getting an already being arranged appt for the pain management specialists made priority (which the GP just has), but got a 56-count box of lynlor IR oxycodone caps. Was thinking I was going to have to spend the next couple of days using DHC CWEs and stretching a bit of morphine so thin it was going to end up being a phenanthrene version of graphene. Now, definitely not going to end up withdrawing at all and the DHC can be saved for more interesting purposes (always have wanted to try dihydromorphine, after trying its 6-monoacetyl ester and finding the stuff blew my damn head off, half hour rush at least, before the high itself even started. Been wanting to see what that magical little propionyl group could do, given the dramatic difference between diamorphine and dipropionylmorphine...that on dihydromorphine....I've got somewhat of a hunch that both the dipropionyl ester, dipropionyldihydromorphine, and 6-propionyldihydromorphine will both turn out as winning tickets, so to speak.

I should think both are going to prove rather tasty

For now, a shot of morphine and 70mg oxy up the nose, that'll do me nicely. The rest of the morphine, might just see how feasible esterification nano is. Since the remainder is no longer important for the next couple of days, again, higher purposes. Been saving a few scraps from ever morphine cap I use, until there's enough for say a 10g go and for it to be reincarnated on a higher plane of existence, if you get what I mean.

 

[BecomingJulie]

The name for the methanecarboxylic substituent is 'formyl', becomingjulie, derived formally speaking from formic acid (formic anhydride, isn't an acid anhydride, for formic acid is HCOOH, dehydration of formic acid gives CO, carbon monoxide

Used to be "formyl". Some 30 years or so back, my chemistry teacher (not the one who used to take an old pair of boots, put a beaker of concentrated ammonia in one and a beaker of concentrated hydrochloric acid in the other and then stand them next to each other by the chalkboard, on the days when the final year kids from the local primary schools were being shown around the Big School where they would be going after the Summer break .....) told us how instead of just giving every newly-discovered substance a name (such as an acid that was originally named formic acid, after the Latin name for ants, because it was found in the bodies of ants) there was an entirely new systematic way of naming organic compounds systematically and unambiguously. Formic acid was henceforth to be known as methanoic acid: meth because it had a one-atom long carbon chain, an because there were no multiple bonds in it [obviously] and oic from the functional group: O=O and room for a negative charge to bond with a positive ion). He reckoned this was as big a deal as the advent of SI, and there was no need even to clutter our memories with all the Old Names anymore. A systematic name such as "octadeka(9)enoic acid" tells you straight away that it's a carboxylic acid with 18 carbons and the ninth bond counting from the functional group is a double one. But then again, it doesn't tell you which plant it's obtained from.....

Referring to its incomplete combustion product as "carbon (II) oxide" might be taking strict IUPAC systematic nomenclature a little too far though .....

Formyl halides are not stable, the dihalides are damn dangerous .....

Yeah, I can see how even eth provides just enough of a carbon chain to use as a handle.

C=OCl2 is commonly known as phosgene and it is an extremely poisonous, sneaky, insidious gas

Yeah, and if you're preparing that shit with the obvious reaction

CO + Cl₂ ? COCL₂​

then even the original reagents aren't very friendly.

Never tried di- or -monoformylmorphine, not yet anyhow.

I can see why ..... It might be somewhere between morphine and heroin, but OTOH it might well have some weirdy properties of its own due to that one-carbon "chain".

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

Not sure if direct chlorination of CO is a practical route to phosgene. IIRC it can be made via burning chlorinated hydrocarbons (don't, people, its really not something you, or anybody else on the street you live on wants around), I seem to recall something about hot carbon acting as a catalyst.), although I can't say as I've spent much time looking into practical, high-efficiency routes to producing phosgene. There is only one reason I want to know how to make phosgene, and that, is so I can avoid reaction conditions that could produce the stuff. (I.e know how to make it, so one also knows how NOT to make it, and ergo, avoid a rather nasty surprise.

As for nasty, well, that usually doesn't put me off. But I have my limits. Theres quite a lot hanging around here that you really, really REALLY wouldn't want to pour over your breakfast cereal, or approach without a gas mask, elbow-length gloves, leather trenchcoat and a pair of goggles under a full face shield (why leather? I find that cotton fiber etc. can soak things up easily, and hold them next to the skin. Not a problem if its a bit of iPA or water, etc., but if something like bromine, chromyl chloride, iodine monochloride, molten white phosphorus, SOCl2, etc. or molten metal ever were to get spilled, or even something like plain ol' 98-99% sulfuric acid, I'd rather the barrier between it, and me, is not porous and can't wick whatever virulent, toxic, corrosive shit could get on the loose close to my skin, more of a chance with thick leather for something to either slick off, be able to be neutralized, or if all else fails to slither out of the coat before something can burn through it. Think body armored labcoat)

As for CO and Cl2, CO is nasty as hell, and as sneaky as the day is long. Cl2 isn't bad though. I do hate the smell of it, but as chemicals in a lab go, its pretty tame. Fluorine is the nasty one amongst the halogens (anything that can set a brick on fire and generates HF tends to make me a bit wary ), although the interhalogens are pretty damn aggressive, although so far, they have been interesting to experiment with. Even if I did have to replace all my keck clips with stainless ones (was going to anyway) when I first made ICl and ICl3, it was less 'aggressive' and more like standing there feeding clips into a woodchipper, the way that iodine monochloride, in particular ate them. I think I should get some teflon ones if they are available, since ICl and ICl3 are the two tamest of the interhalogens, and they still corrode the shit out of stainless. Have to keep in a resistant bottle in the fridge (I've another fridge for storing stuff that doesn't need to be anywhere near the foodstuffs) with a fluoropolymer seal and a disk-shaped seal of some kind of slightly compressible fluoropolymer in the top of the cap, and the screw threads on the necks wrapped tightly in teflon tape; that way it doesn't get out and start disintegrating things.

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

And Becomingjulie, who do you know that actually bothers to call a formylation reaction a 'methanoylation', up to 4 carbons its still common and perfectly legitimate to refer to formyl/acetyl/propionyl/butyryl

 

[trip2themoon]

In the months prior to the great gear drought of 2010, I frequently had gear solidify in the pin. As if finding a viable vein wasn't bad enough - trying to redissolve it with an ever increasing amount of coagulating blood really took the piss...

It was around the spring of 2008 (around the time I signed up here) that I noticed the Kit taking a severe nose-dive in quality. I started seeing a lot of the stuff you are talking about which had a strange fluffiness about it and was really light in colour. I've never pinned it but on the foil the blob was pretty much transparent and it would run forever. Back then though you could still get decent but you had to shop around for it.

 

[BecomingJulie]

And Becomingjulie, who do you know that actually bothers to call a formylation reaction a 'methanoylation', up to 4 carbons its still common and perfectly legitimate to refer to formyl/acetyl/propionyl/butyryl

Anyone who learned organic chemistry in a particular, specific timeframe, while the IUPAC were still pushing hard for the "new" names and expecting the old ones to die out very soon; who hasn't had much practical experience, and therefore opportunity to encounter "old" names still in use, in the meantime; and who still broadly supports the original aim of the revolution even although it didn't seem to happen completely Also, people whose first language is not English, but one which has "old" chemical names that are different from the English ones.

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

Well my chemistry education is a bit atypical to say the least. Went to two secondary schools, one of them didn't teach science at all, at least nothing anybody could ever learn from and the second, that was better (classic autism, aspie spesh schools respectively) but still didn't have great equipment, and my teacher didn't even know how to get a thermite reaction going properly)

Pretty much all the theory I know is from reading books and reading online, and almost all the practical, aside from things like throwing alkali metals in water, dissolving magnesium or calcium metal in acid, tests for CO2, O2 and hydrogen in test tubes with lit or smouldering wooden splints...

Buggers didn't have much more than test tubes. I never even saw a round bottom flask, let alone a hotplate with magnetic stirring, or a rotavap. Only thing they had that I want, is a fume hood (for the kind of things that need one I work outside, wearing protective gear, at least until I can get to building a fume hood for the indoor lab). So I pretty much taught myself 98% of what I know; starting with botany and mycology, when I was old enough to teach myself to read ( age 4, or so I'm told), since that didn't need me to have a bank card to go and buy glassware etc, and I could do simple things like extract the amavadine from fly agaric mushrooms (I didn't KNOW what it was at the time, I just knew as much as 'has to be some kind of transition metal complex without knowing which transition metal; I'd assumed cobalt or perhaps a copper complex, although money was on the former, I didn't have any knowledge of organovanadium chemistry at that age, and unfortunately, was unable to isolate sufficient of the material to decompose it and look at the flame spectrum, etc. [Amanita muscaria is a hyperaccumulator species, in this case for the element vanadium, forms a complex called amavadine, a rather unusual biomolecule containing an octacoordinate vanadium (IV) atom, bound by a pair of ligands which themselves form a cyclic structure, each coordinating to the central V atom via 3 oxygen and a nitrogen atom, likely functioning as a bromoperoxidase) and render it in its cationic state, wherein it becomes a deep, deep vivid blue, which has a really quite attractive color.

And between that, and the huge range of natural products plants and fungi produce, from medicines, to poisons, to the just plain odd (such as say, ascaridole, found in the Epazote plant, and in Boldo, which to the best of my knowledge are the only organic peroxides found in nature, I found it rather fascinating that such an unstable sort of compound as an organoperoxide would ever exist in a natural source, and indeed the essential oil of epazote, contains a quite variable (around 15% to a staggering 70%) amount of it (structurally its a derivative of alpha-terpinene, lacking one of the double bonds in the cyclic ring, and the second one being rearranged axially to a peroxide bridge between the two alkyl sidechains on the ring, which are oriented -para to each other, the peroxide bridge oriented out of the plane of the ring, in line with the methyl and 1-methylethyl group). Used in small amounts (although its toxic) in some cooking, (the leaves, not the essential oil) as a flavouring, the pure compound itself being, unsurprisingly for an organoperoxide, explosive. And whilst I'm not sure, it wouldn't surprise me much if essential oil containing the maximum levels of the stuff was too...at any rate I'd certainly not put it in one of those essential oil vaporizer lamps)

And the things plants, fungi, etc. can do in such mild conditions with enzymes, and the way they can perform stereochemically selective biosynthesis of things so complex that we took many years to so much as determine the structure at all, let alone perform the synthesis of, such as say, the marine polyethers palytoxin and maitotoxin always got me fascinated, being nothing short of absolutely staggering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascaridole


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palytoxin (synthesized by Palythoa toxica, a marine zoanthid Cnidarian, same superfamily as the jellyfish, hydras, corals and anemones, and second most toxic non-proteinaceous poison known to man, ancient hawaiians would dip their spears into the water of tide-pools containing the zoanthids to ensure that the merest scratch from such an envenomed weapon would kill their enemies in moments. A powerful vasodilator injected directly into the heart immediately after exposure might allow a patient to survive long enough to attempt treatment, but otherwise, one is, in a word, fucked, as aside from being a generalized cytotoxin, wiping out the ion gradient in cells which is vital to maintaining cellular integrity and thus, life, it is an incredibly potent, powerful vasoconstrictor, causing a fatal heart attack within minutes if exposure is sufficient. Its gotten people before that kept them in aquariums, one notable case, somebody tried to exterminate a colony of Palythoa with boiling water, and it got its own back, when the steam carried enough palytoxin into the air to get the person trying to boil the polyps to death. Can't remember if he survived or not, pretty sure he ended up in hospital though since there exists a case report about that incident, aquarium keeper inhaled the steam and the zoanthid polyps gave him a taste of his own medicine) (well wouldn't you try and kill somebody, if somebody tried boiling you alive)

And a similar compound, maitotoxin, being the prize-winner for the deadliest non-proteinaceous toxin known to science, responsible for the tropical ciguatera food poisoning, this one being produced by marine dinoflagellate organisms, tiny little planktonic critters, that occasionally form deadly blooms when the population explodes, similar to the occurrence of red tides, producing saxitoxin and its analogs)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maitotoxin (the deadliest non-protein toxin known to science, and so toxic that a non-lethal dose is nasty enough to poison the victim's sexual partner through exposure to bodily fluids, and to poison infants being breast-fed)

Things like this, the sheer complexity of the molecule, and the massive, massive number of possible stereoisomers with only a minute handful being toxic, in the case at least, of palytoxin...it took us humans something like 5-6 years to determine its structure, and many more for us to piece it together synthetically, by synthesizing portions of the molecule and joining together the separate segments)....yet the little animals which make it naturally are capable of accomplishing it outside of the lab, solely with proteins (I.e the enzymatic pathways required for synthesis) and effortlessly.

And things like ibogaine, with its multi-ringed, bridged and stereochemically complex structure, is exceedingly difficult to synthesize compared to your average tryptamine, but plants have no trouble knocking out this fascinating, and seemingly, for some, most valuable medicine. The diversity is just staggering, in what plants, fungi and animals can do.

So really, I just couldn't help myself, once I became aware that such a world existed. Whilst I've bollocks all desire to produce deadly poisons, the simple fact that an organism can, with a strand of DNA, ribosomes and cells can churn out something of such complexity is all the same, amazing.

And having no access via school at the time, to scientific education, what other choice did I have, but to build what equipment I couldn't buy, and the moment I had income and a bank card, to start accumulating a nice big stash of proper borosilicate glassware of the best quality I could find, and what wasn't available to buy, to build or synthesize myself? I don't remember the title, but there was one particular, very detailed chemistry book about as thick as 'the lord of the rings' trilogy with a red cover and a horrid grainy textured outer cover with so much information in it on organic and inorganic chemistry that once I took it out from the library, I'd come back every due-date and renew it, and essentially kept it on permanent loan, using it to build up my lab, and the descriptions of synthetic processes to produce much of what I needed and couldn't buy, whilst busily mining batteries for things like lithium, zinc, carbon rods for electrodes, manganese compounds, silver compounds, thionyl chloride, making my own chlorates (via passing chlorine gas through boiling, concentrated caustic soda solution, the same reaction if done in the cold, produces hypochlorites, so I could use that as a twofer )

Basically anything I could get from a pharmacy, from kids chemistry sets, extracted from rocks, made from bog cleaners, antifreeze, ether and heptane fractionally distilled from car starting fluid, sulfur and formaldehyde from pet shops and all manner of useful things like ammonium salts to generate anhydrous ammonia from garden centers; as well as their conveniently selling magnesium sulfate in bulk as a plant nutrient, to serve me as a drying agent , nitrates extracted from the black powder in fireworks....I'd be saving all my pocket money, and engaging in whatever enterprises I could, from selling flowers door to door picked from cherry trees in bloom, offering to wash cars, and pillaging the waste dumps of industrial sites in the dead of night. Selling copper pipe, lead sheet or pipe from abandoned buildings as scrap metal, car batteries would get traded in after I'd drained the sulfuric acid and the PbO2, lead sulfate etc. from them and refilling them with rocks and water to make up the weight, I'd be all over any such resources as could be had.

Thankfully now I actually have an income and a net connection, so all those things like LAH, borohydride, Red-Al, iodine/bromine, and all the things like white phosphorus (which I had to make, when I was a kid, by distilling the red allotrope in an anoxic environment and catching the vapors under ice-cold water, a laborious process at best and a bit of a hairy one at worst given any air getting in would result in a toxic, although very attractive glowing incandescent, WP-spitting fireball and massive smoke cloud of acid-fumes [the phosphorus pentoxide]

And all those goodies that would be makeable but take a ton of effort like sulfur halides, cyanides, phosphorus halides, plus things I'd never hope to get hold of otherwise, like triphenylphosphine, precious metal catalysts, acyl halides, most alkylating agents..damn is it ever good to be able to just go online and contact my sources for nitro(m)ethane, if I run low on chloroform, not have to make do with shit yielding haloforms which take huge bulk of liquid and poor yield based on acetone, oxidizing acetone with hypochlorite to make chloroform and just go buy it, DCM, 10, 20 liter cans of glacial acetic acid, methanol, iPA and other, far less OTC items.

Couldn't help myself one bit, still cant. So the terminology I learned was that used in the books I studied from. I never HAD much formal science education, so I had to educate myself. Always had a bent for science, I reckon since birth, at least as soon as I could read, I was starting studying. So it just went on from there, growing more sophisticated as more resources became possible to access.

And hey, there is definitely something just....nice...elegant, about lab glassware, the way such artful pieces are made as jacketed spiral coil condensers, precisely tooled ground glass joints so finely made as to fit tightly enough, with a little grease to hold a vacuum.

And there's nothing quite like, after waiting for days for the mail to arrive and unwrapping a big box of glassware, or prizing open the lid of a crate, with a nice new rotavap waiting inside. Seeing the postie approach, knowing he'll be bringing a shipment of solvents, hydrides, shiny new glassware and electronic gizmos...its like being a kid on xmas day walking towards the tree laden underneath with gifts. Unwrapping the new goodies...nothing like that to put a big fucking great ear-to-ear grin on my face

I can't explain WHY, but I have been fascinated and hooked on everything science-ey since I can remember. I reckon it was in me since I first popped out of the womb, it just needed enough time for the host body to develop enough to become manifest; its as much a part of me as having a heart, a pair of lungs and kidneys, a liver and DNA. My best guess is that its just one of those autie things. If that isn't the reason, then buggered if I know, its just 'there'. I've always been completely hooked on exploring the unknown and thirsting for knowledge and exploration.

Admittedly, over the decades, its cost me god knows how many grand or tens of grand in chemicals and equipment, but thats just the way I was made, and there is as much chance of that ever changing as there is of you sprouting wings and turning blue (admittedly I could arrange for the latter, or at least a kind of metallic greyish-cyan, but you get the idea, becomingjulie)

Science, to me, is like crack to a crackhead. Once I got my first fix, I just had to have another. And another, and another. By the time I'm 70-80 you'd see me with a shock of white hair standing out at weird angles and with a manic grin on my face, muttering to myself something about getting the household fusion reactor refuelled for the winter And not impossibly followed around by a short little man answering to the name of 'igor' and prone to saying things like 'yeth maaarther'....

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

And BJ-still, for the first few lowest carboxylate groups, the traditional names are still perfectly acceptable and in very wide use.

And when was the last time you EVER heard a medical professional refer to H as 'diethanoylmorphine' ? and one does not speak of 'ethanoylation' of morphine. You acetylate it, not 'ethanoylate it'. It may not be perfect IUPAC, but I'd bet you dollars to donuts that everybody in EADD, or pretty much anywhere else would understand 'formyl' better and faster than they would 'methanoyl', or say, 'isopropyl alcohol' easy enough, whilst they for a large number of members would have to look up 'propan-2-ol', and whilst I'd bet a fair lot of people would know what 'dimethyltryptamine' means, if I were to call it '2,3-2-(1H-Indol-3-yl)-(N,N-dimethyl)ethanamine' then they would have to look it up, and bar a few of the most well educated in chemistry, they'd have not the slightest clue what the fuck it was.

Sometimes the older nomenclature for very commonly referenced compounds is more practical, and given the time the terms have been in use, how widely known and accepted they are, they are the better, more useful in practice, ways to reference a chemical structure. I wouldn't for a moment contest that there are many terms where IUPAC nomenclature is necessary or the better way to describe something, but just the same, there are many occasions where common parlance is both acceptable, faster and easier to understand (and to write). It is what it is. Just depends on the specific situation. I know I for one, in my lab logbooks and notes always write 'AcO or OAc' rather than 'ethanoyl' if I wish to denote a 2-carbon carboxylic acid ester substituent, or 'formic acid' vs 'methanoic acid or methanoylcarboxylic acid' if I wish to denote the instruction 'add X moles of Y% HCOOH to Z moles of [other reactant here] and reflux at A degrees 'C for *time period here* then distill the fraction boiling at *temperature range* at a vacuum equal to X mmHg'

Its simpler. To say nothing of if one is both performing a synthesis, watching the equipment, thermometer, regulating a vacuum, keeping an eye on the rate of distillate dripping into the receiver flask from the condenser/still head, then whatever is quicker is the more useful, so long as it is understandable and valid nomenclature, it is more expedient to be able to write quickly and take down my notes of the progress of my reactions as they evolve and changes take place.

Since I'm almost always keeping an eye on many different things at the same time, heat, heating rate, speed a distillate comes over, rate a reagent, solvent, catalyst etc. is being added from my pressure-equalized addition funnel, color changes, stirring speed, maybe inert gas flow and pressure, vacuum strength, ensuring all the joints of my glassware are vacuum-tight, its a lot of things to keep track of, and given the nature of chemistry in general, often as not, something like that might be critically important to safety, to success, keeping notes as the entire scene evolves of every minute detail takes more effort. And who wants to waste time with absolute IUPAC compliance writing their notes in longhand when they are busy with monitoring everything thats going on, especially if taking one's eye off the ball for a moment could result in a volcano of corrosives, or other dangerous event, or failure of the project entirely.

 

[Backfromthebrink]

In the months prior to the great gear drought of 2010, I frequently had gear solidify in the pin. As if finding a viable vein wasn't bad enough - trying to redissolve it with an ever increasing amount of coagulating blood really took the piss...

That's a really dangerous thing to do to add heat to already colaguating blood in the syringe as the proteins will degrade and form a very nasty hepotoxin....possibly leading to blood poisoning. I get where your combining from though as if you're rattling badly, the last thing you would want to do would be bin it....plugging the contents would be a far safer option.

On another heroin related note it would seem the carfentanil laced gear has died a death (litterally). The big problem at present seems to be Xanax thats causing people to go over when mixed with gear.