I didn't just say so, I provided a lot of reference. That's the thing about science. It doesn't care about your opinion or my opinion. It provides the information to allow anyone and everyone with the opportunity to replicate the experiments so they can confirm anything they conclude.
I also found out the hard way. We tried scaling a 2CI synthesis (when 2CI was legal in The Netherlands) and to watch as the heat of an uncontrolled DIBAL-H reduction boiled 30L of toluene into our lab is scary. No amount of dry-ice/acetone applied to the surface of the vessel had no effect other than to boil off the acetone (which had preciously been at −78°C).
We didn't run, we tried to remove all of the energetic materials (e.g. 5L of nitromethane) from the work-space. We thought we had got away with it.
Then someone turned on the hot tap somewhere in the building. The spark from the Combi-Boiler intended to light the gas an heat the water ignited the 500+ m3 of toluene vapour that had wended it's way throughout the property. I'm sure you can envision what happened next.
Explosions are weird. FIRST I heard it, THEN I saw it, FINALLY I felt it. I was the lucky one. It burnt off every single hair on my head (it went crispy and came off in lumps), burnt all of my clothing (black) but only my face and hands were actually burnt. The the other 2 guys were not as lucky. One got 50% burns, the other 30% burns. Their skin just fell off and they were transported by Helicopter to a specialist burns unit in Belgium. You read that right - their injuries were so severe that they were taken to another country,
And DIBAL-H is one of the safer options. But both LAH & lithium aluminium triethyl hydride and mentioned along with a couple that aren't even in use any more,
Now, you COULD add the reducing agents VERY slowly so external cooling would control it - but when I say slow, I mean weeks. But as far as I know, if you even needed to scale something like this (imagine DMT turns out to have some use where so much is required, batch reactions aren't used but rather a continuous process BUT given the low yields, inevitable impurities that have to be removed and the cost of the whole setup - the FIRST thing an industrial chemist would do is to find an alternative synthesis.
Lots of things are technically possible, but the market price of DMT and the fact that many people didn't even know it COULD be made synthetically kind of hints that almost nobody synthetically produces it.
Taxol can be made synthetically but 20 years ago farmers were being paid to plane ewe trees because the scientists correctly divined that even in 25 years their wouldn't be a useful synthesis,
If you want cheap DMT, find out which plants produce it, begin an intensive search for the strains that produce the most and cross breed them. I mean, isn't that what they have done for both cannabis and thebaine (precursor to oxycodone). Of the latter, Tazmanian Alkaloids have introduced 'The Norman Strain'. Doesn't have to be grown in fenced off, secure fields because it doesn't produce morphine, but the KEY is that unlike the species of poppy where thebaine is equally spread throughout the plant (e.g. Papaver Oriente), the Norman Strain has >95% of the thebaine in it's sap so that it's harvested as normal opium is.
I have no idea of the prices involved but I know it took them 12 years. I feel almost certain that the same could be applied to DMT. So if you have the time and the skills, you could most likely halve the cost of DMT which would save rare species being destroyed. Maybe you could get a grant?
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