Whoever's behind the Journal of Apocryphal Chemistry is trying to do everyone a good deed before we get into allergy season. After detailing the ever-more-stringent controls on the sale of pseudephedrine, they propose a synthetic route based on a more readily available starting material: methamphetamine.
A quick search of several neighborhoods of the United States revealed that while pseudephedrine is difficult to obtain, N-methylmethamphetamine can be procured at almost any time on short notice and in quantities sufficient for synthesis of useful amounts of the desired material. Moreover, according to government statistics, N-methylmethamphetamine is becoming an increasingly attractive starting material for pseudephedrine, as the availability of N-methylmethamphetamine has remained high while prices have dropped and purity has increased. We present here a convenient series of transformations using reagents which can be found in most well stocked organic chemistry laboratories. . .
Their route, based on a 1985 paper in J. Chem. Soc. Chem. Comm., is not exactly trailer-park chemistry, though. (I note that they have the reference a bit wrong as well; there was no plain J. Chem. Soc. in 1985). It involves a chromium carbonyl complex of the aryl ring, formation of a chiral lithium dianion, and oxidation of that with MoOPH, which would give you pseudephedrine after decomplexation. There's no way to tell if these reactions have actually been run, of course. Based on the literature precedent, it might work, although I'd be worried about maintaining the chirality of the dianion. (For what it's worth, the authors are also aware of this problem, and claim that the selectivity was unaffected).
Their larger point stands. I look forward to seeing more from this paper's authors, O. Hai and I. B. Hakkenshit. I see less interesting stuff in my RSS feed every day of the week.
