Sulfonal/trional/tetronal

[Limpet_Chicken]

Can anyone find any info on these old, seemingly very obscure hypnotics?

The only one I can find shit all about is sulfonal, the oldest of the lot, acetone diethylsulfone, but little on the other two.

Synthesis looks easy enough, if a little stinky (aint that the understatement of the year, where thiols are involved I hate em, having had a nasty incident once where overdoing it on chlormethiazole resulted in metabolic production of some thiol derivative in large enough quantities to taste, sweat, piss out etc, only the second time I've ever slept in a gas mask)

But doable, although I'm not going to go into it here.

What little I can find on them seems to suggest that they are similar in action to a long acting barb, having significant overdose potential, cumulative effects if taken over several days, ODs complicated by seizure/muscle twitches similar to barbs.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?artid=2505603&pageindex=1

Seemingly haemolytic when taken at an OD level though, so chances are its something to be fairly careful with.

Thats from the pubmed article, and what a couple of my medical books say on the stuff, although they are dated to the late 1800s, where they were still using chloral, bromides, mercury, and even, in the case of piles, nitric acid

I'm glad I wasn't around then, not that I have piles, but the thought of the treatment, thats almost enough to make someone shit out a portion of their intestine

No posts on BL about these, anyone tried any of them?

 

[Hammilton]

Tetronal is a new one to me, but I'm pretty sure I have something on trional, though like you said, it is super old (IIRC, I had to pull it from some late 1800's dated magazine; I think it was TIME or NYTimes, i think the latter)

 

[Limpet_Chicken]

Yeah this stuff is almost as ancient as my mother, and put this way, the only dating she would be doing, is of the radiocarbon variety.

Book I pulled it from is late 1890s, can't believe I got those two for free, leather bound, marbled backing on the inside, hehe, just the sort of thing to appeal to a drug addled autie chem geek like me

Not that I'l be burning off my piles (if I had any!) with HNO3 any time soon of course, that kind of puts the entire books into the 'get the fuck away from my arse' category.

If you can find the info I would like to see it, the synthesis of sunfonal is simple enough, although it does use EtSH, so not something one wants to do outside of a glovebox with good seals, assuming one wants to avoid having limbs torn off by angry next door neighbours.

Odd that there seems to be little actual information on the stuff though, you would have thought that even if it was discontinued, there would at least be pharmacological studies in modern days into its activity, but seemingly there is little.

Is this stuff scheduled in the UK? I wouldn't be surprised if its so obscure the jackboot brigade overlooked it entirely.