Ah very interesting, thanks for the link.
So we've got a couple of plausible ways that MDMA could be screwed up, and taking MDDMA as a maybe, a paper from my previous post highlighted impure methylamine as a source for MDDMA production, and then there's this formaldehyde route. What I'm interested to know is, how binary is doing a good job at MDMA synthesis? Is it either you're on top of your technique and use proper purification methods / or you produce trash? Or is it more of a continuum, with the amount of by-products/impurities being correlated with how bad the synth is?
Well so in both of these instances, you're talking about an impurity working its way into the synthesis via the side-synthesis of methylamine to be used in the reductive amination of the ketone intermediate, MDP-2-P (aka, PMK – piperonyl methyl ketone) to MDMA. There are different ways of accomplishing this. Personally, my favorite way was to form the methylamine
in situ during an aluminum/mercuric chloride amalgamation reaction, the nitrogen atom donated by nitromethane for MDMA or nitroethane for MDE. Ammonia would technically be the choice for MDA, but I used an oxime intermediate route for this reaction because it was higher yielding, but I digress.
Usually methylamine synthesis involves the simultaneous synthesis of dimethylamine and trimethylamine, and these last two need to be separated from methylamine completely or they will introduce MDDMA and MDTMA—among potentially several other compounds— to the list of side-products produced. If this purification of methylamine is not carried out thoroughly and meticulously, inadvertent introduction of these impurities seems inevitable.
The trouble, as I see it, is that clandestine labs rarely make use of analytical tools to verify their syntheses' success, yield, and purity. So underground chemists are often in the dark as far as these matters are concerned. But before you going blaming the chemists for being lazy sociopathic miscreants, bear in mind these analytical tools are typically cost-prohibitive not to mention the fact that they will certainly draw unwanted attention if the feds catch wind of enough details. And as an added bonus, while the synthesis of methylamine is fairly straightforward, the stench that is put off from its manufacture cannot be understated. It is a
powerfully noxious and nauseous odor that absolutely has to be dealt with in some fashion or it will attract attention as it truly smells like decomposing fish guts and whale flesh, or something along those lines, with a splash of chemical aroma just to make it really suspicious. So you can probably see where this poses several problems for the aspiring clandestine chemist.
To answer your question directly though, it is more of a continuum than a simple binary; however, some aspects of this are, themselves, binary in nature. For example, assuming MDDMA and MDMA interact in the brain the way we've guessed it might (shout-out to
@indigoaura here), then it might not make much difference how much MDDMA is present just so long as it has covered a certain threshold that guarantees inhibition or 5-HT reuptake thus shutting down access to the 5-HT transporters for the MDMA that crossed the BBB. In order for MDMA to be active and do its thing, it must cross that transporter into the presynapse to trigger the massive flooding release of serotonin that is the hallmark of its effects. And it doesn't take much SSRI, for example, to blockade that action, so it's not unreasonable to consider that MDDMA might be the very same way with regards to cockblocking the effecstasy, as it were.
