hey listen, as long as we're gonna play the crapitalism game, there's nothing wrong with having a passion for profits. If nothing else this is proof positive that one adds value to others in meaningful ways.
If history is any indication, I think this is almost always the case, regardless of what Breaking Bad might make it seem like. Or let's just say there are far more “Jesse Pinkman”’s in this world than there are “Walter White”’s by my estimation.
Right, what does this even mean?
if you want to bring up history, at least go back to the brotherhood of eternal love
OP, I went ahead and merged your thread with the existing megathread on this topic.
If you could leave the antisemitism at the door, that'd probably make us all feel a little bit better about reading what you have to say.
Some years ago their was a sudden avalanche of XTC tablets with 250-300mg of material in them. Now, NO producer is going to put in more than they need to and people are not about to pay double... so I had a GOOD look at the current precursors, syntheses and dose-forms. Piperonal, PMK, MDNPe & MDNPa are now almost extinct as precursors; law enforcement has stopped them & it's the people selling high-price but pure powder who snag all that which is still around. Now PMK glycidate is the de facto precursor.
Someone has found what I consider to be a slice of genius - a 1-step route from PMK glycidate to MDMA. Before then, PMK glycidate had to be converted to PMK & reacted with methylamine BUT methylamine has also been clamped down on. Now, PMK is achiral BUT PMK glycidate is chiral so if your 'magic' 1-step synthesis begins with (S) PMK glycidate, your product is (S) MDMA and likewise (R) PMK glycidate yields (R) MDMA. If you take a quick read of the 'MDMA' section of Pihkal, you will discover that (R) MDMA is active, (S) MDMA almost inactive.
The Chinese convert PMK into PMK glycidate via the Darzen's Reaction by reacting it with methyl 2-chloropropanoate. Now, the cheapest way to make methyl 2-chloropropanoate is from methyl 2-hydroxypropanoate which in turn is made from lactic acid.
OK - 2-chloropropanoate, methyl 2-hydroxypropanoate & the starting point, lactic acid, are ALL chiral. If the synthesis is from (S) PMK-glycidate, the product will be (S) MDMA (the less active isomer). Oh, and the natural isomer of lactic acid is natural and so MUCH cheaper..... care to guess WHICH isomer the Chinese use?
I honestly think that the skillset of MDMA chemists has been eroded sufficiently for them not even to know HOW to convert PMK glycidate to PMK. I mean, it's 2 steps BUT you only need to put ⅓ as much material into each pill!
I'm sorry if this has been covered before but it seems that most people still do not understand what is going on. So, as a gift to MDMA lovers everywhere, I offer you 'Empathy', an MDMA mimic that is more euphoric.
We carried out trials right up to stage 2 so hundreds of people tried & loved it. Most were recruited via www.eunoiapharmacopia.com BUT 5APB & 6APB were cheaper to make. Not simpler - in fact it's easier to get pure Empathy than pure APBs because the latter always had some positional isomers mixed in. Now, I know someone sold p,4-dimethylaminorex as 'Serotonia' and we tried it... and it sucked. You see, the p-Me is a potent SERT inhibitor but it has almost no DAT or NET activity. I'm sure people who tried Serotonia noted how mild it was. So the m-Me is a potent DAT/NET inhibitor. The ratios are designed to match up to the ratio of (R) MDMA. The m-Me alone is just a euphoric stimulant. The p-Me alone is like the crappy MDMA we see today.
I guess you only have my word for it but I am quite confident that Chinese RC manufacturers browse these sites and so they will know if this is true or just me lying. I cannot detail the synthesis but benzaldehyde + nitroalkane ---> nitroalcohol+ NaBH4 ---> aminoalcohol + BrCN ----> product. KOCN doesn't work, you end up with substituted urea.
IF Chinese manufacturers want to provide a good precursor, MD-phenyl-2-nitropropane is legal & can be converted to MDA in 1 step, MDMA in 2 steps. What is cool is that their are DOZENS of reactions that will yield MDA (CTH, complex borohydrides, dissolving metal reductions etc....) and MDA ---> MDMA also has DOZENS of options, all simple.
Oh, and 4MAR is an MAOI, AR is not. I asked David Nichols about that detail and I tend to trust his word.
I will conclude by noting that Empathy was legal when we designed & produced it - no laws were broken... we even paid our taxes.
We actually did get the the answer to this happily enough:
To preempt some counterpoints I'll quote a response I made when I originally posted this.New science just dropped: https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/dta.3118
I know the thread has moved onto other theories since, but it's nice to be able to close off some old ones. Checking 97 samples seized in Germany from 2019-2020, MDMA was found to be extremely racemic.
From the old thread, we can also see that this was true in the past as well.
Batch five was seized in 2006, batch 45 in 2011.
Feel free to just quote the relevant passage from that PDF. I didn't see anything in that document regarding isomers/enantiomers, chirality..
No - but it does refer to the fact that PMK isn't a commonly used intermediate.
We actually did get the the answer to this happily enough:
To preempt some counterpoints I'll quote a response I made when I originally posted this.New science just dropped: https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/dta.3118
I know the thread has moved onto other theories since, but it's nice to be able to close off some old ones. Checking 97 samples seized in Germany from 2019-2020, MDMA was found to be extremely racemic.
From the old thread, we can also see that this was true in the past as well.
Batch five was seized in 2006, batch 45 in 2011.
No, this is not entirely true. For a number of years in the early 2000s, MDMA production was rampant. Then things tightened around the supply of sassafras-oil-producing plants/roots. PMK-glycidate became the new precursor as it was arguably closer to MDP-2-P than safrole ever was. One would have to vacuum distill sassafras oil to get safrole, then isomerize that to isosafrole, and then stick a double bond oxygen where there was an allylbenzene to arrive finally at MDP-2-P, and then reductive amination at last.
LE has just made it more difficult to acquire these chemicals. There is and will continue to be natural precursor oils.
It was just a semi-clever way to disguise a List I precursor. Glycidates are formed via the Darzen reaction, it's in the wikipedia article for glycidates. So your conjecture is that so-called drug chemists are taking PMK-glycidate and going straight for MDMA from there? If this were the case, and if it had the effect on stereoselectivity you claim, then I would expect the data @Negi posted to reflect that in seized MDMA samples' chirality. Instead it overwhelmingly shows racemic MDMA seizures. Are we sure some of these reductive aminations don't output racemic products regardless?
Ok, this is not that difficult. As previously shown, PMK-glycidate → PMK is just a simple reflux with HCl. Methylamine can be synthesized on its own in a number of ways, some of them quite clever and done in situ.
I have no clue about the skill set of MDMA chemists in 2022. I sincerely hope the average competency is higher than what you're suggesting.
Okay so it's a blend of 3'-methyl-aminorex (what you're calling m-Me) and 4'-methyl-aminorex (what you termed p-Me, I guess that's “para-methyl”). The 3'-MAR acts on dopamine and adrenaline while the 4'-MAR works on serotonin with no cross-interference like the 5-APB + 6-APB combo? Jesus Christ those are probably a huge pain in the ass to produce, likely involving something hella dangerous like cyanogen bromide. Funny enough, there's a one-pot synthesis of trans-4-methylaminorex from PPA by forming a urea intermediate with KOCN and then quenching that with HCl, but it sound like you're might be familiar with this route.I'm sorry if this has been covered before but it seems that most people still do not understand what is going on. So, as a gift to MDMA lovers everywhere, I offer you 'Empathy', an MDMA mimic that is more euphoric.
You might say that. It killed a couple dozen people and was notorious for sending people into serotonin syndrome days after it was taken.
Generally it didn't seem like it was at all worth the danger and trouble. Those who were hospitalised might not categorize the drug as "mild" though…
Crappy MDMA is nothing new. Every generation thinks their generation is experiencing something novel with MDMA, when it's the same assortment from good to bad since it's debut on the black market.
Goddammit, see? I knew it would come down to cyanogen bromide. This stuff is both toxic and unstable.
You know after you form the urea you can quench it with equimolar HCl to punch out the trans enantiomer of these drugs (most likely)?
The yields going this route are less than impressive from what I recall. Much smarter to go from ketone to MDMA directly instead of attempting to go from primary amine to secondary
Oh yes, let's examine that, shall we? And how did things end for our lofty Brotherhood of Ironically Eternal Love? To borrow the summation from Wikipedia: "Their activities came to an end on August 5, 1972, when a drug raid was executed on the group where dozens of group members in California, Oregon and Maui were arrested. Some who had escaped the raid continued underground or fled abroad. More members were arrested in 1994 and 1996, and the last of them in 2009".
The question was rhetorical and meant to point out that your statement is something of a platitude.
Well, so doesn't this just incentivize based on profit anyway? So in the long run, the "greedy" capitalist move here would be to "chase passion". But seriously think about that for a second: how often is it a good idea to "chase" passion rather than build into a field of work and specialize until one can trade that speciality knowledge and experience in for higher earnings?
Right, this is what I was saying. Someone claiming they make drugs "passionately" (and presumably to a high standard of quality) when in fact they also know that this passion for high standards ultimately leads to the highest profit, what's actually their incentive? It's not like any of this is some act of altruism. If people are willing to take on the enormous risk of drug production and sales, it's only fair they charge to make profit on their wares… Acts of civil disobedience are one thing, but no one should commit felonies for free.
I think it's just that you're making a moot point when all these seized sample do not reflect any changes in the racemic consistency of blackmarket MDMA.
Do note that what you're talking about here is a subjective, “qualitative effects” comment. These cannot be disputed nor can they be confirmed due to their very subjective nature. There are too many biases to rule out. Way back in the 90s, there were these giant 500 mg wafers called Disco Biscuits that were scored horizontally and vertically so you could break them into 125 mg fourths of MDMA each fairly easily, but of course people would skull the whole thing anyway and chew up the insides of their cheeks without realizing it… I remember by the turn of the century all the pills in the U.S. it seemed like were double- and triple-pressed stamped tablet pills of every color of the rainbow and every major corporate logo you could imagine. Some of those had to have been absolutely loaded down with MDMA. Also, when pills had 110 mg in them back in the 90s, we'd eat two at a time sometimes…
I was praising your insight despite not agreeing with your overall assertion. You don't need to insult me, that's just rude. Implicit exclamation marks?
