man you're totally missing the point... it's not ridiculing me that we solve this.
Not trying to ridicule
you, just your argument. Nothing personal and no offense.
None taken, it is not conjecture it is what remains after ruling out all the other possible options, after all this is a years long thread.
Many of these arguments and impurity side products cannot,
at this point, yet be ruled out. It all pivots on solid evidence and independent, repeatable test results.
I can't produce evidence, we would need a lab for this,
Exactly…
still there are so many different clues that suggests that this is an hypothesis that deserves real attention and not being discarded right away.
Only where you expect to see clues.
By all means I would be very happy to be proven wrong with real data.
Well how about instead of taking the approach of “
prove me wrong!” why not approach it like, “
I don’t know yet until we see more evidence”? Otherwise you jump the gun. There are probably multiple things that can interfere with MDMA
pharmacokinetics and cause a “mehDMA” experience.
No, but I've studied chemistry in high school as many others long time ago,
Yeah and most people took a
foreign language in high school, too.
It doesn’t mean they speak that language fluently or even conversationally now with few exceptions. A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing when we don’t know yet how little we actually know.
still is a quite basic set of reactions (2 max 3 with the proper starting materials, you can find any required precursor online, it's not a secret),
I never said it was a secret, nor implied this knowledge is cryptic or arcane. I’ve been doing this since the
alt.drugs.chemistry days and witnessed the proliferation of illicit drug chemistry knowledge as it moved from
Loompanics book catalogues, to
Newsgroups (like the aforementioned ADC), then to
The Hive, Rhodium’s site, the Erowid and similar sites, and eventually across the
dark net markets.
However,
you cannot safely and reliably find “any required precursor online”, not without serious risk of walking into a trap, L.E. honey pot, or getting reported to the DEA by a chemical supplier (as the law stipulates). Sometimes you might get lucky and find a supplier who doesn’t report jack shit because they’d rather make money, but it’s a roll of the proverbial dice I’m not willing to make, not when my personal liberty is on the line, but that’s just me.
Also
fractional vacuum distillation isn’t difficult, per se, but I
wouldn’t call it “quite basic” either. It really depends on whom you ask, but setting up magnetic stirring hotplates, round-bottom flasks with 24/40 ground glass joints, a Liebig condenser with coolant being fed to it by a pump submerged in an insulated bucket of ice water, a vacuum adapter, a Claisen adapter or thermometer adapter, vacuum pump, vac hose, and vacuum grease, not to mention the fractionating column and a suitable material to pack it with… plus it doesn’t hurt to be familiar with liquid chromatography and have the right material, solvent(s) and suitable column.
it is something doable by any college level chemistry student.
Wait, so your high school chemistry education
is or
is not sufficient then?
Your point that it’s not but so logistically challenging is noted, but that’s also contingent on either being educated in chemistry or trusting someone else to give you a perfect step-by-step
procedural guide. If you’ve ever read any of Uncle Fester’s books, you might realize how this can be dangerous and you should know how to calculate your own math. It’s better to understand how to modify and develop new procedures as needed, too. And if it were that easy more people would do it.
There's plenty of kids doing stuff on various reddit subs.
That’s a vague statement, but I assume you’re talking about
/r/TheeHive and its ilk, and also there are a bunch of related subs on the
.onion forum, Dread. I’m on those subs all the time. … I don’t agree with you here fully. Yes, there are new, younger heads in the game now, but that doesn’t prove it’s supposedly easy to manufacture high quality drugs in your spare time to amuse your friends and relatives… or just yourself, even. But that’s fine, we may have to disagree.
It doesn't involve exotic substances,
“Exotic substances”= vague. Plus the
DEA watch list might surprise you. But I mean, is
palladium dichloride exotic to you? (It’s certainly not cheap.)
neither requires protection from atmosphere, involves maintaining critical temperatures ranges or highly technical and expensive lab gear,
Analytical gear like
GC-MS is beyond the reach of most underground chemists as are the logistics of certain precautions like blast shields and properly pressurized, vented work areas. Also assembling, monitoring, tearing back down and cleaning a full vacuum distillation glassware setup is a whole bunch of slightly to moderately stressful, tedious work. And one really needs
a good vacuum pump to lower boiling points in order to avoid nasty polymers that come from too much heat.
in fact there's a nice procedure on rhodium that shows the final reduction performed in a modified plastic bucket).
I’m well aware of the content on the Rhodium archive site, having been a contributing bee myself when much of that stuff was first published. I have copies of that archive on backup as well as copies of
the entire Hive forum on backup. You’re referring to a period in time
more than twenty years ago. Dr. Drool, Brightside, and Methylman are the bees behind that particular post if memory serves. That method outlines a
p-benzo Wacker oxidation from Safrole to MDP-2-P, and an
Al/Hg amalgam + reductive amination to the final product: bright white, pure MDMA hydrochloride.
Try to acquire some p-benzoquinone, PdCl2, and mercuric chloride in 2021 and see if the
Narcoswine don’t swoop down on you and charge you with attempt to manufacture MDMA. Most of the easily accomplished, thoroughly discussed routes to MDMA from The Hive have become traps or dead-ends. The DEA look for materials involved in illicit synthetic routes, always just behind underground chemists, like a game of cat and mouse, so things like p-benzo wackers and ketone reductions with methylamine aren’t as easy to pull off with no one looking anymore.
And no one in the 90's was using lab grade solvents.
That still just depends on the chemist’s sources. There are clever ways to steal from chemical suppliers, universities, and industry. Also fake businesses and fraudulent credentials aren’t impossible for someone with a little talent at being charming, convincing and good at Photoshop document forgeries.
In fact you could start from pepper and produce mdma completely OTC. More steps required of course.
Wasn’t there an episode of Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia referencing that? Regardless you’re talking about
piperine extraction –> from which you can derive
piperic acid which when hydrolyzed yields
piperonal and eventually without describing the whole process, yes, you can work your way
to Safrole with enough determination. It’s technically
possible but it sounds awfully tedious.
Sorry man totally disagree here.
That’s cool. And understand why you come to your conclusion, but
you’re thinking from the middleman perspective. Consider the drug chemist / producer. From the producer’s angle, highly potent finished-product = more individual doses/grams/
discrete product units. Hence the popularity of potent drugs among traffickers.
If you and your buddies control the production, distribution and ultimately the market without competition you can sell everything you want,
That’s different. If you had that much control, not much could stop you from price gouging if you felt like it. Regardless you can’t just remove all competition and act like that’s what the drug market is like. You’re changing the parameters. This is why cocaine is so profitable despite being weak and short-acting – it’s because the Columbians have a lockdown on its production and global distribution. It’s not because of the drug’s duration or potency. When the market place has healthy competition, and from the perspective of the drug manufacturer,
the more potent the drug, the more profit will come from each gram of starting precursor. This is true in the pharmaceutical industry as well which is part of why LSD’s discovery was so impressive, and also why Dr. Shulgin admits in PiHKAL/TiHKAL that he too was swept up in the notion of producing an ultra-potent, useful pharmaceutical drug to the point of neglecting to recognize fully the
impact of the qualitative experience.
Think about it: let’s say you have 6 kilos of ergotamine tartrate to make into LSD. You create 1.5 kilos of pure LSD from it, which isn’t a high yield, but that’s okay because it’s 15 million doses @100 µg each. We’re not supposed to discuss drug prices, so use your imagination. Compare that now
to 20 kilos of cocaine. Even at a discount, the L is still more profitable. I think you’d need to move roughly a metric ton, no exaggerating, of cocaine to come close to that 1.5 kg of LSD. (
Note: these figures can fetch you a multi-decade prison sentence in many countries; to anyone actually reading this, please don’t be stupid, thanks).
This is also a
big part of the problem with fentanyl – it’s so potent that it’s unbelievably profitable, and that’s exactly why all these transnational criminal organizations have invested in it and are pushing it so heavily.
Another example would be a chemist who aims to
make a phenethylamine from, say, vanillin (4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzaldehyde). From that innocuous starting point, it’s about
as much trouble to manufacture Mescaline as it is to manufacture 2C-B – not impossible, but a good bit of tedium, chemicals, and technical know-how, to be sure. However, there’s a reason you hardly see Mescaline anymore, especially the synthetic stuff – users need somewhere around
400 mg Mescaline to trip compared to ~30 mg 2C-B (or 2C-x). I hope you see my point here.
and a short acting, weaker by mg/kg is it more profitable simply because users consume more of it, therefore you sell more of it,
This disregards other factors like quality, product appeal, safety profile, cost/price, and user preferences. The equation isn’t that simple.
why selling something that is fully active at a certain dosage and lasts 4-6 hours when you can sell a sub par substance that you need double amount and last half the time?
Because someone else will put out a better product that will slow your business to a crawl if you don’t remain competitive. Customers will defect. Hence: competition benefits consumers. As quality increases, dealers need superior customer service plus clever marketing and branding to distinguish themselves.
No problem, at the end nothing changes really.
Nah, given enough time, this too shall pass.
science is not questionable,
No, but interpretations can be questioned.
is based on data, when this data is not available hypotheses are made and are confirmed or disproved through experimentation and/or data acquisition.
The scientific method – you got it. Too bad researching schedule I drugs is so mired in legal red tape most of us can do little but wait for the War on Drugs to end.
We have all the data we need:
No, we don’t. Did you see the part earlier about how Energy Control in Spain doesn’t have analytic standards for certain MDMA impurities, for example? Or how about complications such as, e.g., MDDMA and MDE have the same molecular weight and basic shape and can be tricky to distinguish via mass spec.?
Meh appeared after shifting from natural to synthetic precursor
Firstly, even if that were true,
correlation does not prove causation.
Secondly, are you suggesting all global production of MDMA shifted at once from using safrole (
3,4-methylenedioxyallylbenzene) distilled from
Sassafras oil to, what,
PMK glycidate? That’s would odd since PMK is piperonal methyl ketone, aka
MDP-2-P, which is the intermediary between
isosafrole and
MDMA.
And thirdly,
the time frames don’t correlate, like
@Negi pointed out.
it follows that the difference is due to the precursor
Faulty logic; again:
correlation != causation.
now you have two different hypotheses:
- precursor impurities create active byproducts that compete with the main substance. Fine I can accept that, but as you said it needs proof.
This has
already been proven and links to the journal papers were provided in this thread weeks ago by the OP.
So I go to drugsdata.org today (one of those public and anonymous substance test labs cited before, there are few but not dozens), and check the first 200 results for MDMA and the only results that gives a synthesis byproduct is
https://www.drugsdata.org/view.php?id=11074.
See, that’s because you searched “MDMA” and drew the wrong conclusion from the results, not aware that it limits your query to actual MDMA, I‘m guessing.
Search for the term “ecstasy” in the “Sample name” column. The impurities and imposters come out; however: this thread was meant to exclude those examples and focus on examples wherein a testing lab reports the sample as only containing MDMA for the
active, yet user reports for the same tested material are consistently “meh” without evident explanation.
Personally, I question the validity of some of the testing labs.
All the others pills are tablets are MDMA, so where are those impurities that alter so much the substance effects? Are those all fantastic magic lovey sexy horney danceyoursoulout extasy pills? I doubt very much so
See comment above re: the issue with your search term.
Something isn't right here, either those impurities aren't there or something else is going on.
On a side note, attempted purification of current available "Champagne" or "Cola" or whatever is called DWM MDMA doesn't produce any difference in effects.
Many people in and out this forum tried to purify MeH without success. Purifying in this case means by the bare minimum: pulverization of the substance, multiple acetone washes followed by multiple recrystallizations (at least 4times ) in IPA or other suitable solvent.
Yes if any of the adulterants are active instead of being MDMA or being inactive, then it’s not surprising this rinse doesn’t alter the effects. It won’t remove water-soluble amine-bearing drug salts so long as the acetone is completely salted dry with MgSO₄, ice-cold, and used correctly. You’ll have clean cuts with clean drugs, lol.
Now I'd like to quote you: "No, if the impurity were also an amine-bearing compound, recrystallization would simply also recrystallize the impurity." Actually this isn't correct, crystal lattice formation would favour the substance which is in higher concentration first, this is the whole point of recrystallization.
Firstly, are you not aware of how, for example, MSM tends to co-crystallize with other compounds? But never mind that, b/c secondly, it doesn’t matter if the impurity compounds form crystals or simply get trapped inside another molecule’s crystal lattice,
the impurity would still have whatever effect in your body it was going to have regardless of phase, crystal, whatever. Even ingested MDMA freebase oil will bond to the hydrochloric acid in your stomach upon first-pass metabolism. This is getting too long. Goddamn.
It is a way to purify chemicals.
Yeah no shit.
from wikipedia: "In
chemistry,
recrystallization is a technique used to purify chemicals. By dissolving both impurities and a compound in an appropriate solvent, either the desired compound or impurities can be removed from the solution, leaving the other behind. It is named for the
crystals often formed when the compound precipitates out.
Please just glance through my past posts and tell me if you really think I’m new to organic chemistry. Jesus Fucking Christ, man. Look, you’d need a two-solvent system to do what you describe and it‘s based on exploiting the differences in solubility between compounds and solvents. For example acetone and IPA work well with MDMA. The IPA is boiled and a minimal amount completely dissolves the crystals with agitation. They are then slowly cooled off until cold, anhydrous acetone is added as the crystals crash out. As each new layer of the lattice is formed it is scrubbed clean by the acetone.
“There are better, more suitable purification techniques for this." Indeed.
(
read: lithographic chromatography)
Have you tried any of those and succeed?
Yes, I’ve cleaned discoloration from black market purchased MDMA many times. If there’s little-to-no MDMA present, I can’t do anything about that. Not an alchemist over here turning things to gold, ya know. However, I
have synthesized about a dozen different substituted phenethylamines over the years, and have relevant knowledge and experience in the field from multiple perspectives – user/buyer, dealer, supplier, producer. No bullshit.
just asking
Also: an amine bearing compound in relevant concentration would be detected by the above test labs.
Covered this earlier. You ran the wrong search.
I'm tired to repeat this:
Yeah I’m tired of repeating myself as well.
if is there it is detected. There is not such substance invisible to GC/MS.
I think you should master the search engine before GC-MS.
It is a fact, it's not questionable.
So that leaves us with:
- precursor is not what it should be.
If that were true, then the result of the fraudulent precursor would also be detected by GC-MS, by your own argument, so with your logic we’ve ruled out everything now, and MDMA never existed in the first place. It was just a dream and we’re all wide awake now. Congratulations, you solved it… for me at least
