Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Chemistry => Topic started by: wim on 29/12/2005 13:10:01
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what about those swedish designer drugs?
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What about them
Michael (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi11.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fa186%2Fukmicky%2Fwallbash.gif&hash=7fbfae96ee4eb666ba3ec22832e5a81f)
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does anyone has experience with them or a good site that i can trust?
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I got this of a site, but there must be more information about them and I want to have that information.
“The legality of the designer drugs is only one of many powerful economic incentives working to make them the future drugs of abuse. These drugs are extraordinarily cheap to synthesize. Less than $500 worth of chemicals and equipment can produce a cup of China White worth $2 million on the black market. And it takes only a modicum of laboratory experience to make the stuff from recipe. Theoretically, a single chemist could produce the equivalent of the entire world’s supply of heroin without growing or harvesting a single opium poppy.”
grtz
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quote:
Originally posted by wim
“The legality of the designer drugs is only one of many powerful economic incentives working to make them the future drugs of abuse. These drugs are extraordinarily cheap to synthesize. Less than $500 worth of chemicals and equipment can produce a cup of China White worth $2 million on the black market. And it takes only a modicum of laboratory experience to make the stuff from recipe. Theoretically, a single chemist could produce the equivalent of the entire world’s supply of heroin without growing or harvesting a single opium poppy.”
grtz
It may be theoretically possible to supply heroin without harvesting poppy, but it would still be illegal to do so. It is not how you manufacture it that makes it illegal, it is the fact that you manufacture it at all, or even that you posses and sell it.
Designer drugs tend to have a short life time between being discovered and being prohibited. Besides which, while it may be easy to synthesise lots of different chemicals, if you don't have the appropriate laboratory backup, how are you going to test the effects (even to simply find out how quickly your customers are going to be corpses – and dead customers don't make for repeat orders).
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Unlike designer suits, "designer drugs" are cheaply-produced compounds with effects similar to drugs of abuse. But as these compounds are novel they are not listed as illegal agents and hence an individual cannot be prosecuted for synthesising, possessing or using them.
The problem is that when you go to a chemist and buy a branded agent you can be sure that you are getting what you are buying. That's because the company producing the agent monitors the process very carefully and carries out quality control checks. But a substance produced in someone's garden shed using an amateur chemistry set is not subject to the same stringent controls. As a result side-reactions can take place producing chemical contaminants which have their own effects.
A classic example of this was the case of the "frozen addicts" described by Bill Langston in the early 1980s. In his book Langston describes how seven patients presented to hospitals in northern California in 1982 with all of the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease - they were rigid and unable to move. But these people were very young (whereas most Parkinson's cases occur in the over 60s), and their symptoms had developed, quite literally, over night.
Doctors were initially very confused. But then, on further questioning, all of the patients admitted to being heroin users and to having recently injected themselves with a batch of drugs made by a kitchen chemist.
It turned out that this chemist had been trying to make a designer drug which was an analogue of meperidine, a heroin-like agent. But unfortunately the conditions for the synthesis were not optimal and a byproduct, called MPTP - methy-phenyl-tetrahydro-pyridine, contaminated the mixture. MPTP is metabolised by an enzyme in the brain called MAOb (monoamine oxidase B) to a pyridium ion MPP+ which is very toxic to the family of dopamine-producing nerve cells which are lost from the brains of patients with Parkinson's Disease.
As a result, when the addicts injected the meperidine-analogue contaminated with MPTP they gave themselves a form of Parkinson's.
Similar problems have affected the Ecstasy trade meaning that "Es" often contain a whole raft of other chemicals, including other amphetamines with a range of toxicities.
It surprises me that people are willing to gamble with their lives by swallowing these things.
Chris
"I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception"
- Groucho Marx
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It surprises me that people are willing to gamble with their lives by swallowing these things.
Um, I think at least sometimes that's the point. The only one of my friends who ever did anything harder than cannabis definitely regarded it at least partly as a game... maybe you'd get high, maybe you'd get dead.
It annoyed me a bit because she (a very intelligent person in most respects) didn't seem to be able to get a grip on the fact that there was a third possibility of just getting stupid or perpetually low-grade ill. But at 18 I didn't really have the fluency of language to explain that. Certainly not in the face of an english lit student.
She had the same attitude to smoking, which I *really* didn't understand.
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yeah ok I wasn't really planning on making them , just interested.
thnx do
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quote:
Originally posted by chris
The problem is that when you go to a chemist and buy a branded agent you can be sure that you are getting what you are buying. That's because the company producing the agent monitors the process very carefully and carries out quality control checks.
Chris - did you see the investigation on TV the other night about getting licensed by the MRHA to be a wholesale phamaceutical supplier? It was quite frightening.
The TV company set up a bogus company, went to the MRHA, gave false names & addresses, and got their licence. Within a few days they had orders from high-street chemists and an American guy willing to sell them all kinds of proscribed and possibly fake drugs.
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As many easily acquired chemicals can be used to synthesise poisons/explosives, I would have thought that there would be various recreational drugs which could be simply made also?
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quote:
Originally posted by Life
As many easily acquired chemicals can be used to synthesise poisons/explosives, I would have thought that there would be various recreational drugs which could be simply made also?
The trouble is that if you have a few impurities in your explosive mix, you may get a slightly less dramatic bang; if you have a few impurities in your synthesised drug, you can easily have an unwanted corpse.
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Really, I would have thought that there may have been some way of purifying the drug or neutralising any impurities in it which would work. As a similar problem may occur with explosives - e.g. Acetone Peroxides's high sensitivity due to acidic nature once made.
I understand why this would be a reason though
thanx for the help another_someone