Good article, reactive web design notwithstanding (stop. breaking. my. scrolling). I’m not surprised that obtaining the chemicals was that easy, even accounting for the mislabeling and fake products. A lot of these chemicals are pretty simple and have pretty general use cases in the fine chemicals space. Hell, I had occasion to use (2-bromoethyl)benzene, aniline, and propionyl chlorde in school for making random precursors and ligands, albeit separately. I wonder if they are at all harder to procure nowadays because of the fentanyl epidemic.
Edit: checked some of my old work, didn’t actually use (2-bromoethyl)benzene but did make a related compound as an intermediate for ligand synthesis using a very satisfying Appel reaction.
This isn’t really that surprising. Over 20 years ago I took a course where the professor explained how anyone with a decent understanding of chemistry could turn $300 of raw ingredients into $1 million worth of LSD.
The problem has always been distribution, which is what makes Breaking Bad such a good show. For the average person, having a shit load of illegal drugs with a $3 million value on the street is not the same thing as having $3 million cash.
My friend accidentally ended up befriending one of the largest distributors of LSD in the country. She didn’t even know until she went to a party with him, and he whipped out a pint sized dropper bottle full of acid. Each drop was $10. That one bottle was worth like $80,000.
She didn’t go to any parties with him after that. Apparently she had a great time that evening, but the anxiety of “what if he gets busted while I’m hanging out with him” kept her from being comfortable around him. She did learn some fascinating things from him though.
Apparently LSD producers are very hippie and do it purely for love of the substance; They just want to spread it to as many people as possible. They sell to the distributors basically at cost, which is how it’s able to stay so cheap per hit; $10 will last you pretty much all day, unless you’re regularly doing massive doses and have built a resistance to it. That’s also why LSD isn’t trafficked by groups like gangs or cartels; The suppliers simply won’t sell to them, because they don’t want the gangs and cartels fighting over it and increasing street prices.
It’s also incredibly easy for traffickers to hide, so the risk of getting caught is low. It dissolves in alcohol, so traffickers can just throw it into a vodka bottle in the trunk of their car. If they get pulled over and searched, they just say it’s left over liquor from a party they went to last week. As long as they’re sober while driving, cops can’t bust them for just having liquor in their trunk.
Wow so much effort and such a good read. Real investigative journalism. I didn’t know fentanyl was that easy to produce.
That’s why pharmacuetical companies invented it in the first place. Crazy easy to produce and crazy more potent than previous opiods, so it is an absolute money printer
Ngl, trying to crack down on this seems like a hopeless battle without authoritarian controls on chemistry lab equipment. This general problem is going to be much bigger in the future as well. Today it’s fentanyl and in the future it will be synthetic pathogens
They got the concept of added value. Congratulations.
