heh, heh, heh…
some of my on-going work is my lit review - i’m continue to collect reports of clandestine syntheses of methamphetamine. talk about making use of whatever is available. the old dodgey synthesis used the precursor chemical phenyl-2-propanone (P2P, aka phenylacetone). P2P is a recemate - that it, it contains left-handed and right-handed molecules. in many cases in pharmacology, the handedness of a drug is important where the biological system (eg the protein it binds to) has a spacial specificity for a particular enantiomer (ie left or right-handed molecule). Anyhoo, this is important because when controls were placed on P2P in the 1980s, meth cooks started using an alternative synthetic strategy using ephedrine or pseudoephedrine (from over-the-counter anticongestants such as Sudafed) as the starting material. The catalyst used in the reaction is red phosphorus, which you get by scraping off the side of a matchbox. The product of the reaction is d-methamphetamine which is the more biologically active enatiomer. This method just so happened to be better than the one the was previously being used, resulting in not only the active enantiomer but also a highly pure product that ended up taking the place of cocaine in places where coke was a bit harder to get. Crystal meth also has a particularly nasty tendency to bring on psychosis. Other synthetc approaches have fluorished and been improvised, but basically the moral of the story is that sometimes when you try to do something to stop something bad, something worse can result.