![]() ![]() If you don't believe this, ask the thousands of families of the fentanyl overdose victims how well cracking down on Vicodin worked from them.Ī little quiz (those who read the Breaking Bad article from above need not apply):.When government cracks down on something in the futile "war on drugs," something else will pop up that will be even worse.Chemists are smarter than government agencies.So, the government took Sudafed off the shelves, meth synthesis became even more efficient, and people sneeze more. So, chemists went back one step made it from something else, another chemical called phenylacetic acid, which is used in the perfume industry, and can be bought in huge quantities. ![]() See: Breaking Really Bad, 25 Years Before Walter White.Ī minor problem that "modern" meth makers had to overcome was the difficulty in obtaining phenylacetone (P2P) if you were not in a research lab. How do you get rid of it? A DuPont chemist named Michael Hovey tried something similar in 1985. It would take about an hour to synthesize. ![]() There is nothing stopping any organic chemist from making meth and waltzing out of the building with a kilo of it. P2P is also easy for chemists in a lab to come by. When we order it we get on a list somewhere. It is a very common reagent, and a bottle or two can be found in most organic chemistry labs. Methylamine is the chemical in the large drum that they stole from the chemical warehouse. The problem is that it requires different starting materials, phenylacetone (aka, phenyl-2-propanone, P2P) and methylamine, a gas that smells like ammonia and is sold as a water solution in glass bottles or 55-gallon drums. It is called a reductive amination, and, unlike the phosphorous iodine mess, it is clean and very easy. In the absence of pseudoephedrine, all that was needed was another method, and Walter White found one, which is far superior to the first. So, did removing Sudafed from the shelves of pharmacies accomplish anything except increase sales of Kleenex? Not much, since we organic chemists are a nothing if not creative. The product of this reaction is 3-(2-aminopropyl)phenol, (aka gepefrin), which is a mediocre blood pressure drug sold in Europe. So if you react phenylephrine with phosphorous and iodine it only the OH in the green circle is affected. But the hydroxyl group in the blue circle (called a phenolic group) is chemically unreactive. Phenylephrine contains two different hydroxyl (OH) groups, as shown in the blue and green circles. The second reaction (below) is quite different. It's messy and dangerous, but it works well enough. Walter White used phosphorous and iodine, a method that no organic chemist in a real lab (and in his right mind) would use. There are a number of chemical reagents that can be used for this transformation. In the first reaction (above), a simple chemical transformation of a hydroxyl (OH) group (green circle) into a hydrogen atom-a process called reduction-is all that is needed to convert (relatively) harmless pseudoephedrine into methamphetamine, which is anything but harmless. Before we take a look at the chemistry that explains this, here is a detailed pharmacological comparison of the two drugs: Sudafed was replaced by another decongestant Sudafed PE, which cannot be converted to methamphetamine, but doesn't work as well. The Act was intended to put a dent in the illegal production of methamphetamine, which was heavily abused at that time, especially in poorer areas of the US. To get the decongestant you now have to sniff out the pharmacist counter and hand over your driver's license. If you've watched Breaking Bad you know very well that pseudoephedrine can be chemically modified to produce methamphetamine, aka crystal meth, which is why Sudafed was taken off pharmacy shelves in 2006 (1). ![]() It began with Sudafed, which contains the drug pseudoephedrine. The drug phobia that now has us firmly in its grip, you know, the "let's restrict everything" mentality, didn't start with Vicodin, Valium, or Ritalin. ![]()
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