Stuff

They ask this first because they want to bag the chemist as customer or at least get them on a mailing list so that they can hound the chemist later to buy more of their stuff ]... 

Science dealerships aren t the only places to get the stuff one needs. At those mega hardware stores one can find pure acetone, methanol, ethanol, toluene, methyl ethyl ketone, DCM(as a constituent of some stripping agents), sodium hydroxide in the form of lye, and some acids such as sulfuric and hydrochloric. These precious tools can be bought there cheaply and in great quantity. 

The chemist is going to need a source of vacuum. When distilling high boiling stuff like valuable ecstasy free base oil, a vacuum is... 

All of the pieces pictured here are not going to fit perfectiy into each other and that s going to cause all sorts of leaks. The answer is teflon tape. Strike loves teflon tape This inexpensive product is found in the plumbing department of any hardware store and is the duct tape of the next century. Teflon tape is chemically and thermally indestructible. This stuff is wrapped around any piece of pipe or joint, said part then jammed into its appropriate receptacle and the tape will mold to form a perfect fit. Hell, it can mummify a whoie joint compiex to make it absolutely impregnable. 

Now, the ethanol used is almost always anhydrous, meaning it has no water. The closest one can get commercially to anhydrous ethanol is Everclear which is 95% ethanol and 5% water (190 proof). A lot of chemical supply stores will not carry 100% (200 proo ethanol because it is a potable (drinkable) product. This means that they would have to get a liquor license or some other state permit to sell the stuff and that is a hassle that many don t want to bother with,... 

NOTE a really good procedure for busting up the emulsion caused by introducing the water is to slowly acidify the water layer with HCl. As the water layer acidifies one will see the emulsion vanish. As this occurs the water layer will lighten as particulates and stuff start to exit the water layer and go into the DCM layer. Works every time. 

VANILLIN In vanilla beans of course. But never more than 2%. This stuff is bought as a synthetic and is cheap and legal. 

The next day comes and the hung-over chemist wakens to see a dark red solution stirring away. In some cases where the chemist had made an enormous batch of this stuff, there may be seen a small mass of crystalline precipitate at the bottom of the flask. This is no big deal and will go away in the next step. If the chemist had made this in a flat-bottomed flask (which she really should have for convenience) then the ice tray is removed, the flask returned to the stir plate, a distillation setup attached, and the acetone is vacuum distilled from the flask. After all the acetone has come over the chemist can proceed in two different ways. One way is to just keep on distilling the solution until all of the formic acid has been removed. The chemist knows that just about all the formic has been removed when there is about 300mL of thick black liquid remaining in the reaction flask and hardly any clear formic acid is dripping over into the collection flask. If one were to swirl the reaction flask, the liquid will appear syrupy and kind of coat the sides of the flask. This is more evident when the flask cools. A quick sniff of the flask may indicate that some formic is still in there, but it should be too minimal to be of any concern. 

Ether - Starting fluid (works great - Quaaaaack ) 2. Home made mercuric acetate (Now this stuff can be special ordered from ones chem supplier but there s a delay, may look funny - Quaaaaack , and is more expensive. So what is the solution to this Make it yourself Its easy, quantitative, and cheaper. Strike mentions this in the book and points ducks to a reference. Follow the EXACT same procedure for Mercuric Propionate except use glacial acetic acid...quack ). You ll need to use 20 to 25% more of the home brew mercuric acetate since it is a little contaminated with acetic (ducks can t get it totally dry without a vacuum oven). 3. NaOH washed Brazillian is fine Quack No need to purify further for starting material ... 

Later on Strike noticed a few posts from Dr. Quack grumbling about how things did not, in the end, work out with the products of this procedure. Is Dr. Quack cwazy Yes Is she a bad chemist NO So what gives Weil, the following is a personal communique from Merlin a chemist that all of you will thank when you see the stuff she wrote later on in this book... 

Well, that s about as rounded an education on Leuckart reactions as Strike can give. Strike feels that after reading all of those similar, repetitious steps, one can start to get a good feel for where a product is at any given moment. Stuff like what happens to MDA when it s mixed with acid or base, or what happens to ketones (P2P) under the same circumstances. One can see now that it is possible to not only isolate safrole and P2Ps chemically but that the same can be true for the final MDA or meth freebase oil. Repeated washings with acid or base and solvent can effectively clean up a compound to an almost presentable state without the use of vacuum distillation, it can happen, one only needs have confidence in the chemistry. 

This catalyst works in a similar manner to NaBHaCN except that it does not suffer from the same potential toxicity that NaBHaCN does. It is also different in that one can synthesize the damn stuff rather easily in one s own garage, as opposed to NaBHaCN which will require a very complicated and dangerous cyanide generation apparatus as is shown in the Chemicals section of this book. The following is about all Strike has on the making of the catalyst NaBH(OAc)3 [55] ... 

You know how just a couple of paragraphs ago where the chemist first filtered the crude crystals from the chilled reaction mixture, then washed them with water or acetic acid Well, all that liquid filtrate has a lot of valuable, unreacted piperonal or benzaldehyde in it. To rescue the stuff the chemist dilutes the mixture with 500ml dHaO and extracts it with DCM. The DCM is washed with 100ml 5% NaOH solution then vacuum distilled to give a dark oil which is unreacted aldehyde. Hey That s a lot of good material that can be put through the process again. 

If the chemist wants to know whether her final product is bromo-safrole and not just a bunch of unreacted safrole there is a simple little test she can do. Safrole is soluble (will dissolve in) cold concentrated sulfuric acid. But bromosafrole is insoluble in it. So the chemist can take a shot glass full of straight-from-the-bottle 96% H2SO4 and place it in the freezer until it s ice cold. Then she takes it out and drops a few drops of mystery product into it. If the oil dissolves then the stuff is unreacted safrole. If the oil drops to the bottom and does not dissolve it s the goods. 

This is a chapter written entirely by a chemist named Rhodium (with guest speaker Osmium ). Rhodium is, as far as Strike is concerned, the world s leading underground scientist. Knowledgeable in nearly every aspect of drug chemistry, this chemist has been the savior for many a person that was lost. Here he has contributed some new reactions for your reading pleasure. Radical stuff that you can bet will become the next wave of synthesis protocol. The rest of this chapter is Rhodium s voice.]... 

But we have many reasons. That is why the ground are actually progressing the fields of amphetamine science. Believe it or not, the Journal methods on precursors such as ours published research work. Half of the stuff in able, proper science done by people with no amazing when you think about it. 

Man, that recipe is WEAK But hey That s 10% final product in one pot. Yeeshl Why bother Don t take this first method seriously folks. It was just Strike s way of illustrating the futility of easy answers. All the rest of the stuff in this section is much, much better. 

DMSO - Dimethylsulphoxide is a very common solvent with a freezing point of 20 degrees. When you buy this stuff it will be crystallised in the bottle. To melt, all you need to do is place the bottle in a bowl of hot water for 30 minutes - simple. If you re lucky enough to live somewhere warm it may already be liquid, where I live, no chance. When you open the bottle you will notice that this stuff smells a bit farty, don t worry too much, it doesn t get that bad. 500ml straight into the reaction flask and start the stirrer. 

Chloroform - a very common solvent which has a rather unpleasant smell. Try not to get too close to this stuff as it has anaesthetic properties which you don t really want to find out about. 

There s no real order needed to get the stuff into the reaction flask. Use a 1000ml flask with a stirrer bar and it s easier if the chloroform goes in last so you can wash down the solids if you have any stuck in the funnel. Set up the condenser and drying tube as we did with the methylenation. 

Vacuum filtering can be a bit tricky, as the filter paper clogs up very quickly and stalls the process. With this stuff it is particularly important to get rid of as much of the solids as possible or your distillation be will very messy. A way round that I have found (that isn t in any book) was to use loads of filter papers, throw them all into a big beaker and then rinse them with solvent, then filter the solvent. Filter tiny amounts at a time, as soon as the paper blocks - stop and change the paper. I normally run the filtrate through at least twice. Any way you can make sure that you have done two... 

This method is by far the easiest of the two methods I descnbe, but because it uses bromine liquid as a precursor to the dibromodioxane crystals a fume cupboard (or a fucking good method of fume extraction) is absolutely essential. Surgically removing ones gonads with a blunt knife would be a much less painful way of harming yourself than messing with this stuff in the kitchen. 

Safrole from the Grignard reagent Keeping the apparatus from the above reaction, pour 60g of allylbromide into the sep funnel. As with the ingredients of the last procedure the allylbromide must be dried over sodium sulphate. This stuff is really nasty, use a mask at least or a fume cupboard if you can get access to one or fill the sep funnel outdoors. The fumes are invisible and pretty lethal -please be warned. 

When making vanillin from guaiacol the chemist can smell success because the product will have an intense vanilla odor. One can even flavor cookies with the stuff (true ). This Riemer-Tiemann method is also an excellent way to get salicylal-dehyde from phenol in yields of up to 50%. The chemist does everything the same except uses NaOH instead of KOH. 

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