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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

My brother studies Chemistry. One of the first things they told them was that they could make Meth (I think) with a street value of about 1000 times the cost of the materials, but the police would know where to start looking as soon as they got their hands on some, because it would be too pure, too well made.

Mind you, this was told to incoming (freshmen) students, presumably the professors would be able to make the precursors in such a way that the authorities wouldn't know.

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Yep. In O-chem lab many years ago one of the first things we did was "alkaloid extraction", where we pulled caffeine from tea bags, which was a yellow, clumpy powder, which we then washed out the impurities and it was a clean white crystal. Caffeine is in the same family as meth, and the process is similar.

The teacher joked that she used to teach in San Bernardino and there were a lot of chemicals that the department never had to buy because the police would turn it over after raiding meth labs.

> Caffeine is in the same family as meth

If by family you mean CNS stimulant with an amino group, then yes, I guess? They are very different structurally and pharmacologically.

A synthesis of methamphetamine would not look very much at all like an alkaloid extraction, except, possibly, for the final workup and isolation of the salt.

So is the idea that the school tells them they could totally do this, and they'd get caught, so as to preempt students from coming up with the idea on their own?

Eh, it sounds like the teacher is just trying to get their class excited about the chemistry. Come for the very pure drugs, stay for the molecular orbital theory and the love of the lab.

That, and because some of the more enterprising students would come up with the idea on their own, so better to depress any such tendency ahead of time than end up with two or three people a year finding out via prison sentences that they weren't quite as smart as they thought they were.

"Oh, we could totally synthesize meth and make tons of money, but it would be so good we'd get caught immediately." Talk is cheap. POC or GTFO.

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