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Comment by PeanutCurry | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, I can't speak to opioids but cannabis and natural psychedelics are already very simple to produce. The main reason not to try them isn't because they're hard it's because of not wanting to fail a drug test for work or not wanting to be arrested for possession.

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It's much more difficult than biosynthesis of alcohol, which is so easy you can do it by accident. Leave a container of fruit juice uncovered and wild yeast will most likely ferment it. If you add dried yeast and cover it with an airlock (which can be as simple as a lose snap-fit lid (snap-fit so it won't get stuck and explode)) and it will most likely taste acceptable too.

Fermenting alcohol is so easy that there's no practical way to enforce alcohol prohibition. It takes no specialized equipment (lights etc.), it's easy to hide, and you might be able to pass it off as an accident if you get caught. If you could make other drugs in the same way it would become very hard to enforce their prohibition.

Many drugs are within that general level of simplicity to produce. They're plants and fungi, and growing them is as simple as regular plants and fungi. Psilocybin, mescaline, cannabis, even opium is pretty simple.

The details difficulties are related to regulations, or stealth (for illegal producers).

I grow regular food plants (chiles), and it's not that simple. You have germination, irrigation, fertilization, repotting, pest control, weeding, etc. If you just carelessly throw some seeds on the ground then they probably won't germinate or they'll get eaten by animals and you'll get nothing. If you forget to water them they'll die. You have to check them every day if you want them to grow reliably.

Making wine is as easy as buying a carton of grape juice, adding some dried yeast, and covering the top with some aluminum foil. It won't be good wine, but it will be recognizably wine. People living under prohibition would be happy with it. If you try growing chiles with that level of effort you'll get nothing edible.

Eh, mescaline, weed and (sort of) Psilocybin) is fairly easy. I guess the difference is it takes a lot longer to grow these things rather over fermenting alcohol.

These are the two I was thinking of. If you're trying to optimize for quality then there's difficulty. But simply hiding a weed plant and getting a yield isn't difficult unless you live in a colder climate. Shrooms are so easy people grow them in shoeboxes.

Edit: When I said two I failed to notice mescaline. I haven't done much reading on mescaline.

People in California grow huge San Pedro cacti in their garden, but that doesn't work so well when you are living in a colder climate.

Weed is often grown by people tossing seeds on federal or someone else's land then coming back to collect when grown and doing nothing else. For a while it was in WV's top 3 crops because there was so much unused land for people to do this.

Like all crops they benifit from care, but the trade off of ~zero time, effort, and risk for some value is the appeal.

Eh, peppers are harder than lots of other vegetables. If you have good results with them, you'd have no problem with tomatoes, turnips, onions, radishes, lettuce, etc. I've never grown an "illegal" plant, but you may not be able to generalize from chili peppers to e.g. pot.

Ever grown mushrooms? I wouldn't call it easy. It takes a few months and a lot of preparation, plus you need a pressure cooker and some other equipment.

There are kits available with the sterilization part done for you.

Or just move to pasteurized hay, which is much more lenient

My friend said that pressure cooking popcorn kernels as an incubation medium allowed fast mycillial colonization. He could shake the jars every couple days to speed up the process. He also claimed pasteurized hay made an excellent growth substrate.

the hard part is keeping everything clean once youve inoculated

A lot of that is just time though. A pressure cooker isn't a difficult item to acquire and it's hardly suspicious. Even in America, it's mainly difficult in states like California and that's only because of the increased challenge to acquire spores. Most states in the USA have a weird loophole where you can purchase spores but the shrooms themselves are an illegal good. There are people who grow them in shoeboxes from kits. As long as you're willing to compromise quality in exchange for simply producing some amount of quantity you can get mushrooms with relatively little risk.

i believe a pressure cooker is optional for sterlization, and by all accounts it is easy, much easier than growing cannabis, which can be a bit more labor intensive

Depends what you're comparing it to I guess. It's still very much hobby-grade though and with some techniques (like the famous PF tek) you don't even need a pressure cooker.

It still requires some time and dedication but it's really simple compared to, say, the synthesis of LSD.

I've collected them growing in the wild... yes I mean psilocybin as well as morels, etc.

Selection bias. You found the lucky plants that managed to live. I had a friend try to grow shrooms, and despite managing the humidity, temperature and light exposure, disinfecting the container, and carefully controlling just about every aspect of the process he couldn't get shit to grow.

Likewise when I was strapped for cash in college I briefly considered growing a few cannabis plants and decided against it after it seemed to be a lot harder to grow anything sell-able than expected.

Counter anecdote: I did it about 15 years ago and got several pounds of good quality shrooms with no special knowledge or effort. Got lucky I guess.

I've always considered the main reason we don't have a larger home grown drug problem is the same reason high-end crime is relatively rare: you're selecting a technically capable subset that our society already rewards fairly well.

Such is the setup of Breaking Bad: were Walter White not terminal, would he still take the risk?

That and the fact that police techniques for locating this kind of thing is pretty advanced. Until recently (LED grow lamps) the power consumption from grow lamps was so high that the power company would notice and the police would take interest. Cops can also drive around with infrared cameras looking for hot exhaust air/lamps, visible even if windows are blocked. Helicopters with infrared cameras can see hidden grow plots outside.

Even when I was looking at it people were still split over LED vs conventional lights for growing, so it's only gotten easier to evade detection as the legality of growing has relaxed (literal definition: become less strict again).

I don't know about shrooms, but they're peanuts compared to weed anyway. Obviously it's infeasible to grow coca anywhere in the US- you need a huge amount to produce any drug. Likewise creating LSD/MDMA/meth without synthetic, highly controlled precursors is pretty much completely infeasible. You could grow morning glories for ergot... if you wanted to harvest an entire field of them.

But yeah, any decent chemist could figure out how to make any of the big drugs very easily. The precursor restrictions only keep out the non-experts. Even a penniless chemist knows that going to jail for that will make him totally radioactive for the rest of his life.

That's not a counter, it's more selection bias. Nature is a good place for mushrooms to grow, but that doesn't mean it's easy to grow them yourself. Cannabis is a very successful plant but it still isn't as easy to grow in your home. You can go outside and find a fern almost anywhere in the world- they're one of the oldest, most successful, and most widespread plants, but they are a pain in the ass to grow yourself: http://articles.latimes.com/1991-10-27/realestate/re-649_1_m...

Sorry, I may have been too vague. I grew them in a large plastic bin in my bathtub. I got the spores and was able to start the mycelium without any bacteria problems, somehow (My kitchen was no more sanitary than you would expect from a 21 year old bachelor). I really had no idea what I was doing so, based on the stories I hear of other people trying and failing several times before giving up, I assume I was just exceptionally lucky. :)

Edit: Ah, I get your point about selection bias now. Yes, based on self-reporting on drug forums I am surely in a small minority of clueless yet successful psychedelic mushroom farmers. I suppose if I ran through a minefield once and didn't lose any limbs, I would think that was easy too: "just run in a straight line as fast as you can, no problem!"

I also had success growing mushrooms at around that age. I just followed the instructions and did try to take extra care with cleanliness, my guess is that as we're both here on HN we're probably predisposed to be better at following a process.

That also takes a decent amount of training (especially with the morels as they have poisonous lookalikes I've heard) and you need to be in the right environment. The PF Tek that another person mentioned is also not going to be so easy for the average person. I got 3-4 ounces my first try growing in mason jars and big plastic tubs, but it could have yielded a lot more if the tub hadn't gotten infected after one or two rehydrations. Initially I remember not knowing where to start as I read through the assortment of information and techniques out there, so that too adds to the difficulty of learning.

LSD is not trivial to make but once you can, you can produce an entire country's supply in no time, given the minuscule dosage.

The United States is estimated to have very few acid makers, with roughly a half-dozen accountable for most of the country's supply.

1P-LSD is currently legal and mass produced for cheap online. Much what we see is this.

Since 1P-LSD is theorized to be a prodrug of LSD, it would likely be illegal in the United States under the Federal Analogue Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act

> likely be illegal

It's not illegal.

I always had the impression that psilocybin in particular either was not tested for or does not stay in your body long enough to be tested for. My only concern with psilocybin mushrooms would be their legality, but IIRC, it is not illegal to possess spores for them.

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