Edit: (ratelimit, sorry)
group: small chemical structure manipulated in a single synthetic step. See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_group
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_group
scheduling: I have no idea, but it seems likely that at least all the easy precursors were. (ChemE, like systems CS, is all about tradeoffs. It's unlikely anyone bothers to schedule precursors along very difficult synthetic routes. Just like CS people have the IOCCC, synthetic chemists sometimes do small batches with pathways no ChemE would use, just because they're there.)
characterisation: One should do this anyways, to discover if what one has made is what one had intended to make. (compare with unit testing) In the context, I'd consider it a warning that one should especially do this if one plans to partake product.
TA: teaching assistant (post- or just pre-MS in this case, definitely with lab experience)
The punchline is that the TA could guess the intended product given only a single synthesis step for a partial structure. (To be fair, computer geeks love discussing black hat activities, so it shouldn't be any surprise chemists are up on the "abuses" of their science to the same degree.)
Are all the precursors scheduled, or is the punchline that the TA was wrong?
Why would one do well to remember to characterise any synthesis undertaken? To protect oneself against legal action by showing that the labs purpose was synthesising legal compounds?
Is "TA" the same as Tax Attorney?
The punchline is that the Teaching Assistant immediately sees the intent of the question, and goes from the general to the specific and replies: [ you won't be able to synthesise LSD with that approach because ] "all of the precursors are also scheduled."
When you do a reaction on a chemical, the reaction can often affect multiple different parts of the structure, even if you only want it to affect one site. So, you can pop a "protecting group" onto the site you don't want modified, and then remove it later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_group
A TA is a teaching assistant; typically a grad student with lots of knowledge teaching a class to undergrads.
You would want to characterize any synthesis- verify your work to make sure you got high quality product that is pure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaving_group
You design your synthesis around this and try to pick pathways that are easy, have the highest yields, and don't produce undesirable products you have to remove.
My brother did chemistry at university too. Did an internship at an Australian government laboratory (National Measurement Institute) at which he got to manufacture MDMA - completely legally, it was part of a research project into different synthesis routes, so that by measuring traces they could determine how street samples were manufactured. He must be one of the few people in the whole country to synthesise ecstasy without breaking any laws in doing so. (They were very careful to ensure none of the staff sampled the product; it was all weighed very precisely and signed off by multiple people from precursors to synthesis to analysis to destruction.)
The physical harm was little to none. The mental harm varied greatly, there were even some people who got improvements in pre-existing mental conditions; with lsd in general, but also with large overdoses in particular.
We know the LD50 of LSD in rabbits, rats and mice [1]. Surely, there exists a human LD50 as well, it is just that hopefully nobody will ever be evil enough to do the necessary human experiments to determine it. (That's true for all drugs – just because we can't ethically discover the human LD50 doesn't mean one doesn't exist.)
What's the biggest overdose anybody has ever taken? This case report is the biggest one I know about. And yet, they each only consumed "two lines" of 3mm by 4mm by 30 mm, which is less than a gram, administered nasally. They were hospitalised. Would they have lived without medical attention? We don't know, but quite possibly not. And surely it would have been physically possible to take an even bigger overdose than that. How do we know an even more massive overdose would not have been fatal?
People rarely take LSD intravenously. I think a fatal overdose of LSD would most easily achieved with intravenous administration. That's what the animal study LD50s are calculated based on.
Unless you are trying to commit suicide or murder, you wouldn't do it. And if you are trying to do either, there are far more practical methods than massive LSD overdoses.
[1] https://maps.org/research-archive/w3pb/2008/2008_Passie_2306...
EDIT: I deleted my back of the envelope calculations about how much the people took in mg/kg. I don't have confidence I'm doing it right so better not to.
It might take a lot but physical harm from overdose is likely possible, with determination.
i once took 82 hits of acid. ahh, to be 17 years old and think you're invincible again. each hit was a gellcap with about 4 hits like blotter paper. this was at an outdoor rave-festival.
i was curled up in a ball in a tent for 2 days. fully immersive hallucinations. the good thing is when you are so incapacitated, you cant get up and move around to hurt yourself and others. i had sitters watching me and feeding me water.
nothing happened. i slowly returned to sober consciousness with zero bad physical side effects. except dissappointment that i had missed the entire rave.
that was the greatest spiritual experience i have ever had. none of the hallucinations were scary or negative, likely because the setting was outdoors on a rural camp ground in nature. i was talking to the Sun. and the blades of grass. and they talked back. i felt an indescribable oneness with all living beings and a realization that all life is sentient. meaning that our "human consciousness" model is just a tiny sliver of the full spectrum of "living consciousness", only we dont see the greater consciousness while we go about our daily lives trapped inside our limited minds. as an analogy, think of human consciousness like a language--C or assembly. then Universal Consciousness is like Leibnitz's mythical Perfect Language which simultaneously describes and creates our Monadic world.
decades later, that experience is still one of my happiest and i can remember it more vividly than more recent milestone events.
i understand why Steve Jobs said his first time tripping was his #2 greatest life experience.
if you ever have the opportunity to take 360 hits of acid, i recommend you go for it. you will see God and it will permanently reprogram your brain.
Having said that, I think LSD is a fantastic drug but that is not for everyone. I’ve got a friend who did it constantly for over 2 years and he is a completely sane person. He claims it was one of the experiences that put an end to his alcoholist tendency which might as well be genetic. His dad died due to alcoholism.
This, too, is an armchair diagnosis and unnecessarily sensational language. According to Wikipedia:
> Asked if Barrett may have had Asperger's syndrome, his sister Rosemary Breen said that he and his siblings were "all on the spectrum".
> Waters maintains that Barrett suffered "without a doubt" from schizophrenia. In an article published in 2006, Gilmour was quoted as saying: "In my opinion, his nervous breakdown would have happened anyway. It was a deep-rooted thing. But I'll say the psychedelic experience might well have acted as a catalyst. Still, I just don't think he could deal with the vision of success and all the things that went with it."
It's not "backyard meth lab ordering 40ft container of pseudoephedrine" levels of ridiculous.
Interestingly, ET is used to treat cluster headaches and migraines.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2011/06/lsd-alleviates-suici...
We used to sell to quite a few people who similarly suffered from the condition, and used mushrooms to treat it - but it was an impossible thing for us to market or advertise, due to the way the MHRA (Medicines and Health Regulatory Agency) dictates what beneficial claims can be stated about retailed items.
- ed typo, grammar
If someone asked me what the typical salt was I'd say table salt
Lsd is also exclusively sold as tartrate
HCl + NaOH -> HOH (water) + NaCl
But if you mix a different acid and a different base, you'll get a different salt, for example if you mix sulphuric acid and calcium hydroxide, you get calcium sulfate:
H2SO4 + Ca(OH)2 -> 2(HOH) + CaSO4
Calcium sulfate is just a different salt.
I'm not (just) being judgmental here: volunteering harm reduction at festivals, the number 1 problem we had was that users had no idea what they had put into their bodies.
Actual chemists, no doubt, don't use any of this terminology since chemical reactions don't produce the desired results if you're vague about what you put into them.
- Lysergic acid is a relatively fragile molecule and will fall apart if exposed to harsh reaction conditions. Compare that to say methamphetamine which can survive strong acids/bases.
- It’s also light sensitive, so you need to protect from light which is why you see the red light setup in LSD labs
- Purification is challenging as well.
https://www.aclu.org/other/death-penalty-questions-and-answe...
It's so fucked up, it makes me disgusted even thinking about it.
that said, it’s hardly a cash cow in the way meth and fentanyl are; and as someone said elsewhere on this thread, one person could probably suppy the whole country.
I’m curious about your last statement. Scaling makes sense as a cost factor, but are you saying that lower barriers for production would increase the cost? That seems backwards to me.
About the cost, the way I understand it, the definitive factor is scalability. It's MUCH more scalable than the production of other drugs. If this was not the case, it probably would be VERY expensive, because of the very high barriers to entry and very low and distributed demand.
ergotamine doesn't grow on trees lol