Even other countries get pressured into drug prohibition - to my knowledge, there is no country where it would be safe (as in legal) to make drugs for yourself (Portugal maybe?). Not every prison system is as inhumane as that of the US, but here in Germany we had a report just last week that the chance of getting raped in juvenile prison is shockingly high.

Getting precursors and equipment would at least be rather expensive here (also chemical suppliers are prone to notify the police if you buy the "wrong" stuff).

PCR machines are essentially Peltier blocks with a chunk of aluminium on top - there is no hard tech in these things.

A used chromatograph with detectors is easily above 10.000€ - I saw a guy in a german chemistry forum who bought a gas chromatograph with detector(s?) for around 10000€. You don't absolutely need one - but if you want to be sure about the cleanliness of your product you need some kind of analysis. I have to admit although I have vocational training in chemistry and analytics I don't know how low the detection threshold of something like a TLC plate is, which would be the easiest (/cheapest) way to get a guesstimate. Overall this looks easy when you get into it (it's just a bunch of chemical reactions after all) but the closer you look at it, the harder it gets.

There is no Moores law in chemistry - there are probably a lot of new synthetic pathways that could be applicable; finding the right ones (to get a good yield; to use available precursors) is hard and takes knowledge the average weekend warrior won't have (it would be a lot easier to just use the recipes on rhodiums archive and try to make the precursors you can't buy).