Well I was watching the news this morning, and I saw thing thing on a "Mescaline lab" bust. What gets me is that they mentioned that the chemicals used to make Mescaline from the cactus are just as toxic as the ones used to make meth. Is this true? Or just media BS?
sensationalism. getting it from the cactus involves simple acid/base chemistry, you could technically do it using lemon juice and ammonia. (you'd just be left with a lot of water to remove). evaporating xylene is no big deal either.. did it yesterday in the polymer lab, don't even need a fume hood. making meth from pseudoephedrine also uses acid/base extraction, but also a reduction step (possibly a bit more hazardous, depending on the route you take). the news always blows drug issues out of proportion. yeah..so you shouldn't eat muriatic acid or lye because they're toxic ...duhhh
I suppose it is possible they were synthing it instead of extracting. I'm sure that is much more economically sound.
Is it true that mescaline synthesis is very difficult? I've heard conflicting opinions, but I know next to nothing about chemistry.
Not really, but two of the chemicals you need are closely watched, one of them has no use I'm aware of except to make mescaline or TMA. The third is the fuel for the drag strip cars that don't run on alcohol. So both catastrophic fire and catastrophic prison time are real possibilities.
squirrel, if you're talkine about nitromethane, that's one route; not necessary in other methods. and yes... any 3,4,5- aromatic compounds are watched 2ce's, it's a long process to go from vanillin, an easily accessible chem, to mescaline; not necessarily hard, but trying to get bromine would be pretty difficult, and it's fairly hazardous. the only other really hazardous chem is sodium (or potassium) cyanide salt, but other than that, no fire/explosion hazards. it would take a couple of days from start to finish. the difficulty is in the aquisition of some of the reagents
I know there are other routes, not the details, but making mescaline wouldn't be a hugely profitable operation, given the dose. Most "mescaline labs" probably involve mixing one part 2ce to twenty parts n,n,dimethylanywhitepowdertheycanfind. If they even bother to cut it, I dought it would affect sales one way or the other.
the vanillin route would be lucrative, if it weren't for the high price of bromine. then again, maybe mesc wasn't meant to be bastardized by the black market.
