The ephedrine (or pseudoephedrine) synthesis is a one step using phosphorus/iodine reduction directly to methamphetamine. It’s simple and clean in that only an acid base extraction is required, and only one set of NP solvents.
All these others syntheses with multiple steps up the chances of weird toxic solvents or contaminants creeping in. I think it’s a contaminant issue that’s exacerbated by the drug use.
The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance. It’s not an evil drug per se - long history before it was criminalized. Plus that would neuter the cartels and protect people’s health more than pushing it underground.
>The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance
Famously, the US spent about 15-20 years attempting this with opioids. They were widely available to people via a pseudo-medical process, or via secondhand dealing. Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and production. The result? A shattering drug addiction crisis that at its height killed more people annually than the entire Vietnam War.
(For people saying 'no, that was illegal heroin or fentanyl that did all that damage'- the Wiki page for the opioid crisis is quite clear that at least 50% of all deaths were due to perfectly legal, regulated opioids).
When you make drugs legal & easy to get, lots & lots of people do them- who develop life-shattering addictions and OD en masse. They also build tolerance and then move on to even harder stuff. AFAIK out of the 300ish countries on the globe, there is not 1 that has decriminalized hard drugs in the modern era. And no don't say Portugal, contrary to widespread myth they forced people under threat of jail to attend drug rehab, and anyways they've recently curtailed even that.
I realize this is not going to get a lot of upvotes on HN, but yes making it difficult to do hard drugs is a reasonable public policy goal. (Which again, is why literally every country on the planet does it). There's room to argue about the exact tactics, but the broad goal is perfectly legitimate
> The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance.
The phrase “small amount” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this statement.
The government does regulate and control amphetamine and methamphetamine (Desoxyn) as prescription drugs. The former is not all that hard to access. For a while it was as easy as signing up for a service through a TikTok ad and filling out a form, after which you were guaranteed a prescription. Those mills got shut down but it’s not hard to find a doctor willing to write a prescription in your area with some Internet searching (Side note: Lot of people get surprised when they get a prescription from some random doctor and discover that all of their other doctors know about it. Controlled substance prescriptions go to shared databases and it will be on that record for a while)
> It’s not an evil drug per se - long history before it was criminalized
Dose makes the poison, the recreational users aren’t going to be satisfied with your government regulated small amounts.
These discussions always end up with two parties talking past each other because one side wants to focus only on the ideal drug user who uses small amounts and has perfect education and self control, while ignoring that the meth users wouldn’t be stopped from seeking their larger quantities than a theoretical government regulated small amount program would allow.
I should also mention that methamphetamine appears to be quite neurotoxic at recreational doses. Maybe even smaller doses too.
We should also mention that the “long history” you speak of isn’t actually that long and was associated with small epidemics of overuse and addiction, too. It’s not like addiction is a modern phenomenon.
> I think it’s a contaminant issue that’s exacerbated by the drug use.
I think the various pieces of evidence presented in the article basically all point against this. Is there a reason you think the evidence in the article is flawed?
Check out the book “The Fort Bragg Cartel” if you’re wondering why drugs are illegal even if legalization makes more sense from a harm reduction standpoint. The highest levels of the military are involved in drug trafficking. Use of drugs by clandestine colonial states goes all the way back to the opium wars. US is nothing new. The deep state funds off the books operations with drug money and possibly human trafficking as well.
Tried clicking the fivethirtyeight link halfway down the article, and was immediately reminded of what abc decided to start doing today. What an asshole move.
The article was doing so well until the conclusion.
> Does this rule out the idea of contaminants? No. Even if it’s 97% pure d-meth, there could be something very nasty lurking in that last 3%. But I don’t see the need for such an explanation. We know there are many more heavy users, so there’s no need to go beyond the idea that quantity has a quality all its own.
It's fine if the author finds it an uninteresting problem because the probable answer is staring us in the face, but still, he only has a plausible hypothesis.
If Sam Quinones is correct in that there is a fundamental difference in meth then and now that is causing major issues for addicts, it would certainly be in society's interest to figure that out and rectify it.
I was thinking the same thing, though I couldn't remember the timeline. Makes me wonder if there was something already in the zeitgeist, or if it was fueled by the obsession with purity in the series. I could totally see Breaking Bad causing chemists to want to up their game, or causing chemists to get clowned for having low purity.
yes, while the show probably popularized the idea of purity for meth, in general strict prohibition leads to increase in purity and potency. We've recently seen that with heroin/fentanyl. There is probably still no "fentanyl of meth", and thus so far only purity increase. Once a more potent, fentanyl-like, meth appears, it will probably similarly get into and displace a lot of classic meth trade.
What? Prohibition historically showed the exact opposite.
I suspect higher purity & potency of street drugs has much more to do with more sophisticated operators operating outside of the US than strict prohibition. Same with fentanyl.
I believe OP wanted to make the point that one of the most important things for people profiting from the illegal sale of drugs (meth or heroin/opiates) is to minimize the amount that has to be trafficked (1kg of 10% meth vs 100g of pure meth or 1kg of heroin vs 10g of fentanyl).
>He points out that “old” meth was made from ephedrine and that “new” meth is made from a chemical called Phenylacetone or P2P
the new is just the old that came back. The old meth, "biker meth", was P2P. Then was ephedrine, and with a crackdown on ephedrine - back to P2P.
Another noticeable thing - the recent shortage of ADHD medication while supposedly illegal meth production has been growing. Demand is present in both cases while the capitalism model of responding with supply seems to work very well only in one.
> Another noticeable thing - the recent shortage of ADHD medication while supposedly illegal meth production has been growing. Demand is present in both cases while the capitalism model of responding with supply seems to work very well only in one.
Capitalism isn’t the problem at all with prescription medications. The annual production amounts are regulated by the government. There has been an explosion in demand for ADHD prescriptions between the way it’s trending on social media and the recent shifts in how easily prescriptions are handed out.
I don’t agree that inducing artificial supply shortages is the right way to regulate it, but there is no “capitalism bad” story here. If anything this is a good example of how central command and control of production doesn’t work.
In the former case, you have government artificially suppressing supply and acting to dissuade pharmacies from keeping almost any extra stock, which is unfortunate.
I think the biggest takeaway for me is just how insanely ineffective banning pseudoephedrine over the counter was.
Price went down, usage went up overdose went up, seizures went up, the production just changed quickly and there wasn’t even a blip.
Billions of uses of bullshit decongestant products that didn’t work at all… and to get the good stuff you still need to buy it from behind the counter and give ID.
Throwback to A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine [0] [1], a 2012 paper describing how to synthesize Sudafed from meth lol
I don't think its innate though - most people I've met can think of higher order consequences or at least understand them.
The real issue is actually measuring results. I think we have to design society to factor higher order effects in. That means a fundamentally new approach to things like voting and tracking accountability.
Is it even possible? Who knows. Sometimes I think our problems have outstripped individual life spans which makes them intractable.
The other day I needed pseudoephedrine, so I asked for one box of instant tablets and one box of extended release capsules. The store said they’re only allowed to sell me one box so I had to choose.
I’m so glad these policies made it so meth isn’t super easy to find anymore.
Oh wait, meth is still dirt cheap fucking everywhere, but now I also can’t get effective cold medicine either. Can we please just admit this policy doesn’t have any effect on the meth supply curve and please put pseudoephedrine back in Dayquil?
All these others syntheses with multiple steps up the chances of weird toxic solvents or contaminants creeping in. I think it’s a contaminant issue that’s exacerbated by the drug use.
The government should just regulate it, control purity and production and let people access small amounts for recreation/performance. It’s not an evil drug per se - long history before it was criminalized. Plus that would neuter the cartels and protect people’s health more than pushing it underground.
Famously, the US spent about 15-20 years attempting this with opioids. They were widely available to people via a pseudo-medical process, or via secondhand dealing. Opioids were/are manufactured by regulated, publicly traded companies with inspectors who controlled purity and production. The result? A shattering drug addiction crisis that at its height killed more people annually than the entire Vietnam War.
(For people saying 'no, that was illegal heroin or fentanyl that did all that damage'- the Wiki page for the opioid crisis is quite clear that at least 50% of all deaths were due to perfectly legal, regulated opioids).
When you make drugs legal & easy to get, lots & lots of people do them- who develop life-shattering addictions and OD en masse. They also build tolerance and then move on to even harder stuff. AFAIK out of the 300ish countries on the globe, there is not 1 that has decriminalized hard drugs in the modern era. And no don't say Portugal, contrary to widespread myth they forced people under threat of jail to attend drug rehab, and anyways they've recently curtailed even that.
I realize this is not going to get a lot of upvotes on HN, but yes making it difficult to do hard drugs is a reasonable public policy goal. (Which again, is why literally every country on the planet does it). There's room to argue about the exact tactics, but the broad goal is perfectly legitimate
The phrase “small amount” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this statement.
The government does regulate and control amphetamine and methamphetamine (Desoxyn) as prescription drugs. The former is not all that hard to access. For a while it was as easy as signing up for a service through a TikTok ad and filling out a form, after which you were guaranteed a prescription. Those mills got shut down but it’s not hard to find a doctor willing to write a prescription in your area with some Internet searching (Side note: Lot of people get surprised when they get a prescription from some random doctor and discover that all of their other doctors know about it. Controlled substance prescriptions go to shared databases and it will be on that record for a while)
> It’s not an evil drug per se - long history before it was criminalized
Dose makes the poison, the recreational users aren’t going to be satisfied with your government regulated small amounts.
These discussions always end up with two parties talking past each other because one side wants to focus only on the ideal drug user who uses small amounts and has perfect education and self control, while ignoring that the meth users wouldn’t be stopped from seeking their larger quantities than a theoretical government regulated small amount program would allow.
I should also mention that methamphetamine appears to be quite neurotoxic at recreational doses. Maybe even smaller doses too.
We should also mention that the “long history” you speak of isn’t actually that long and was associated with small epidemics of overuse and addiction, too. It’s not like addiction is a modern phenomenon.
I think the various pieces of evidence presented in the article basically all point against this. Is there a reason you think the evidence in the article is flawed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca...
3 lines later..
>.. The Drug Enforcement Agency tests the meth they seize to see how it was made.
quick answer!
> Does this rule out the idea of contaminants? No. Even if it’s 97% pure d-meth, there could be something very nasty lurking in that last 3%. But I don’t see the need for such an explanation. We know there are many more heavy users, so there’s no need to go beyond the idea that quantity has a quality all its own.
It's fine if the author finds it an uninteresting problem because the probable answer is staring us in the face, but still, he only has a plausible hypothesis.
If Sam Quinones is correct in that there is a fundamental difference in meth then and now that is causing major issues for addicts, it would certainly be in society's interest to figure that out and rectify it.
I suspect higher purity & potency of street drugs has much more to do with more sophisticated operators operating outside of the US than strict prohibition. Same with fentanyl.
I believe this explanation is too simplistic...
the new is just the old that came back. The old meth, "biker meth", was P2P. Then was ephedrine, and with a crackdown on ephedrine - back to P2P.
Another noticeable thing - the recent shortage of ADHD medication while supposedly illegal meth production has been growing. Demand is present in both cases while the capitalism model of responding with supply seems to work very well only in one.
Capitalism isn’t the problem at all with prescription medications. The annual production amounts are regulated by the government. There has been an explosion in demand for ADHD prescriptions between the way it’s trending on social media and the recent shifts in how easily prescriptions are handed out.
I don’t agree that inducing artificial supply shortages is the right way to regulate it, but there is no “capitalism bad” story here. If anything this is a good example of how central command and control of production doesn’t work.
Now I can't say that I led a P2P network anymore.
I think the biggest takeaway for me is just how insanely ineffective banning pseudoephedrine over the counter was.
Price went down, usage went up overdose went up, seizures went up, the production just changed quickly and there wasn’t even a blip.
Billions of uses of bullshit decongestant products that didn’t work at all… and to get the good stuff you still need to buy it from behind the counter and give ID.
[0] https://improbable.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Pseudoephe...
[1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pseudephedrine-mad...
In many states it wasn’t banned. It just moved behind the counter and you could only by a limited amount per month.
Which was actually fantastically good for those of us who actually need it, because this made it available again instead of the empty shelves.
The real issue is actually measuring results. I think we have to design society to factor higher order effects in. That means a fundamentally new approach to things like voting and tracking accountability.
Is it even possible? Who knows. Sometimes I think our problems have outstripped individual life spans which makes them intractable.
I’m so glad these policies made it so meth isn’t super easy to find anymore.
Oh wait, meth is still dirt cheap fucking everywhere, but now I also can’t get effective cold medicine either. Can we please just admit this policy doesn’t have any effect on the meth supply curve and please put pseudoephedrine back in Dayquil?