Thoughts: The Ebb and Flow

jtotheizzoe:

How To Synthesize Sudafed from Meth

Frustrated by how difficult it is to buy Sudafed these days? Tired of being looked at like a meth addict when you sign your name and give away half of your personal information to get some simple nasal decongestant? So were these chemists*

A quick search of several neighborhoods of the United States revealed that while pseudoephedrine is difficult to obtain, N-methylamphetamine can be procured at almost any time on short notice and in quantities sufficient for synthesis of useful amounts of the desired material.  Moreover,according to government maintained statistics, N-methylmphetamine is becoming an increasingly attractive starting material for pseudoephedrine, as the availability of Nmethylmphetamine has remained high while prices have dropped and purity has increased [2].  We present here a convenient series of transformations using reagents which can be found in most well stocked organic chemistry laboratories to produce psuedoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine.

A journal article worth of The Onion. Please don’t try this. Please.

(* and by “these chemists” I of course mean “people who do not actually exist”)