this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Damaging contaminants from production, unknown potency leading to accidental overdose if pure, adulterants added to "cut" the drugs. If you account for dosage, method of introduction, and difference in drugs its about as massive. There is a reason people who take addrerall don't regress to non-verbal and walk around hallucinating after being up for 3 days and take 6 months to dry out and relearn how to talk.
You say that as if black-market adderall wouldn't be similarly risky even if it weren't "laced" with anything. Quit conflating risked caused by the means of production with risks caused by the different chemistry.
Historically black market adderall was a an issue of diversion where legitimate pills were diverted to illegal drug sales in part by patients and in part by wholesalers or others in the legitimate drug pipeline as opposed to you know being meth
contamination with weird shit only happens with small scale manufacturing using no purification at all. large scale manufacturers will usually know a bit or two about organic chemistry, and processes more suitable for large scale manufacture don't introduce them at all (and don't require pseudoephedrine)
yes, the difference is dose, you'll see the same shit in people popping 50 adderal pills a day
I wonder what you are basing this on? I'm guessing neither you nor I are actually in the drug industry. Clinicians and people dealing directly with the problem say differently. They busted a multistory reactor with tons of reactants waiting to be processed. Most of the people who were busted working there ultimately died of liver failure. Clinicians say that people drying out from the newer P2P meth display qualitatively different experiences with much longer periods of recovery after shorter periods of addiction. Previously P2P meth was low quality and undesired because it contained a large quantity of undesirable materials that lead to heart pounding as opposed to a desirable high. Improved processes allow chemists to remove the obvious undesirable quantities but are believed to produce introduce contaminants.
My source is a nytimes and other legitimate press as opposed to drug use.
well, i guess you're guessing correctly about yourself, but you're guessing wrong about me (partially)
as a chemist this doesn't surprise me at all. at every step you'll see, typically, something like 10g of solvent per 1g of product. then there's some solvent being used for purification as well, how much of it depends on technique being used. i doubt that visit of osha is the top concern of cartel lab manager, so these poor sods are going to be soaked in solvents, or at least solvent vapours 24/7. it's the liver that deals with it all and if it can't do it effectively, most notably this happens with chlorinated solvents (cheap, convenient, low boiling: DCM) liver gets fucked and that's the end result. some routes involve such friendly chemicals like benzyl chloride, this won't help either
when i was talking about impurities i was mostly talking about residual iodine, alkyl iodides, some weird phosphorus(III) compounds, occasional aziridine and such. similar compounds were responsible for side effects of a drug most commonly known as krokodil. i forgor about (R)-meth, chemically speaking, both (S)- and (R)- isomers are meth, these just differ in pharmacology, the active being (S)- and (R)- just being decongestant. usual P2P process provides 1:1 mix of them, but separation could probably make the process rather expensive (and what do you do with (R)-meth?). i suspect that instead someone developed an asymmetric P2P process, or something else entirely, which means that big meth labs moved from first year organic chemistry lab level to bsc thesis level. that's a progress, i guess, probably to be accompanied by new and exciting cases of heavy metal poisonings in the future
i understand it's a cultural thing. in US, as i suspect you are american, meth is sold in bulk drug of the poors, and amphetamine is (illegally) sold as pills to stock gamblers^W^W^W traders and SV engineers, that is the rich. this is absolutely not a global situation and for example in my country the street stimulant of choice is amphetamine sold as a bulk powder and i can assure you it can be every bit just as destructive. and this is before you consider things like alpha-pvp that have paranoia as an intended feature and there are people that like this effect specifically. goes without saying that street stimulant users won't be usually very picky about what they will try that day. just in the case it's unclear: i'm not saying that meth is good or that evil psychiatrists poison kids with adhd with drugs, i'm saying that you're underestimating how dangerous amphetamine can be, in some contexts, in comparison to meth.
my source for that is my own degree in organic chemistry, former flatmate that worked in harms reduction organization, and not having my head firmly embedded in my ass. i won't disturb your smug undeserved sense of superiority anymore, have a nice day