Walter White outsources production to China

November 25, 2013 4:56 AM

Mike Power's book, Drugs 2.0 was a hugely insightful and interesting overview of the rapidly shifting landscape that is Novel Research Chemicals. At a recent drugs conference, Power presented an overview of his work
posted by PeterMcDermott (14 comments total)

The premise is that legislation is oriented around outlawing specific chemicals and that the chemists can easily procure designer drugs that outfox the letter of the law. This seems only temporary until laws are made to outlaw the feeling of getting high, presuming it can be defined. When this happens it should be plenty obvious that these laws have little do with protecting public health if something can be banned before it is even discovered.
posted by dgran at 5:10 AM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]

The Chinese Empire tried to outlaw discovery for a while. That did not work out too well.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:18 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

Fascinating talk, and amazing that it wasn't necessarily that difficult for that journalist to have a whole new compound synthesized like that. The economics of it alone show why these new compounds keep popping up.
posted by xingcat at 6:38 AM on November 25, 2013

It would be quite neat to develop a QSAR model of the pharmacophore of a series of similar variants of psychoactive compounds (say extacy) and then run a simple substructure search of common commercially available library compounds. You could order in the 100 most positive and test them on willing experimenters. You would probably find some rather interesting new substances.

Note for those people who didn't understand the above I could essentially get a list of 100 likely legal compoounds to test on people in approximetely half an hours work. That is how easy some of this stuff is to do. The hard part of drug discovery is specificity and ensuring safety. If you're not that concerned with safety and the specificity bleed over wouldn't really have any issue it would be fairly simple to make an analogous compound without much trouble.
posted by koolkat at 7:50 AM on November 25, 2013

What a great talk. Well worth the 30 minutes to watch.

He speaks of the clean, professional, efficient Chinese factories, and goes on to contrast with "I wasn't in a field in Colombia surrounded by snipers and dogs..."

It's also Drug War 2.0, and I and doubt that the US, UK, and Canadian governments, for instance, are anywhere near ready to follow the example of Portugal.

Sometimes Drug War 2.0 looks like the Opium Wars of 1839-1860, only high-tech and backwards.
posted by Cookiebastard at 8:05 AM on November 25, 2013 [3 favorites]

It would be quite neat to develop a QSAR model of the pharmacophore of a series of similar variants of psychoactive compounds (say extacy) and then run a simple substructure search of common commercially available library compounds. You could order in the 100 most positive and test them on willing experimenters. You would probably find some rather interesting new substances.

Indeed, like MPTP. You could fund a generation of grants looking at new models of neuroinjury. I think structurally guided synthesis is probably the better way to proceed, until the NIH establishes a National Institute for Pleasure and you can get a grant to go do in vitro/in vivo animal screens. Even the Sasha Shulgin approach of slowly titering dose seems hella scary to me, given the multi-log potency differences seen across many of the known tryptamines.
posted by monocyte at 8:38 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

Hence the willing experimenters. I wouldn't take any of these without at least a two year tox study in rats.
posted by koolkat at 8:42 AM on November 25, 2013

That is actually quite an interesting side effect of the war on drugs. Instead of taking safe well tested and used throughout the lifetime of humanity drugs like cannabis and psilocybin and peyote, you now have people making novel compounds that are untested precisely because they aren't illegal yet. SO on one hand you've got one of the safest (in terms of effective dose vs lethal doce) compounds ever studied against something that has never been made before. This is one of the most tragic outcomes of the drug war for me. People are going to use drugs, just let them and make sure that those drugs are as safe as possible.
posted by koolkat at 8:47 AM on November 25, 2013 [7 favorites]

There are people who try new drugs. At least if you believe Vice.com. Which I wouldn't blame you if you didn't.
posted by lumpenprole at 9:10 AM on November 25, 2013

It would be quite neat to develop a QSAR model of the pharmacophore of a series of similar variants of psychoactive compounds (say extacy) and then run a simple substructure search of common commercially available library compounds. You could order in the 100 most positive and test them on willing experimenters. You would probably find some rather interesting new substances.

You guys should read this. I used to hang out on a forum with the interviewee - he sorta retired because he couldn't get two words past "methyl-" without somebody trying to get it synthed and sold.

And of course there is Alexander Shulgin, not to mention the fully legit academics like David Nichols and John Huffman.
posted by atoxyl at 9:13 AM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]

I may or may not know someone who ordered alpha-methyl-tryptamine from an RC website in the mid-00's before the big federal bust that happened. This individual is happy they suffered no legal repercussions. The individual was pretty certain the substance was safe given that it was a fairly established chemical with a moderately well known profile (already having been described in TIHKaL years before the order).

This individual is sad that methods of obtaining legal safe known chemicals is much more difficult these days and even known "research" chemicals is still difficult to acquire compared to the newer novel compounds - which, is really fascinating when you think about it. By clamping down on the known species, you are forcing an evolution of ever new sub-species.
posted by symbioid at 10:00 AM on November 25, 2013

If real drugs were legal, shit like krokodil and bath salts would never have been invented.
posted by evil otto at 10:45 AM on November 25, 2013

This video was pretty interesting. While we know that making drugs illegal pushes price down, it's not just "the marketeers" selling it who get that benefit, but the people at the root of the supply chain - the farmers themselves. I mean - I knew it in regards to Afghanistan, but I didn't really think about Cocaine in S. America, for example.

The other thing, mentioning the point that the rapid proliferation exists because we continue to crack down, which leads to more frequent releases of less well understood chemicals onto the market.

I just now *got* the concept of the Silk Road name for that service. I mean, there's multiple ways to read it, but tying that in to is ability to buy product via China (even though that wasn't related to Silk Road in any direct way), it's still interesting to think of those connections...
posted by symbioid at 12:29 PM on November 25, 2013

The Chinese Empire tried to outlaw discovery for a while. That did not work out too well.

If organic chemistry is outlawed, only outlaws will have organic chemistry!
posted by Talez at 10:00 PM on November 25, 2013 [1 favorite]