As far as I can tell LSD is damn hard to make in illicit labs, not only are the precursors heavily controlled and watched and rare in industry(used in stuff like holograms) but the synthesis is not something a high school chemistry student could do. But LSD is easy to find on the darknetmarkets nonetheless.
Fentynal and PCP aren’t as difficult, and they are being made and out there even on the street in certain areas.
But I’ve never seen black market barbs, at all. I’m sure most of the users who remember them fondly are well dying off due to age, but even when they were phased out of medical use in favor of the benzodiazepines(valium, xanax etc) due to safety reasons and there had to be a big market none appeared. If you’re curious apparently it is easy to kill yourself with a barb overdose, while benzos if not combined with other stuff are almost impossible to fatally OD on, which is why the switch happened.
This question was inspired by the recent question about why the beloved Quaaludes(methaqualone) never saw any illicit synthesis even though there was a big market and they were legendary.
I remember asking a second-year chemistry student “How would you make lysergic acid diethylamide?”
He thought for a second, then said “I would take…hey, wait a second, isn’t that LSD?”
Apparently the process involves creating the reaction, then refining, and refining. One of the lab tests he mentioned was to be given an unknown substance, determine what it was mainly, and refine it as pure as you could. Then they marked the stock solution with C14, to catch the cut-throat doctor wanabees with no ethics who would cheat on the test by adding stock solution to make their sample much closer to pure.
This is my impression, my guess - that for most of these chemicals, any interesting chemicals, they are a complex mix. Setting up and controlling conditions to get the precise reaction conditions is difficult. They the results have to be refined through several cycles, because too much of the wrong byproducts will make for a lively trip, ultimately to the morgue. The less concerned amateur chemists probably either don’t know or don’t care to do this step well.
Presumably making barbituates is much more complex than other drugs. The Wikipedia article talks about their extreme toxicity, which probably means making amateur-hour batches far too risky to sell.
Makers of illicit drugs are hardly concerned about their customer’s health - see Krokodil if you want a quick lesson in the trade.
WARNING - avoid photos and videos unless you want to see the flesh falling off living peoples’ arms and legs.
It seems that one step involves adding a volitile hydrocarbon, which is them supposed to be cooked off.
It doesn’t get cooked off - people are injecting lighter fluid and kerosene and who knows what others.
I do, however, want to finally see the recipe for meth - after all the hints:
Ether (who knows what it smells like, and how do they know?)
Sudafed (apparently the starter stock)
And the guy in Florida who stole a tanker trailer of some agricultural chemical and parked on his front yard with a hose into the kitchen - ammonia?
Krokodil is an homemade drug that you can cook on your stove from relatively common products. It’s extremely destrructive because of the shit people use to do it. So, here, the makers and the consumers are one and the same.
I’m guessing that the answer will end up being profit related. If alcohol gives the same effect and is cheap, there won’t be a market for a more expensive product that does the same thing. The same thing will happen if it’s fairly easy to sidetrack prescription pills. If it’s cheaper to finagle or boost quality controlled product, there’s no reason to cook.
Why buy street drugs made of unknown origins when you can buy them online thru questionable pharmacies based out of South America and China? After Quaaludes (Roher 714’s) were banned in the states the market was saturated with a home grown “Soper” powder product that just came in sandwich Glad bags and dealers would buy empty capsules and fill them up themselves. People quickly realized that anyone could put bullshit into a capsule and pass it off as whatever they wanted it to be and the general market crashed. Most people just will not take obviously bootleg drugs (especially women) when an acceptable pharmaceutical product exist unless they are hardcore addicts like crack and meth heads.
LSD was an attempt to synthesize ergotamine, which comes from the fungus. I don’t think it was a successful attempt, however, as ergot and LSD are quite different, if I understand correctly.