It’s getting to be more and more of a pain in the ass to buy cold medicine these days, thanks to laws that try to make it difficult for entrepreneurs to produce large quantities of methamphetamine. The ingredients of interest are apparently pseudophedrine and ephedrine. As a result, my understanding is that meth production is being driven out of the US and into Mexico by these restrictions.
My question: why aren’t enterprising meth cooks endeavoring to synthesize these ingredients on their own? This would give American meth manufacturers a leg up on foreign producers, who have to go to great expense and risk in order to get their finished product across the border into the US. The synthesis process is apparently not a secret. So what are the major hurdles to production of pseudoephedrine/ephedrine on a scale that would satisfy regional and/or national markets for methamphetimine?
Getting the yeasties to do what you want at home would be tricky, and prone to batch to batch variability.
Extracting Pseudoephedrine from garden grown Ephedra sinica would likely prove the easier route.
Just because synthesizing your own ephedrine isn’t as secret, doesn’t mean it’s easy or even do-able at all.
Making a (relatively basic) atomic bomb isn’t a big secret, but obviously that’s not something just anyone can do. An extreme analogy, but it’s a similar concept. Yes, the plans, and in some cases even the supplies, are right there for anyone to use, but that doesn’t mean it will work the way they want.