And torture expert? whilst there are a handfull of shitheads who really have gone out of their way to earn my loathing and anger, I have no desire to set up shop as a torturer. (and no those to whom I'd gladly do such things as to make the vilest of the medieval witch-hunting inquisitors turn pale and puke in their underwear (yes, I meant that, it'd be coming out of the wrong end entirely) were they to witness or hear of the kinds of things these few select individuals would get from me, they'd shit and puke in reverse)
On the whole though, I reckon I'd do far better as resident recreational-medical dual-purpose pharmacist. No rx forms needed, just cash up front, guarantee of no counterfeit recreationals, since I'd KNOW where they came from. Aside from weed, I don't for the vast majority of anything consumed of that nature, take street produce myself. Cocaine (very rarely, if I'm offered, I'll accept but I don't buy the stuff) being the primary exception, and thus far, LSD, since the de novo syntheses of either are extremely demanding multi-step processes. LSD I could make, given the precursors, that is the difficult bit (more or less, the synths aren't what one could call trivial either) but its getting the ergotamine, ergometrine etc. that has to be hydrolyzed to lysergic acid, since you can't just go out and BUY it, you have little choice unless you've underworld contacts in that specific sphere, and I don't. As well of course as the money to pay for their services. The alternative is a massive and involved research program for each and every lysergamide preparing aspirant. I look at that synthesis of less of a 'drug cook' theme and more of..kind of like a monk or nun embarking on their novitiate, aspiring to join the senior ranks of the clergy, with the likely many years it'll take, and dedicated effort, and not least, a goodly helping of pure luck, since you must rely on a fungus, parasitic on grain plants which is sensitive, capricious, not all strains produce, mutatogenic treatment is needed, often repeatedly and with diffeferent, and almost always pretty nasty, toxic, carcinogenic chemicals, and analyzing the results eventually isolating a stable and product
ive organism (ergot fungi, typically, usually either Claviceps purpurea, rye ergot, or Paspalum ergot. C.paspali I'd very much prefer to work with C.paspali, since its main product, paspalic acid, spontaneously isomerises to lysergic acid, whilst with C.purpurea the wee buggers produce an awfully variable amount of ergopeptide alkaloids, consisting of lysergic acid that have to be subjected to careful hydrolysis, using alcoholic KOH typically, and that on an extremely PH-sensitive molecule of great preciousness and which takes masses of effort to obtain so much as a gram (although 1g would be enough to produce a lot of acid tabs/windowpanes/microdots) and which more or less must be had through a capricious, unstable bitchy little sod of an organism from precursors it makes that REALLY aren't nice [ergot poisoning, if nonfatal can take two distinct forms, a convulsive, hallucinatory type in its primary expression, or a dry gangrene form mainly, due to the very potent vasoconstrictor effects of the ergopeptide alkaloids, which in the past, poor peasants, when it wasn't known, had to make do with the leftover, trashy, ergot-riddled flour whilst the nobility took the good stuff, started falling over in seizures, having visions of 'the devil', in the extreme religiose context at the time, and had bits falling off, noses, fingers, toes etc and rotting. So the fermenter tanks and cultures you need to be careful with, very, very careful.
I am..well, I am ready to set foot upon the path, once a couple of pieces of equipment have been bought (a suitable spectrophotometer for detailed, precise analyses of what the biosynthesis process is turning out, performing chemotypes of strains) as well as building some genetic analysis basic equipment for basic genotyping and gaining an idea of what is likely, in mutants.)
I'd sooner work with Paspalum ergot, but I've never seen it. The fates, it seems, wish me to do my work with Claviceps purpurea, the common rye ergot. Got a jar of sclerotia, and have been sampling areas distant from each other to obtain a greater variation of starting genetic diversity within strains and studying for perhaps 5 years. This before I ever picked up a petri dish and decided to make a culture of the organism. I hope I can manage it. I'm not much given to being highly emotional, but if I do prove to myself that I am able to perform this task, even if the result is a single sheet of acid, then it would be a source of immense personal pride in the achievement, taking things from pernicketty fungal sclerotia, plucked from wild grass heads parasitized with the fungus, right the way though to clean, multiply recrystallized perfect needlepoint fluff....shit the mere thought makes my hands shake a little and the mental weight of such an undertaking is immense but damned if I wasted half a decade plus in reading research data and talking to people knowledgeable in the field in question. Better than I may have given up, but I am not the type to do so voluntarily.
And reassuringly gruesome? eh? I just know what caustic tastes like. I've (inadvertently) tasted it in the past, in various concentrations, not to mention (involuntarily and most unwantedly) been got in the eyes with something partially composed of boiling hot concentrated caustic.
Its not very nice, although it isn't awful either. That said I seem to have built up or been born pretty resistant to it. As long as it isn't in the eyes etc., simple skin contact with caustic soda solution is...well I hardly seem to need to wash it off, I DO clean it off but I'll finish up whatever if anything has a greater priority and had work gone into it, first and end up without even redness. I have never had a burn from the stuff in solution. Fused, molten caustic yes, that stuff is nasty, and mixed NaOH-KOH electolytes are even worse, I've had that stuff etch a nickel electrode from rougly 3mm (slightly less imo) to a razor-sharp pointed tip at the contact area within hours. Never had that on me but I've seen what it'll do to metals and to graphite and its not something I want on me in the slightest. (the extreme etching was due to electrolytic action mind you, since it was only the anode that was attacked so viciously, whilst the cathode was in that case, pyrolytic carbon, and the cathode, simply rigged up by wiring a carbon crucible up to serve as the negatively biased electrode and to hold the melt, whilst the cathode was dipped in and fed through a tube in the center of the lid whilst experimenting with methods and cell designs for producing sodium, potassium, alloys of Na and calcium, and NaK alloy, a liquid metal at room temperature, mixed of sodium and potassium, but more reactive, and violently so, than either. I've been able to produce NaK, but only produce and never to capture any, its always gone off in little showers of sparks the moment traces were formed, obvious to see, but too elusive to capture, never got so much as a single little blob of the alloy via an electrolytic process. A shame, as NaOH melts have a very fine critical window temperature wise of around 20 degrees between the melting point of the hydroxide itself, sodium production possible just beyond melting point and 20 degrees higher it just dissolves back into the melt to give a grey, difficultly fusible solid with properties in between sodium and its hydroxide-its caustic, its soluble in water but with some violence in that it'll pop and spark and fizz off hydrogen, the color being a grey-blue to cyan kind of color, but a sodium hydroxide-KOH mixture behaves as a binary eutectic in the correct proportions, which melts at 200 'C rather than the 318 degrees 'C of NaOH alone, and similarly high MP for potash lye alone, when mixed, the two alkali metal hydroxides form a mixture which melts with a vastly depressed melting point. Only difficulty is....NaK. NaK is SO reactive if the experiment is run in air, I've never even been able to get sufficient to hang around for long enough to go 'CRACK!' and fling itself across the room in a fiery trail of molten metal, whereas with sodium, I've had moments in electrolytic processes whereby I've literally had to dive for cover and go for the circuit breakers rather than approach the power supply, to avoid being bombarded with molten sodium. Whilst there are nonelectrolytic methods for making it, that are higher yielding and easier its still fun for those nights I can't sleep and can't find anything else to do, and there is a certain amount of pride to be had in success, since its difficult and has many variables to contend with, such as eutectic mixture use, the critical temperature between melting, getting metal (if you can keep it where you want it without its reacting with stray air and blasting itself across the room in a glowy orange trail of liquid fire) getting little bits vs getting a hailstorm that sounds like machine-pistol fire and then getting nothing at all. And the resistance of the melt adds to the complications, not to mention it changes if the melt ends up getting Na dissolved in it (or K, etc).
Still, a favourite childhood experiment in my younger days and one I still enjoy tinkering with in the hopes of getting a better yield, despite the fact that my electrolytic processes have only returned small beads, there's a thermite-like process and extraction of the slag using boiling 1,4-dioxane that can yield large amounts, and that I have a double-packed container with a 100g slab of sodium, which is quite a lot, as its a very light, low density metal, covered in oil, and vacuum-packed/heat-sealed into an interior package and that stored in an exterior plastic packet filled with some inert gas or other. It's not so much that I need the metal that I like doing the electrolytic processes, I suffer from a depleted stock of neither sodium, nor lithium metal, got plenty of both. And could buy all of the alkali metals and alkaline earth metals if I wanted, bar francium which cannot BE stored, as it is, similaly to astatine, one of the most unstable, highly radioactive elements around bar the superheavy transactinides, that I cannot buy, nor can anybody else, and I'd have to go to some trouble to get hold of radium, and I don't know if I COULD get the metal. I'd not refine it myself, hell no, too radioactive, would contaminate the lab with a single mistake and render it permanently unusable)
It'd have to come from a radium salt, and thats where the difficulty and danger would lie most. I could probably do it. But doing it safely is another matter.
