Heh you'd be surprised what you can make in a couple of days work DD. The investment in precursors is usually trivial. Was going to use ebay as a really rough guide, not that I'd (yeah, yeah, I see the puns already) expose myself for a cheap buck if I were in that field. But while the best price on there now is almost 90 dollars/100ml of nitroethane, have seen it go for about 20 a liter inc. shippin and somewhere around 12-15 GBP for a liter of top notch benzaldehyde. All thats needed from there is some glacial acetic acid, some ferric chloride (only a few grams a liter of FeCl3 hydrate are needed at most, its catalytic, although not worth the price saving the iron based oxide wastes), iron metal powder and hydroxylamine. Already have iron dust, GAA I use as a solvent frequently enough, hydroxylamine, not costed it recently but already have plenty of the HCl salt, some ammonium formate as well, which can be made from fertilizer, lye and kitchen kettle descaler if you were going to do it on the cheap and didn't have standards. Formic acid isn't expensive any how.
Plus an amine base, a pretty good combination in triethylenetetramine (made into the acetate salt by dissolving the freebase amine in GAA) plus about 20% of a secondary amine base of a cyclic nature, together the two it seems make rather a good Knoevanagel catalyst and the solvents for workup, that can be recycled by distillation, after washing and drying.
Oh, and a microwave oven, a non-electronic thermometer, flask, a piece of unused kitchen towel or bog roll to prevent P2NP fumes vaporizing out and exerting a teargas effect on anyone in the vicinity not wearing sealed goggles, and a gas mask. The thermometer needing to be of the alcohol type given liquid metal is not the kind of thing you want in a microwave.
Near quantitative yields done solventless or in a little additional nitroethane that is later recycled by vacuum distillation. Solvents needed for recrystallization, all in all starting from scratch with NO resources other than a microwave and some bog roll, I should imagine one could get everything you needed to make a kg of racemic methamphetamine or amphetamine, N-ethylamphetamine if you've got some flair for novelty and a nice product without the rough edges of meth but with a good deal more potency than straight primary amine, via P2P formation with iron, catalytic FeCl3 in either conc. HCl or in GAA, extraction with dichloromethane, again recyclable via distillation using catalytic transfer hydrogenation to reduce P2P ketoxime to amphetamine, or borohydride, molecular sieves and ethylamine made from reduction of nitroethane to prepare it in the absence of diethylamine or triethylamine, or, go by reduction of the double bond in P2NP to the equivalent phenylnitropropane using 3.5-4 molar equivalents of sodium borohydride with respect to the P2NP (prevents Michael addition of 1-phenyl-2-beta-nitropropene and 1-phenyl-2-beta-nitropropane) followed by the use of iron, ferric chloride in glacial acetic acid, 80-85 'C temperature range, I should imagine, for the acidic iron reduction and reduce directly to amphetamine. Not sure how that'd work out price range wise, but at least 150 percent, outlay of a few hundred, and 150 % would be mates rates, and considering the product would not be cut, stepped on, fucking contaminated with inert garbage to pad it out. Which as a chemist, the thought of is quite honestly enough to make me almost choke on my protein shake in disgust. And I certainly would have no part in it if I were in such a line of work, and I wouldn't sell product to anybody that did, or at most, grams at high prices, and they'd have to suck it otherwise because personal supply is all I could logically speaking, guarantee would be remaining uncut.
I'd not have my good name befouled, is what I mean.
Still, as a chemist I can definitely appreciate the sorts of profit margins can be accessible. If I were to turn to such a line of employment that is. Few hundred quid start up costs, initial profits sunk right into the next batch, plus a bit of profit, and buying better equipment etc., and anyone interested in the amphetamines business could find themselves making a tidy sum. Street garbage thats 10% product, 90% cut, or even half that if its really shit, at the worse end goes for a tenner a gram! for even an oz thats 280 quid to sink in if it were garbage, 400-500 if you were gonna properly do things, and it all be uncut, hell, more if you were willing to spend the time resolving the enantiomers to give pure dextro- using enantiopure tartaric acid for selective crystallization.
Don't ask me how I know such things. It's just the sort of knowledge a competent chemist would have, and of course if one already had the equipment, never mind much of the supplies to make it, or all of them, or make a selection, like a cheese board, only more of a speed-board
....that'd be the initial investment taken care of.
Shit, I shouldn't think about such things, because the more I actually crunch the numbers the nicer it looks haha. Not that I'd ever do such a thing myself of course. But even doing excellent pricing from a consumer point of view and moving uncut stuff by the oz and by the key, that'd be very good work, saving society from shitty amphetamines one member at a time, with clean product not made via a mercury salts-aluminium based reductive amination process using P2P, but with mercury-free processes, CTH or borohydride and then acidic iron reduction P2NP>P2NPane>amphetamine that'd work out pretty profitable DD.
Why, thinking of taking it up as a line of work?
