Before I had my overload circuit-breaker installation (I.e meds), when I was of the age where parents looked after medical/dr visits, I dipped into my outside-of-box-oddball-autie-talent pool, so to speak, to do what comes naturally, I.e get chemhacking.
Started with the really easy entry-level kinds of cooking projects those new to the art typically try out first, decyclization of Y-butyrolactone with caustic potash to give GHB, did that by the pound using the stove-top and a salted water bath to keep it hot and saponify that lactone, just bung everything, GBL, an alkali metal, or alkaline earth metal hydroxide base, a mixture of mostly MeOH (not needed strictly, but using mostly methanol allows for a quicker yield of product by virtue of allowing for much less water needing to be boiled off)
Hold at reflux for about a half to 3/4 hour, then strip off the methanol/water mixture, once evaporated down to a hypersaline brine-like liquid, pour onto foil-lined baking trays, and leave in the oven with the door wedged open and the flame at its lowest, to drive off the last of the liquid (IMPORTANT! make sure the methanol is evaporated off, before the drying out in the oven, to avoid a fire.)
Then all that needs be done, is to take up the foil and crunch up the chunky crystals of GHB.
Or if no Y-butyrolactone, 1,4-butanediol, or tetrahydrofuran were on the lab shelves, then maybe chloral hydrate from alcohol, direct photocatalyzed halogenation of ethanol under UV irradiation using chlorine gas. Chlorbutol (otherwise known as chlorobutanol) was another really quick, simple, easy sedative, similar to chloral, made by condensing the enolate of acetone, prepared by deprotonating same w/strong base, with chloroform, itself prepared by oxidizing acetone using the haloform rxn, generating the transient-lived dichlorocarbene using hypochlorite/group I metal hydroxide base.
Then one takes the freshly prepared chloroform, and adds it to the acetone enol and base, hold at reflux for a while, using an efficient condenser.
The chlorbutol crystallizes as fine acicular needles which sublime before melting, and possess a very distinctive camphor-like, 'medicinal, antiseptic' type scent. Long, long long duration of action, and it, like chloral hydrate, can tend to repeat on one, with minty camphorish astringent kind of taste if one belches after taking the drug.
What else...ether, that was a fun beginner's synth for both an extremely versatile, useful solvent, and either inhaled or consumed orally it packs a kick that needs experiencing to be believed. Smells lovely too. Synth route I use for EtOEt being to slowly, dropwise addition of anhydrous, or very, very dry ethyl alcohol into hot, concentrated sulfuric acid, distilling the ether off as it forms, although one must maintain the reaction below 150 deg. C lest one ends up merely dehydrating the alcohol to ethylene gas.
Another DIY-ed before-meds solution to insomnia, and fatigue, is tea, brewed from the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, that most famous and easily recognized fungus of the red cap covered in warty white fragments of the velum universale, and having white gills, white stalk possessed of a membranous, flaccid ring, and volva reduced to an enlarged, somewhat rough and warty basal bulb, grows exclusively with its mycorrhizal partner trees, silver birch being by far the most common, but it also grows with pine trees at times, little gnome sitting on the top holding a wee 'lil fishing rod, swearing like a sailor and blaspheming the air blue in fury at having his little wee tiny gnomehome abruptly yoinked out of the ground, dropped into the collecting baskets, then thrown in the oven to be dried crispy
Used, and still do make good use of fly agaric as a hypnotic, sedative, endurance-booster, anti-anxiogenic, and to top off the many uses this wonderful fungus has, a goodly spoonful of the dried, powdered caps works some real magic on the flavoursomeness if thrown into a pot of cooking beef chilli or stew, or sprinkled over a nice big and juicy slab of steak.
It is, however, poisonous, unless prepared correctly, but the mode of preparation is quite simple, consisting of being cleaned, the caps put on foil lined baking trays, and curing with a long, low heat with the oven door slightly ajar, This heat-cure allows for the decarboxylation of a neurotoxin present in A.muscaria called ibotenic acid to the psychoactive muscimol. When used as a cooking spice though, the traces of ibotenic acid left behind act as an agonist of glutamate receptors on the tongue which are responsible for producing the taste known as umami, or savouryness. Brings out the meaty, salty type flavours of the piece of meat like a sort of nature-spawned MSG. Can either drive a man berserkirgang, act as a dissociative psychedelic of a unique stripe (acts as an orthosteric agonist at GABAa receptors, I.e binding at the same site that GABA itself does, unlike say, barbs, benzos and Z-drugs which bind an allosteric site on the GABAa receptor complex distinct from GABA, the native neurotransmitter)
Or turn a simply good, tasty steak to something fucking scrumptious, delish enough to kneecap anybody caught looking hungrily at one's plate
was it something I said?