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A comment on Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business.

Re:Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Busi... by timr on Monday September 30, 2013 @10:45PM (#6473714)
One real problem (that this article got factually wrong) is that phenylephrine (the 'PE' in Sudafed PE) doesn't really work. The literature goes back-and-forth on it, but the consensus seems to be that it's only marginally more effective than placebo. Pseudoephedrine is significantly more effective than both (which, of course, is partly due to its close chemical relationship to methamphetamine...funny how that works).
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Re:Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Busi... by kens on Monday September 30, 2013 @11:33PM (#6473880)
Agreed. For entertainment, see the satirical article "A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine" which notes the difficulty of obtaining psudoephedrine from pharmacies and gives a simple chemical synthesis of it from "readily available" meth.

"We expect that the simultaneous trends of restricting pseudoephedrine sales while N-methylamphetamine becomes less expensive and of higher purity will make the methods presented here increasingly attractive."

http://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Busi... by timr on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @02:34AM (#6474499)
"which notes the difficulty of obtaining psudoephedrine from pharmacies and gives a simple chemical synthesis of it from "readily available" meth"

Ha! It certainly would be a good bit easier to put that hydroxyl group back on than to strip it off in the first place....

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