Over-the-counter substance: Encyclopedia II - Over-the-counter substance - Chemicals

Over-the-counter substance - Chemicals

Over-the-counter chemicals may be sold without much suspicion. Many chemicals are becoming harder to get due to regulations designed to thwart underground drug and explosives laboratories. Underground chemists have become exceedingly efficient in extracting essential chemicals from very ordinary items, and using very ordinary items to yield illicit chemicals:

• Ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from cough medicine for methamphetamine or methcathinone
• Potassium permanganate (a filter treatment and water conditioning agent) for methcathinone
• piperidine from pepper for PCP
• safrole from sassafras oil for MDMA
• myristicin from nutmeg oil for MMDA
• benzaldehyde from bitter almond oil for amphetamines
• cinnamaldehyde from cinnamon for allybenzene for phenylacetone for methamphetamine
• Sulfuric acid from Drain Cleaner or Car Batteries
• Acetone and Hydrogen peroxide for Acetone peroxide
• Glycerin and Nitric acid for Nitroglycerin

Other over-the-counter drugs are freely available, although not marketed as drugs. For example,

• Morning glory seeds are sold for their gardening purposes, but can be used recreationally as a hallucinogenic drug due to the LSA they contain.
• Nutmeg has also been used to some extent as a hallucinogenic drug, but is considered undesirable to most recreational drug users.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Chemicals", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki