6 Realities of Cooking Illegal Drugs (Not Seen on TV)

A few months before that, I'd done 2CB, a powerful hallucinogen that wasn't technically illegal at the time. It wound up getting banned, and the whole supply dried up. This terrified me; E was already illegal, and I knew there was no guarantee that the feds wouldn't bust whoever was making it for my state. I wasn't willing to live in a world where I couldn't roll my balls off a cliff at a moment's notice.

One day, a friend of mine mentioned in idle conversation that you could use nutmeg to get high. It's true -- I looked it up. Nutmeg contains a psychoactive chemical called myristicin, but what caught my eye was that it's also about 2 percent safrole. It was a revelation. Safrole happens to be one of the main reagents for MDMA (Ecstasy). I thought to myself, "Oh. These aren't manufactured out of thin air. These are from plants."

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Eat about 200 of these, and you'll be ready for Bonnaroo.

I resolved to learn how to make it -- mostly out of idle curiosity rather than criminal intent. I suspect a lot of nerdy kids get into this business because they love drugs and fall down the rabbit hole of studying how all these wacky chemicals affect their brains. One thing leads to another and then, boom, you're committing felonies in real life than most kids barely dare in Grand Theft Auto.

I was at a grocery store one day, dejected and bordering on sober, when I ran into a friend I'd known for years. I'd just started studying chemistry, and I was definitely too lippy about my drug brewin' plans. I lamented that I didn't have the cash necessary to fund my psychedelic start-up. Rather than being properly sketched out, he got really excited and said, "I've got somebody you should meet." And, rather than being properly sketched out, I had him set up a dinner.

He and I met with these Asian guys who didn't speak much English. I'll be referring to them simply as "the Asians" from here on out, because I don't think all of them wound up in prison and it's probably best to not be super specific with this sort of story.

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To the guys who did end up in prison ... best of luck?

So I walked them through what I'd need, while one took notes. He checked the list out with some other cooks, and it seemed legit. So they came back and offered to shotgun me what seemed like a shitload of money. I later found out they were big into the cocaine trade, and the few grand they were throwing my way might as well have been couch change, but at the time, I felt pretty important.

I rented a house and started setting up my lab, buying the best equipment I could and going as overboard as you'd go if a bunch of rich dudes offered to fund your hobby. Whenever I ran out of money, I went back to the Asians and said, "I need something more." I wound up buying a condenser that cost two grand by itself. I bought a high-end Rotovac. I built my own playground, filled with everything I'd ever wanted. In the end, I even had the stuff to start assembling a gas chromatograph. That's like, the Charizard of drug chemistry.

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"I choose you, expensive science box!"

I was worried about using it or selling it, though. The final reaction involved elemental aluminum as a reducing catalyst. To get the aluminum oxide off the aluminum, you use mercury. You have to put the mercury into the reaction vessel, and you clear it out with sodium hydroxide. I wasn't sure if I'd done it right, and since I'd used powdered mercury, it had been invisible from the get-go, so I had to take it on faith that I'd gotten the poison out.

Drug chemists don't exactly occupy an elevated position in society. Some of you might even think I'm a terrible person for getting involved in this at all. But I got into making drugs because I'd had so many good times on drugs. I wasn't about to take the risk that the chemicals I made might hurt people. I had to find some way to test this stuff before I let it out onto the streets.

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I wanted to "test" it via some safer method than, well, this.

So I injected a small amount into a rat. It lived! And it staggered out of the experience with a whole new appreciation for electronic music. I tried it on myself next: 10 mg, then 20, then 50, then 100.

I was with one of my long-time associates when we first realized it worked. We both ran out in the yard, jumping up and down. It was celebration time. We were overcome by the realization of what we'd done, what we were capable of doing. We also may or may not have been on E.

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Probably a little from Column A, a little from Column B.

I ended up destroying that stuff, because I didn't really want to take it, and having anything that powerful is terrifying. Imagine if I'd sneezed on the pile -- a dusting of that stuff gets in your nose, and you're hallucinating for days. Unlike Acid, it's got a low LD50, so a high enough accidental dose could have killed me.

I was also a bit reckless with the dichloromethane. It is a fairly common solvent, but back then, I wasn't aware of how dangerous chlorohydrocarbons could be. It rapidly evaporates, and because I was a lazy teenage drug addict, I wound up leaving it out. It got into my air and, well ... now my vision is pretty bad and I sometimes can't distinguish colors. I found out later that these are classic symptoms of chlorohydrocarbon inhalation.

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Don't huff, kids. It fucks up laser light shows forever.

Eventually I started making MDA. That's basically a faster, off-brand version of Ecstasy. You can go from safrole to MDA in a mere five hours if you use a dangerous reagent named tetronitromethane (TNM). It's more explosive than TNT and it is very, very unstable. You had to make this shit behind a blast shield. The safe temperature range was around 160 degrees Celsius. If the temperature went up slowly, you chucked ice on it. If the temperature jumped abruptly, you had to run like hell, and maybe try to time your slow motion jump with the resulting house explosion.

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You know what they say -- "It's not a drug lab if it can't explode."

I got half the money from what I made. That's a pretty big cut, but the amount doesn't really matter. It's dirty. You can't buy a car with that, you can't put it in the bank, and you can't save up and buy a house. So I went out every day and bought game systems, every game that sounded even remotely interesting (even Ubisoft -- that's how little it mattered), or clothing. As long as it was under $500, no one cared that you paid in cash.

Once, after coming down from a roll, I was struck with the sudden idea to set up an agility course for my dog. I went to several stores and spent about $900 on pieces and equipment, even though I didn't have a good yard for it, nor was my dog particularly agile. I did it because I looked at him lying on the carpet while I was rolling and thought "I want to create a wonderland for you." He sniffed it once and resolved to never go near it again.

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Dogs usually have fairly low standards for "wonderland."

I talked to one Asian about laundering. I was under the Hollywood impression that it was really easy, but it's far more complicated and much, much slower than the movies make it out to be. I'd have to take whatever money I wanted to cycle through a bank and become an investor and equity partner in their business. It seemed like a really bad idea to stick my name on the same legal paperwork as some drug kingpins', so I declined. Better to waste my money on shovelware and abandoned dog parks than provide the DEA with a paper trail.