[fullspectrumdev]

Contacts for reliable contract synthesis labs in China are kind of a closely held secret.

Before the 2017 “general ban” on psychoactive substances in the UK there was a thriving industry where “entrepreneurs” with the contacts for such labs would hire chemists to find them a new candidate analogue/derivative of say, a stimulant or hallucinogen or whatever, knock together a synthesis route, see if it works, and then have it manufactured in bulk for resale to head shops.

A small number of people got incredibly rich off this, some got busted when their product got banned and they didn’t dump the stock fast enough, but most made fucking phenomenal amounts of money.

The same “trade” carries on in some other European countries to this day, with “new” LSD derivatives cropping up every few months when one is invariably banned.

I vaguely recall there was even a few articles about this whole thing back in the day by some journalists, maybe at Vice or something? They had an interview with one of the chemists.

[Telemakhos]

Perhaps NPR: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/17/916890880/we-are-shipping-to-... ('We Are Shipping To The U.S.': Inside China's Online Synthetic Drug Networks, 2020)

Perhaps NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/world/asia/in-china-illeg... (In China, Illegal Drugs Are Sold Online in an Unbridled Market, 2015)

[pantalaimon]

> The same “trade” carries on in some other European countries to this day, with “new” LSD derivatives cropping up every few months when one is invariably banned.

AFAIU those were all made by Lizard Labs

[DontchaKnowit]

Those were the good ol days for a druggie teenager.

Well "good ol" as in cheap easy access to tons of novel drugs. Which actually made life kind of a living nightmare.

[iancmceachern]

Maybe Hamiltons Pharmacopeia?