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DigitalRaven posted:Not strictly dangerous, but one of the best chemistry papers I've read for a while: A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine Holy poo poo that's amazing.
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Feb 15, 2015 05:19
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Code Jockey posted:Holy poo poo that's amazing. Educate us plebes please. I looked at it and the authors are funny but I don't know if it is joke chemistry or why.
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Feb 15, 2015 06:15
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Ultimate Mango posted:Educate us plebes please. I looked at it and the authors are funny but I don't know if it is joke chemistry or why. The joke is that pseudoephedrine became tightly controlled to prevent people from making methamphetamine with it. So now if you have a cold and want some sudafed it's easier to just by some meth and work backwards.
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Feb 15, 2015 06:17
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There were a lot of other good lines in there too, really. Read it carefully instead of just looking at the pictures, they seem dry until you realize he is actually comparing lab reagent supplier quality and consistency to street drugs.
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Feb 15, 2015 07:29
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quote:While N-methylamphetamine itself is a powerful decongestant, it is less desirable in a medical setting because of its severe side effects and addictive properties [3]. Such side effects may include insomnia, agitation, irritability, dry mouth, sweating, and heart palpitations. Other side effects may include violent urges or, similarly, the urge to be successful in business or finance. 
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Feb 15, 2015 10:04
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Phanatic posted:The joke is that pseudoephedrine became tightly controlled to prevent people from making methamphetamine with it. So now if you have a cold and want some sudafed it's easier to just by some meth and work backwards. For me too it was mixing up pseudo and meth and realizing a ways in "lmao wait this isn't making meth, this is making medicine out of meth, that's hilarious" Also Phanatic posted:The joke is that pseudoephedrine became tightly controlled to prevent people from making methamphetamine with it. So now if you have a cold and want some sudafed it's easier to just by some meth and work backwards. Also yeah some great humor
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Feb 15, 2015 10:11
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quote:In our search for sources of N-methylamphetamine we have 
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Feb 15, 2015 15:16
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I have a pretty ignorant question, are there any sort of recreational drugs that are still used for medical purposes? Such as weed for cancer patients etc?
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Feb 15, 2015 16:39
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Lots, starting with morphine. Various tranquilizers and anesthetics, stimulants. There are a lot.
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Feb 15, 2015 16:43
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Plenty of anti-depressants too. Diazepam especially. In fact, most benzodiazepines. Gyro Zeppeli has a new favorite as of 17:01 on Feb 15, 2015 |
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Feb 15, 2015 16:58
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Most recreational drugs started out in medical uses, that's how they got developed. Indeed nicotine and alcohol are about the only recreational drugs I can think of without some sort of medical use of which I'm aware other than the treatment of their own addictions. Weed for cancer patients is just the start, hell, marijuana is one of the few drugs which was almost exclusively recreational from Victorian times until very recently and is just coming back into fashion as a medical drug.
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Feb 15, 2015 17:52
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thespaceinvader posted:Most recreational drugs started out in medical uses, that's how they got developed. Indeed nicotine and alcohol are about the only recreational drugs I can think of without some sort of medical use of which I'm aware other than the treatment of their own addictions. e: I can't come up with any non-recreational use for it that involves consumption though. Collateral Damage has a new favorite as of 18:17 on Feb 15, 2015 |
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Feb 15, 2015 18:00
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I didn't think of disinfection, but yeah, that's valid. Just nicotine then. Maybe stuff like khat as well. But most of the well-known western recreational drugs are repurposed medicines.
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Feb 15, 2015 18:07
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I've heard they used to use whiskey to treat diabetes before insulin was figured out.
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Feb 15, 2015 18:08
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thespaceinvader posted:I didn't think of disinfection, but yeah, that's valid. Just nicotine then. Maybe stuff like khat as well. But most of the well-known western recreational drugs are repurposed medicines. Cocaine is both an anesthetic and vasoconstrictor, so it's ideal for some types of eye surgery to minimize bleeding.
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Feb 15, 2015 18:14
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thespaceinvader posted:Just nicotine then. Wikipedia posted:The tobacco smoke enema was the principal medical method to resuscitate victims of drowning in the 18th century.  Dunno if THAT counts, though.
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Feb 15, 2015 18:25
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Ethanol is used to treat methanol and other toxic alcohol poisonings. More so in developing countries now, since there are better treatments that aren't always available there, but it does work.
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Feb 15, 2015 18:32
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Default Settings posted:
Can't tell if this counts as blowing smoke up your rear end, or out it.
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Feb 15, 2015 20:13
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And you can actually get legal methamphetamine, if you have really severe ADD issues. Most of the drugs that people use have legitimate medical uses. They also make you feel really good, and they're eventually pretty destructive if you keep taking them.
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Feb 15, 2015 20:16
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WarpedNaba posted:Can't tell if this counts as blowing smoke up your rear end, or out it. Hopefully, if it has to happen at all, both.
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Feb 15, 2015 20:23
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Nicotine was also used as an insecticide for a long time.
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Feb 15, 2015 20:37
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Shanakin posted:Nicotine was also used as an insecticide for a long time. Still is, I thought.
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Feb 15, 2015 20:41
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Collateral Damage posted:Alcohol (ethanol etc) is used for disinfection, and has tons of industrial uses. Methanol poisoning. http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1174890-treatment quote:Antidote therapy, often using ethanol or fomepizole, is directed towards delaying methanol metabolism until the methanol is eliminated from the patient’s system either naturally or via dialysis. Like methanol, ethanol is metabolized by ADH, but the enzyme’s affinity for ethanol is 10-20 times higher than it is for methanol. Fomepizole is also metabolized by ADH; however, its use is limited because of high cost and lack of availability.
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Feb 15, 2015 21:12
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SymmetryrtemmyS posted:Still is, I thought. It is. Water that has had a bunch of cigarette butts soak in it for a couple of days is awesome against aphids. A spritz with a spray bottle is all it takes.
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Feb 15, 2015 21:18
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I know there used to be nicotine insectide sprays out there that had warnings on them saying that they should only ever be used by smokers (because their lungs are more used to getting 10 packs worth of cigarettes in one go).
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Feb 15, 2015 22:19
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This looks like a good thread to repost something I put in the (now goldmined) Bizarre History thread back in 2009. Since the substance has come up in recent pages, it's particularly germane, as this is a story about aqua regia, or nitro-hydrochloric acid, which has been used since alchemical times to dissolve gold and other precious metals. I pieced it together from various poorly sourced wikipedia pages which have since then become a lot more thoroughly written. Physicists Are Awesome and Chemists Are Awesomer Much like the Soviets with Lysenkoism, the Nazis had their own nutty ideas about what "proper science" should be. In the Nazis' case, of course, this meant "no Jewish science", like say Einstein's. It also meant "no receiving Nobel Prizes". See, back in 1935, when notorious pacifist and anti-Nazi journalist Carl von Ossietzky was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Goebbels first tried asking him nicely (because the dude was in a concentration camp and coughing up blood from TB) to decline the prize, you know, in the interest of the Reich. But Ossietzky thought long and hard about this and came respectfully to a different conclusion, saying: badass posted:After much consideration, I have made the decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize which has fallen to me. I cannot share the view put forward to me by the representatives of the Secret State Police that in doing so I exclude myself from German society. The Nobel Peace Prize is not a sign of an internal political struggle, but of understanding between peoples. As a recipient of the prize, I will do my best to encourage this understanding and as a German I will always bear in mind Germany's justifiable interests in Europe. Upon which the Nazis pitched a fit, blacked-out all mention of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize from German media, and decreed that no German should ever accept any Nobel Prize from that point on ever. This also applied to Nobel Prizes that had been issued to Germans prior to that date, which good German scientists were now supposed to turn in. Physicists Max von Laue (who had won the Prize in 1914 for figuring out how to diffract X-rays) and James Franck (who had won it in 1925 for doing an experiment that helped confirm Bohr's model of the atom) wanted to hang on to theirs and screw the state. Understandably: Laue was a big-time mover-and-shaker at the University of Berlin and buddy of Einstein and several other high-profile Jewish scientists, one of which was Franck. Laue kept putting his thumb in the eye of the Nazis at every opportunity, snubbing the favored Nazi physicist Johannes Stark from high career placement and making sure everyone knew how little regard he had for Hitler's treasured "Deutsche Physik", which by definition involved ignoring all the contributions made by his Jewish colleagues. The Nazis kept trying to keep him quiet, but nothing worked short of Stark getting promoted over his head and immediately firing Laue, which is what he did. So now there were these two Nobel Prizes in Germany, held by disgraced but ballsy physicists, who wanted to do their part to make sure the Nazis didn't get away with erasing that particular bit of history that they had their names on. They couldn't send gold out of the country (a capital crime). They couldn't simply hide them (that hadn't turned out well for a lot of other people). They couldn't harness the power of Einstein's relativity and send the medals to another dimension. But where physics couldn't save their medals, chemistry could. Possibly through Franck's work on the Bohr atomic model, Laue and Franck came into contact with George de Hevesy, a Hungarian chemist who had worked with Bohr and become such a close colleague of his that de Hevesy had a lab at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. When the Nazis invaded Denmark in 1940, and it was inevitable that the Germans would pick up every illicit bit of gold they could find, especially gold owned by Jews, and especially gold in the form of Nobel Prizes that Germans weren't supposed to have, de Hevesy put into action a cunning plan: take the two physicists' Nobel Prizes and dissolve them in aqua regia. After a long and tense afternoon, he ended up with a big beaker full of orange liquid, which he stuck on a shelf which was crowded with hundreds of other jars of miscellaneous unidentifiable reagents. Here is my artistic interpretation of de Hevesy being questioned by the Nazis when they came stomping through the Bohr Institute looking for contraband:  After the war, de Hevesy came back to his lab and found all his beakers and jars undisturbed, right where he'd left them, including the jar containing about two thirds of a pound of dissolved gold. He did some chemist magic and precipitated out all the gold dust and gave it back to the Nobel Foundation, who recast it into medals. Laue and Franck got their prizes back. De Hevesy won one of his own several years later (not for this stunt, remarkably, though my suspicion is that the Nobel guys were just looking for an excuse to give him one). And Einstein's Jewish Science went on to be confirmed time and again, including just recently in space. I've never seen this story dramatized, though it seems like there's a movie in it somewhere. I'll be submitting my screenplay, AQUA REGIA, to various agents in the community shortly. Aw gently caress, looks like NPR beat me to the punch.
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Feb 15, 2015 22:39
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Booze is good for antifreeze poisoning, too, since the ethylene glycol is pretty much two ethanols going rear end to rear end.
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Feb 15, 2015 22:41
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DemeaninDemon posted:Booze is good for antifreeze poisoning, too, since the ethylene glycol is pretty much two ethanols going rear end to rear end. Yeah, that's one of the toxic alcohols I was referring to.
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Feb 15, 2015 23:02
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Sometimes I wonder why we have shrines to gods and not men. Imagine going to the Relative church, paying $5 for a glass die to roll on the table, listening to the preacher rattle off a few interesting facts on science, then having lunch in the cafe opposite. Only an hour, and all proceeds go to a scholarship fund for innovative fields.
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Feb 16, 2015 00:39
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Because science does not need faith or worship. It just is.
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Feb 16, 2015 01:02
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WarpedNaba posted:Sometimes I wonder why we have shrines to gods and not men. Imagine going to the Relative church, paying $5 for a glass die to roll on the table, listening to the preacher rattle off a few interesting facts on science, then having lunch in the cafe opposite. Only an hour, and all proceeds go to a scholarship fund for innovative fields. You just described a museum.
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Feb 16, 2015 01:35
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KillHour posted:You just described a museum. Well dang, I thought I was onto something 
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Feb 16, 2015 01:55
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Shanakin posted:Nicotine was also used as an insecticide for a long time. I've got a big ol' bottle of nicotine to make my own ecig juice and can confirm that it kills the poo poo out of ants. KozmoNaut posted:It is. Water that has had a bunch of cigarette butts soak in it for a couple of days is awesome against aphids. Ewwwww http://www.nudenicotine.com/product/nicotine-sample-request/
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Feb 16, 2015 02:02
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Fat_Cow posted:I have a pretty ignorant question, are there any sort of recreational drugs that are still used for medical purposes? Such as weed for cancer patients etc? Ecstasy was originally created for PTSD patients. poo poo works a little too well and now it's scheduled.
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Feb 16, 2015 07:51
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Lots, starting with morphine. Various tranquilizers and anesthetics, stimulants. There are a lot. Heroin, too. IIRC it was originally designed as a better and less addictive morphine derivative, and while the "less addictive" - part kind of failed, it is a rather decent painkiller. I believe the UK prefers it where most countries use morphine.
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Feb 16, 2015 09:53
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I believe it was intended as a cure for morphine addiction, in which function it performs admirably.
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Feb 16, 2015 09:59
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The Lone Badger posted:I believe it was intended as a cure for morphine addiction, in which function it performs admirably. Going by their original ad copy: quote:HEROIN-HYDROCHLORIDE Given that morphine is still used as a cough suppressant, I imagine it worked perfectly fine - apart from the entire addiction thing, ofc.
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Feb 16, 2015 13:58
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Also a great diarrhea cure! poo poo, opium has been one of the few cure-alls that kinda works since at least Ancient Greece.
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Feb 16, 2015 14:07
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It doesnt cure poo poo. It is really good at alleviating symptoms though.
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Feb 16, 2015 14:24
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Rigged Death Trap posted:It doesnt cure poo poo. to be fair, for most of human history the difference between treating the illness and the symptoms hasn't really been an obvious one
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Feb 16, 2015 14:29
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