Vinyl disposable gloves safe?

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Organic chemistry is my field but it has had to extend to a fair bit of biology as well.

Cool. And what kind of stuff do you do with organic chemistry?
Do you teach it or do you do experiments? Chemistry would also have interested me unfortunately I sucked at it.

I mainly teach, but not as much as I used to, unfortunately.

Cool. Could you also produce meth if you had the labs and the necessarychemicals? I'm just asking out of curiousity. Do you know breaking bad? I just ask myself would every good chemist know how to make high quality crystal meth?

Yes, any good organic chemist could do that (but of course doesn't).Drug labs often recruit recent chemistry graduates to do the work. They are the fall guys who are there when the lab is raided - the boss is never there.

Woah. So you're saying that you could produce meth right away whenever you wanted or would you also first have to look up the necessary precursors and the different steps in the production and all that? And would it really be possible to produce meth with is 99% pure like in breaking bad? I mean is the meth which a chemist makes better than the meth which a non-chemist makes?

The skill of a synthetic organic chemist is in designing ways to make compounds, even ones that have never been made before. However if something has already been made and the procedure is published, it usually makes sense to do the same rather than re-invent the wheel.Getting high purity is usually just a matter of applying proper purification techniques at each step. Street drugs are nearly all made by people with at least some chemical training, but they may cut corners and not purify their compounds properly. In addition, practically all of them are deliberately 'cut' by adding something like sugar, to maximise profits.

Could you also make lsd or mdma?Or would this simply be too complicated or is there no such thing as too complicated if you have the equipment and the ingredients?

There's time, too, and cost. Methamphetamine is easy, which is why it's the one that most backyard drugs labs are making. But all the MDMA (a little more complicated) and LSD (a lot more complicated) that are on the streets are made synthetically in labs. Cocaine, on the other hand, though it can be made synthetically, is much cheaper to get from coca leaves.

But the normal LSD isn't pure right?I saw a documentary about LSD and they showed a certain lab which has the license to produce a certain amount of LSD for medical experiments and their LSD is supposedly also totally pure which indicates that ordinary LSD is not pure. I wonder why. Do the people in the labs who produce street LSD not care about purity or do do they suck at making pure LSD?

As I mentioned before, it's partly a matter of doing it properly versus cutting corners, and partly a matter of deliberate dilution. People who make street drugs aren't subjected to legal quality standards, so they just aim for maximum money from minimum work.

I see. Damn, being a chemist must be cool. It's kinda like being MacGyver where you can make stuff out of other stuff which normal people can't do. Isn't this a cool feeling?

I can't say I've ever thought of myself as having supranormal powers. :smile:

But couldn't you also come up with MacGyver stuff in situations like for example when you're trapped in a basement and have to escape somehow and then build a bomb with a few ingredients you find in there? Or do you know how to make gunpowder or would you also have to look it up?

I haven't seen any of the MacGyver episodes but I saw a Mythbusters episode where they tried out some of MacGyver ploys and they didn't work. :smile:

In fiction you can happen to have useful things around and make it plausible that they happen to be there. However in real life it is very unlikely that useful things would be available in the confines of, say, a basement, especially if several things all have to be present by chance.

I know how to make gunpowder off the top of my head, but I'd have to look up the proportions.

I remember absolutely nothing i ever learned in school about chemistry and i had this for 6 years! That's depressing. This makes me feel dumb. Every kid in the 5th grade knows more about this than i do. back then i also didnt like it but now it bothers me. i skimmed through a chemistry book recently and didnt understand anything. i think even now i couldnt teach it to myself.

I'm sure you're not alone in not understanding chemistry.