

Uncle Fester: I’ve been getting emails here for, oh, about the past month or so. Ever since they made it illegal in Britain there, people have been inquiring as to how to go about cookin’ it… yup. By weight, mephedrone is much less potent than methamphetamine—it seems like small-scale production would be impractical.
Well, impractical here in the US… People have been contacting me from all over the world. Lord knows where the hell they’re from. When you first published Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture it allowed laymen to make their own meth and free themselves from dependence on gangs and drug dealers. I find the do-it-yourself ethos of the meth cook very empowering.
Well, you know China, man. You talk to the right people over there, toss them a couple dollars, and they’ll mislabel drums for you. That’s where a lot of raw materials come from now for large-scale production—they go to China. Who’s going to sit there extracting nasal decongestants when you can get something unscheduled whipped up by the Chinese? The drums they ship out have labels that… well… the labels don’t match the contents! [maniacal laughter] But how do you feel about clandestine—
The industrialization of the field? Yes, exactly.
I preferred it when it was mom-and-pop. Back in the heyday in the mid-90s you could walk down to the grocery store and the pharmacy and everything you needed was 1-2-3, oh, hey, you’re all set and ready to go make some meth. But now, the absolute strongest iodine tincture you can find on the shelf is 1 percent. Well, that’s not very useful now! You have to show ID in order to get these pseudo-ephedrine pills, you know, and it’s become a very troublesome process to do here in the US on a mom-and-pop scale. And that’s what you got to account for the industrialization there… We’ve come to a point where buying home-cooked methamphetamine is essentially a patriotic act.
It should have a sticker: “Made in the USA.” Despite the fact that mephedrone is almost certainly cardiotoxic and impractical for small-scale manufacture, how would one go about cooking up a batch?
If one cooks benzaldehyde with xylene rather than toluene, then methyl substitution on the benzene ring will be assured. Both are hardware-store paint solvents and very easily available at dirt-cheap prices. The method I would choose is given in my book and detailed on a one-gallon scale using a car-battery charger and some lead metal sheet plus some hardware-store permanganate— Purrrrrrmanganate?
What was that there? Sorry, meow-meow joke.
Oh, OK. So you’ve got the permanganate along with some hardware-store sulfuric-acid drain opener. The added ingredient is homebrew-beer-shop sodium metabisulfite, which is used to disinfect brew kettles before making a batch of beer or wine. I’ll spare all the details, but it is just as simple as that to produce para-methyl-benzaldehyde. Using an excess of the xylene would assure that only one of the methyl groups on the xylene gets oxidized to benzaldehyde. Production of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from the made benzaldehyde is a bit more complex, both equally filled with hardware-store supplies. That would give the ephedrine or pseudoephedrine starting material that one could then oxidize to mephedrone, and all from scratch off the store shelf. Bravo.
Where there’s a will there’s a way—to cook up speed! Disclaimer: Don’t do any of this, obviously.
