Photo via popperking.com
Annons
Annons
You'd have a moderately equipped chemistry lab. Standard glassware to be able to stir things and extract. You need to be able to remove solvent sufficiently, you need to be able to do vacuum insulation. But these are the standard things that an undergrad would learn. And coming out of an undergrad degree, you would probably struggle to replicate it immediately but you'd be familiar with it and if someone gave you a bit of advice you'd be able to replicate it no problem.Okay, so what are the chemicals you'd need to get your hands on?
I'm a little reluctant to speak in great detail. But the information is not hard to find. There are straight forward salts or organic compound solvents that are multi-use, you can source them reasonably easily from suppliers and the internet provides a lot more shady ways, not that I've actually tried or took a look. Let me see if I can see anything on Ebay…yeah, yeah, you can do it.That's so strange I didn't think you could make poppers with chemicals from eBay.
Well I haven't really looked very much but it looks like there's all kinds of stuff you can get. If it came from the US or Estonia it might get picked up through the post but if it was from the UK through Royal Mail it would be private anyway so it's just as good as TNT or Federal Express.How expensive would it be to make it?
I imagine your profit margins would be pretty high. And as you'd be doing it on the sly you wouldn't have to follow fully certified practice, like you'd dump all the waste down the sink, so you wouldn't have all the overheads associated with a normal practice.
Annons
If you ban things compound by compound you'll have to update your list every five minutes. But then you also can't predict what new starter chemicals will be brought in from people within and outside the country that really know their pharmacology. How do you frame legislation in terms of being able to protect people for real – like making the drugs actually safe given how people behave. The demand is there and we know the pharmacology. We know the pharmacology of the class A drugs, cocaine, heroin, and so on but we haven't really begun to understand that what we're doing is opening up a market for other things that are totally unknown.So should we be worried?
My concern is that as you start making certain classes of molecules illegal and difficult to source is that you open the gates to a huge industry simply because it is much more profitable to sell something that is illegal than something you can get from the corner shop. What we are doing is creating extraordinary untapped business opportunities at a time of austerity.More from VICE: Why the Night Is a Vital Part of the Human Experience and Must Be ProtectedClive Martin Remembers Three Years of Big Nights OutWhat Exactly Is Responsible for the Death of So Many British Nightclubs?