Word: underground
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...past few months, it's become nearly impossible to buy Ketaset in New York City's underground drug market. Made by Fort Dodge, an Iowa-based pharmaceutical firm, Ketaset is a brand of ketamine, a compound that blocks certain neuroreceptors, causing hallucinations in high doses and, in lower doses, a fuzzy dissociation--like the warmth of a couple of Jim Beams. Legally, it's used as an anesthetic. Illegally, one snorts ketamine because the fuzziness lasts half an hour and doesn't produce bourbon's four-Advil hangover...
...compounds do occasionally come from underground drug labs or, like MDMA (ecstasy), are rediscovered after years of being ignored in scientific literature. In this world, no one is held in greater esteem than Alexander Shulgin...
Shulgin is a biochemist who once studied psychedelics for Dow Chemical. Now 75, Shulgin has synthesized hundreds of compounds in the smelly lab in the woods behind his California home. He and his wife Ann, a therapist, have published two books that are the bibles of underground drug research: PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) and TIHKAL (Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved). Many of the drugs that have emerged from underground labs can be traced to well-thumbed copies of the Shulgins' books...
...drugs that appear on the market usually do so after underground chemists read scientific papers and decide to cook something up. Scientists studying how cocaine works in the brain, for example, have developed a version 100 times more powerful. The recipe is available in academic journals, waiting to be exploited...
...chemicals needed to synthesize such drugs are tracked by authorities, a change from the Shulgins' day. And even if the ingredients were widely available, the scientific expertise is not. According to David Nichols, a student of Shulgin's who is now a professor of chemistry at Purdue, "The underground chemist is typically not going to discover a completely new psychoactive substance. The kinds of things that are easy to make, by and large, have been made...