Know anything about chemistry? Please help me make drugs.

Hey. I'm writing a thing that involves a fictional drug, and since I know nothing whatsoever about chemistry I'd be really grateful if someone who does could help make the manufacturing process sound plausible. I won't have to describe every molecule, but I need to be able to summarize in broad strokes the steps involved, and it would be great to have a few details to throw in here and there for authenticity.

As I've currently written it, the process goes as follows:

1) A mind-altering venom is extracted from the animal that produces it. This raw substance is a thick milky liquid that couldn't get you high unless you poured it straight into a specific part of your brain.

2) Some people with a basic understanding of chemistry uses various equipment to biosynthesise and then separate it, binding the active substance in gritty, slag-like lumps referred to as 'precipitate'. These could technically be ground up and snorted, but it would be too coarse to be properly absorbed, so you'd need a lot of it to get noticeably high.

3) The precipitate is bagged and placed in high-tech freezers that subject it to very specific temperatures for very specific amounts of time, frost-weathering it into a fine, beige and easily snortable powder. This is the final product.

Does the overall process sound remotely plausible, and if not, what should I change? Have I blatantly misused any of the technical terms? What would be the names of some believable pieces of equipment in step 2?

Thanks a bunch for any help!

Alright, your step 1 is pretty good, and your use of term precipitate is close enough to the mark that I'd let it slide. The problem is that your steps 2 and 3, while fine on their own, don't really fit together without a little finagling. Namely, keeping the temperature the same while changing the state from liquid to solid is a chemical process, and what you've described is a physical process. However, get rid of the term biosynthesis completely, or at least the bio part, as that means the reaction is occurring inside a living organism.

Now, if you've got a synthesis reaction, that means you've got little molecule+little molecule=big molecule. Depending on how detailed you want to get and what the active groups are on the precursor molecule, you can literally use anything you want and, in theory, get anything you want, including your solid. As for the freeze-weathering, come to think of it, you don't need that at all. If you're trying to break it into small pieces, just chop it up cocaine-style, and if you want a reaction that happens only at low temperatures, well, that doesn't exist. Hope this helps!

That does help a lot. Thanks! While step 3 doesn't have to be freezing, it would be convenient if there was a necessary last step that required the product to be placed inside some big and expensive machine. What might be a better choice? An oven?

Yeah, an oven set to a low temp would work best. High temperatures degrade large organic molecules into a mess, like cooking an egg.

All right. Thanks!

But even if step 2 can theoretically involve anything, there must be some tools and methods that make more sense than others given the circumstances, right? To reiterate, those circumstances are:

A biological psychoactive venom (which takes the form of a thick milky liquid) is synthesized and separated to bind the active substances into gritty lumps, which after being treated in ovens and chopped up become a (beige) powder that's suitable for snorting.

Like, are there any particular tools or methods that are commonly used when synthesizing biological fluids? Do the traits - gritty, milky, psychoactive etc. - imply components or types of components that are usually handled in a certain way? Are there any relevant standard methods for solidifying certain substances in a liquid?

Basically, I'd like to be able to toss in a few things like '...the [machine] was [doing a thing]...' or '...while they poured [stuff] into the [other stuff]...' in a way that sounds about right.

One thing to keep in mind: you can't exactly go into detail on this or the Moral Guardians will bring out the Torches and Pitchforks. You can get around this by mislabelling, say, the Anarchist Handbook or use And Some Other Stuff ala media like The Last of Us that has accurate yet incomplete guides to explosives, et al.

@tsstevens: I don't really agree. As long as it's clear that all the components involved in the production of the drug are fictional, what does it matter that we described the process in detail?

@Artistic Platypus: If the venom can be synthesized in a lab, then having it be a venom seems extraneous. If you want it to convey it as dangerous to human health, call it a Toxin. Otherwise, rather than synthesizing it in the lab, have the drug producers buy it from some shady farm or maybe even start one of their own.

Might I make a suggestion about changing the production process a bit. As I understand, you want the drug to be usable at step 2 while having drawbacks and to incorporate machines into the process.

1. Extract the venom from the organism.

2. Derivatize the venom (preferably in the presence of an enzyme) with a compound of your choice to give it the ability to pass through the blood brain barrier. At this stage, the compound itself is usuable, but due to the aqueous medium of the reaction and the compound's hygroscopic nature, the drug is bound to a lot of water molecules, making it a wet sludge. It has to be injected, but because of the water molecules attached, how much of the drug takes effect is variable, possibly resulting in overdoses if the customer receives a higher grade of the compound. The compound also decomposes when heated, so you can't just throw it on the frying pan and dry it.

3. Dry the compound in a vacuum evaporator and later spray a water resistant coating on it. Now the product is ready.

edited 1st Aug '14 2:26:02 AM by Elfhunter

Mannitol or perhaps a fictional equivalent might be of some use.

@ OP: No thanks, those drugs sound like they would be illegal and I don't want to go to jail.

@tsstevens: Considering the first step to making the drug is 'extract a fictional venom from a fictional animal', I don't think there's a huge risk that anyone would try to do it at home.

@Elfhunter: Damn, that's... That's amazing. It does everything I need it to, plot-wise, and it sounds convincing as hell. Thanks a lot!

@carbon-mantis: Thanks for the tip! I'll try to make sense of hat that is and what it does when I'm less tired.

So... If I interpret it right, mannitol could be the compound with which the venom is derivatized in Elfhunter's step 2? That's lovely. However, I'd still like to be able to flesh out the process a bit more, and my clueless attempts at googling hasn't given me anything I could use without fear of making a fool of myself.

So pardon me for being so needy, but are there any specific actions, machines or pieces of equipment that I can plausibly namedrop in relation to the derivatization? Or, for that matter, the process of synthesizing the mannitol.

~Reads Title~

........

You knew exactly what you were writing when you came up with this topic didn't you?

Right. I should make some suggestions, although I don't know anything about Chemistry myself.

I'm willing to bet there's an internet site that can give you some good guidelines, because these days, there's always an internet site for something.

Have you ever actually done a drug like that OP?

I ask because it seems like very few of you in this thread even have the slightest idea what you're talking about, but what you described in the first post vaguely resembles DMT extraction.

Protip: Check erowid.

edited 23rd Aug '14 1:44:37 AM by Thelostcup

I have neither done nor made any hard drugs, no. Especially not any based on fictional substances extracted from fictional animals. My lack of knowledge of how they're made is the reason why I started this thread. My lack of knowledge of what taking them is like is quite unrelated to the chemical technobabble I hope to produce, isn't it?

Thanks for the website tip, though! I feel like visiting it puts me on some kind of government watchlist, but hopefully it'll be worth it.

Potash or saltpeter might be a good primitive/medieval binding compound. Given that it's an essential element in gunpowder, you could definitely develop some interesting concepts or simply clever names. As with anything, good writing requires you to do some homework. Sometimes quite a bit of homework. For some side effects, users of such a compound could have unnaturally white teeth (especially given the presumed "time period") or areas with high use could have widespread baby blue syndrome in newborns, or given that KNO 3 is used to speed the rotting process of, say, stumps, that might have some potentially ghoulish effects to its users.

Just some ideas to keep in mind. For the venom, did you want it to work along the lines of a morphine-type of painkiller as its primary effect? This might be the way to go considering an experimental painkiller made from snail venom is potentially 100 times more potent that morphine. Venom-derivative pharmaceuticals tend to be non-addictive, so keep that in mind.

edited 23rd Aug '14 12:04:24 PM by Cyran

How familiar are you with the extraction and preparation of LSA, 5-MeO-DMT and bufotenin? Because the kind of convoluted process that you describe is really not that far from some of the weird things that you have to do to properly extract ergoline alkaloids from Mexican morning glory seeds and Colorado river toad skin.