How does one convert amphetamine to methamphetamine?
It can easily be done with reductive amination.Alkylating agents can be problematic because secondary amines are more easily alkylated than primary amines. Thus, you end up with a mixture of secondary, tertiary, and quaternary amines. The trick is to do reductive amination. You can easily methylate an amine by reaction with formaldehyde to form an imine. This can be followed by reduction with sodium borohydride, which will yield the desired secondary amine (methamphetamine). It is possible to do it all in one pot if you use sodium cyanoborohydride, which is strong enough to reduce the imine, but too weak to reduce the aldehyde. Thus, as the imine forms the cyanoborohydride reduces it. Imines form via reversible covalent bond formation, which means it's an equilibrium reaction. To drive it to the product, you can do the reaction over 4 angstrom molecule sieves (zeolites), which will absorb any water formed. Alternatively, it could be done in a dean-stark trap where the water is driven off by heat.
Can hallucinogens actually help people with mental illness?
I have personal experience with this. I was deeply depressed throughout my adolescence. I have taken countless anti-depressants and anti-psychotics but none of them worked. I remember feeling so exhausted by every little thing that happened to me. I started going to intensive Cognitive Behavioral Therapy 5 times a week and this did help, but only so much. Once I started to feel a little better, I began talking to people again (I went into hiding for months and months) and found a kid selling LSD. I had done it before but this time- wow. I can tell you that everything changed for me that day. I've always described it as an awakening. It was a spiritual experience and I had been an atheist for years up until this point. My whole world was flipped upside down but it was a good thing. It was like LSD lifted the veil and I could finally see clearly. It erases all of the mundane bullshit that we all worry about on a day to day basis. That stuff just seems so unimportant all of a sudden. I've had the same experience with MDMA: my boyfriend and I were having all these deep, emotional issues within our relationship. I thought we were on the verge of breaking up. We did MDMA together and it erased everything...it was as if we could see through all of these fake problems to the core of our relationship. The core is love. Perhaps that's all it is: when I take these substances, I see love and nothing else. I don't think hallucinogens are for everyone, just as anti-depressants aren't for everyone. But they worked for me. They turned my entire life around.
What are the differences between mitochondrial and nuclear DNA?
Nuclear DNA is the standard 46 chromosomes which you've heard about, where you inherit 23 from your mom and 23 from your dad. These are very long, with centromeres and telomeres, and just about everything else you've learned from Genetics class.Mitochondrial DNA only has one chromosome, and this is organized like a circular genome (similar to most prokaryotic DNA). This single chromosome is much shorter, and codes for the specific proteins which are used in the metabolic processes mitochondria undertake (i.e., fatty acid metabolism, citrate acid cycle, ATP synthesis). The mitochondrion also makes its own tRNAs and rRNAs, and undergoes synthesis/replication separately from nuclear DNA. As mentioned before, mtDNA inheritance is solely matrilineal; you never inherit mtDNA from your father.mtDNA, since it is solely matrilineal, doesn't undergo recombination like nuclear DNA--meaning that while nuclear DNA is a shuffle of your parents' DNA, all changes in mtDNA have to come from mutations. Thus, mtDNA is great for trying to detect human ancestry, and many seminal papers detailing recent human migration/ancestry were published in the 00's.
Thinking about doing shrooms, what are the positive and negative effects?
go to erowid.com. it's the best drug website i've found, and trust me...i spend a lot of time researching illegal narcotics. a shroom trip comes and goes in waves...sometimes you'll roll around on the floor laughing, sometimes you be very introspective, sometimes you'll be anxious, sometimes you'll be overly confident. make sure you're in a comfortable setting when you trip, and are around people you trust, and make sure you don't have to go anywhere. make sure you've got happy music, trippy movies (fantasia is awesome), and strobe lights. don't trip if you're in a bad mood...that's a guaranteed way to have a bad trip. shrooms (and most other hallucinogens) take the emotions you're feeling and run with em. before i check out on a trip, i make sure to write in big black letters on a paper IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD! and sign it. that way i can remind myself it's all pretend if the trip starts getting dark. you can overdose, psylocibin is a mild poison...but we're talking consuming a lot of shroomies. i would stick to less than 3.5 grams (1/8 of an ounce) for your first time. to intensify your trip, drink orange juice...or anything with a high vitamin c content. to kill a trip, drink milk, or anything with vitamin d. oh yeah, shrooms taste nasty. mix em up in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or something when you eat em.
Did German soldiers in the trenches during the first world war use ecstasy to cope with the horrors of war?
No. In WW2 though, they used this.It was an over the counter drug in Germany, pre war, and was not tightly regulated later. I have seen in various articles and journals copies of letters from German soldiers home asking for more to be sent. It was issued to Luftwaffe pilots.“During World War II, methamphetamine was sold in tablet form under the brand name Pervitin (not to be confused with Perviton, which is a synonym for Phenatine), produced by the Berlin-based Temmler pharmaceutical company. It was used extensively by all branches of the combined Wehrmacht armed forces of the Third Reich, and was popular with Luftwaffe pilots in particular, for its performance-enhancing stimulant effects and to induce extended wakefulness.[140][141] Pervitin became colloquially known among the German troops as "Stuka-Tablets" (Stuka-Tabletten) and "Herman-Göring-Pills" (Hermann-Göring-Pillen). Side effects were so serious that the army sharply cut back its usage in 1940.[142] Historian Lukasz Kamienski says "A soldier going to battle on Pervitin usually found himself unable to perform effectively for the next day or two. Suffering from a drug hangover and looking more like a zombie than a great warrior, he had to recover from the side effects." Some soldiers turned very violent, committing war crimes against civilians; others attacked their own officers.���Methamphetamine - WikipediaMDMA (ecstasy) was synthesized in 1912, but has no known medical use, although there have been some trials in the US to treat a few conditions. It has side effects making it unsuitable for use by troops, including increased empathy and giddiness.