Interesting answers all around, glad you groovy wasps were interested in this.  To help steer the topic, here's a summation of the responses that imo best addressed my questions as asked/intended:

in general, the DEA is aware of these sites and monitors them to some extent, but the scheduling decisions come down to what's being found in the field. […]You have to assume everyone has access to the information you release and then decide whether it does more good or harm on a case by case basis.

the ideal and standard of comparison should be Organic Syntheses [...] readers are expected to have laboratory experience and general knowledge; a procedure isn't going to explain in detail what it means to distill at 12 mm pressure and collect the fraction boiling between 107 and 109 degrees. Nor will it warn that acetone is flammable, ether forms peroxides, or that sodium azide is poisonous.

I would go along with Darwinism to an extent. [...]. If you cannot understand why something works, do not break out the flasks until you do, if you can't understand why, you won't understand what else is likely to happen during the disarmingly simple procedure as written up.

Furthermore, was skimming through the member intro's section the other day and found some discussions which were in line with this topic as well, hope the poster's don't mind my borrowing their words...(pm me)

This is pretty much the heart of the matter.

there is something to be said for not publishing complete start-to-end documents like BrightStar's, which start with "go down to your local hippy shop" [...]  and end with "put 100mg in each gelcap and yer rich, bitches!!!"

we're working against a paradox. we all need information to get the job done. but the better the publicly available information is, the faster the precursors we need disappear.

we tried to take everything to an OTC level in order to beat the restrictions, but obviously that makes chemistry sisyphusian at a certain point. nobody wanted to dig up sassafras roots with a shovel.

The standard procedures to turn ketones, benzaldehydes, and other useful precursors into actual drugs are still valid. There's no call to ask, for example, how to run a Leuckart reaction once you already have phenyl-2-propanone. It's been written about a hundred times before and it's foolish to think that the words are any more helpful if they come from an active member instead of an archived Hive post. The active front of control in the WoD, at least for already-popular synthetic drugs, is now further down the synthesis flow chart: controlling benzaldehydes, nitroethane, acid anhydrides, etc. That is the stuff that people need to keep working on. The end-game is already laid out about as well as it ever will be. And -- double bonus -- if you just talk about phenols, benzaldehydes, reduction, oxidation, methylation, etc... it looks just like legitimate chemistry because it is legitimate chemistry.

http://127.0.0.1/talk/index.php/topic,167.20.html



Whaddya fink?

-pfish

There are some interesting full disclosure vs. proprietary knowledge questions here.

I gained my earliest chemical knowledge back when you had to go to the library and find organic syntheses or various reference books and start looking for what you wanted.  Even heard about ephedrine - red p - hydriodic kits for sale before the internet, the knowledge did spread before sites like these.

I found many of Sasha's syntheses before he wrote Pihkal and met Mark of JLF back when he just sold Amanita poisonous non-consumables.  If not for Sasha and Strike's books, and Mark and Strike's chemical sales, we might arguably still be able to do all sorts of things.

Having met Sasha and found a community in the Hive, I like the way full disclosure worked out.  But it didn't work out too good for Mark and Strike.

The hive was my segway into the world of chemistry, and without some of the blow by blow write-ups I found there, may never have experienced the successes that encouraged me to delve further into the field.

Today, I wouldn't follow someone else's write-up, because then I would simply be repeating something that someone else has already done (boring). The challenge now is to find new ways of doing things,  or novel routes to existing compounds, or even new compounds. But without sites like the hive or the vespiary and idiot proof write-ups, I would never have reached the point where I was capable of going it alone. So I try to stay humble and try to help when asked. I think the point of sites like this is to keep the chemistry accesssible to those without a background in it.


On a completely different note, over 10 years ago, Antibody posted the 1st accessible blow by blow oxime reduction on the hive (it is still being discussed). A couple of months later when restocking hydroxylamine from an alternative photography supplier, the supplier asked me "Was there just an article published? All of a sudden, I can't keep this stuff in stock"  Which clearly illustrates how quickly there can be a run on some obscure reagent when a good "tek" gets posted. Now a days ordering the stuff can raise some eyebrows.

my 2¢


FYI - safrole was already scheduled before the hive came into existence. It was the sassafras oil loophole that the hive made infamous.

I remember when I was a 17 year old oddball, having dabbled with chemistry sets and 1950/60s experiment guidebooks since age 12, after obtaining PiHKaL by coincidence in the mid-nineties, I wrote letters to a certain well-known large chemical supplier (the name I got from the periodic table hanging in my chemistry class) using the school letterhead paper I made my homework on. I had no clue about scheduled, let alone watched chemicals, so I was requesting the pricing for things like isosafrole, nitroethane, POCl₃ and many more.

They answered me promptly and friendly with the info I requested, twice, after the third letter they sent me a catalogue. I wonder what reaction you'd get nowadays?

More than September 11, I'd have to suggest the use/misuse of acetone peroxide by the various suicide bombers and of course the Oklahoma bombing using predominantly nitrofill. Those two really fucked up access to peroxide(s) and nitrates/nitric acid respectively. K3wl's have fucked up more than any other group in terms of access to basic chemicals, essentially any chemical found in the garage/shed/etc. of some dickhead that has just crippled themselves and/or others frigging around with improvised explosives, is put on the watch list.

Safrole, sassafras oil, etc. were basically fucked by the time I got to the hive, ephedrine was already scheduled where I was (although I do recall being someone I know picked up with >5g of partially cleaned pseudo and getting out of it as it was not THEN listed). A very good working knowledge of what is and is not too fucking hot to handle is an essential requirement of a long and happy life.

Taking the time to actually learn through experiments with non-listed materials, to actually get some hands on experience and start working out what is happening and why, is something that I see too few people engage in.

For example, there are basic 1st year chemistry course experiments listed here (and elsewhere) that describe separating the components of various tablets, interesting in itself, might be of some utility to understand the process instead of slavishly following a one size fits all writeup you don't understand. There are also a number of experiments that have been designed which, although dealing with completely legal substrates/precursors, actually replicate almost entirely what others might choose to examine later.

Finally, there are scientific journal articles that with a modicum of learning, actually begin to make sense. When this happens, it is amazing how simple the actual reactions involved in most of the chemistry discussed on the hive, the other places and even here really are. That doesn't make them foolproof, quite simply when combining:

incompetence + drugfucked idiots + half-assed "recipes" + greed = difficult to design anything that is proof to the sheer fucking stupidity that can exist.

Anyone who has been around long enough is kind of antsy about discussing their own pet OTC projects. They've seen too many "unlistable" commodity chemicals become "unobtanium" overnight due to the combination alluded to above. They may still be willing to do whatever they can to advance the cause, but irritation with, and distrust of, stupidity, greed & irresponsible fuckwits is cumulative (much like industrial hearing loss). It also gets quite draining to see absolutely harmless wannabees getting incredibly long sentences because of some half-baked "recipe" they got off the internet, but had no chance of making work (whether through lack of knowledge, general incompetence, genetic abnormality, or whatever), or worse, seeing equally dim individuals trying to acquire chemicals that 'blind freddy' knows are too fucking hot to try and source because they heard about them on the internet and didn't "think" that others might have too (one particular aldehyde in mind ATM, which has several trade names but which is about as safe to order as a couple of kilograms of lithium, pseudoephedrine or safrole, technically possible but best get ready to buy new cupboards, doors, carpet, etc as a result of getting visited by the flying monkey squads).