yo, i'm hive crew. my interest was captured by Antibody2's pseudonitrosite work in 2000. i was in love. when the hive went down it was like somebody shot my JFK. i was like, OMFG this sucks! i hopped to the dmt-nexus cause WD had nothing much for me. nothing was quite the same for awhile. i guess ScienceMadness was running continuously the whole time, and absorbed a lot of the purer scientists (too bad Barium never showed up, eh?), while WD absorbed more of the c(r)ooks. SM was very interesting to me- a lot of ideas discussed on the hive were given full write ups (some with pictures!) on SM. meanwhile they discriminate against drug chemists. it's funny 
I assure you that I speak for SM management when I say the following, but I will also tell you that I will not offer proof of it so you'll have to make up your own mind about whether or not to believe me:
The leadership of SM does not discriminate against drug chemists. They do discriminate against drug cooks who just want product without effort or learning. Some ordinary members discriminate against drug chemists regardless of how smart and hard-working they may be. It has been hard to keep the antidrug crew from fucking up every drug chemistry thread, but it's been easier since Sauron left in a big huff some months ago. He is participating again now but hasn't returned to his full obnoxious glory.
Polverone at least
likes smart drug chemists. Remember that he was actually a Hive member, though never a producing bee, before that glorious site died. It is no accident that Nicodem was picked to be a moderator, either -- he whose Hive signature was "The real drug-problem is that we need more and better drugs." Both dislike lazy cooks, or really any lazy members who want to be spoonfed "recipes" for stuff, but there are a lot more people in the world who want a "recipe" to cook meth than (say) cook indigo so vigilance and enforcement is more important with the drug questions.
Legislators and law enforcers set up and enforce rules to try to prohibit certain products from being manufactured. This sets up an intellectual challenge for people who like chemistry and aren't programmed to obey the rules that other people have set up. It's a thrill to go up against a multi-billion-dollar prohibition regime, and win by dodging all their roadblocks. It's exciting to read about other people coming up with their own solutions, and it builds a sense of community when people share and collaboratively build their strategies for the winning side in the WoD. It's like pirates who crack protected software as a hobby: the best part is figuring out how to do it and proving that you can. Lots of people share this mentality on SM, some of them with explosives and pyrotechnics (also controlled products) instead of drugs. The first reason a lot of people cracked a chemistry book is because they want drugs or firecrackers and they can't just buy them.
Then there's the commercial aspect. Some pirates just want software they can't otherwise afford to buy, or they even want to sell cracked software to make cash. Some drug-hounds just want a recipe so they can become small time manufacturers without learning much of anything, or some want to take their ounce-size experience and scale it up to pounds of product, so they can be rich. That's the sort of drug chemist almost nobody on SM wants to help: the guy who only wants products to sell to the black market, or the one who's already there and wants to make it bigger. Greed = big visibility, big trouble, and even worse these sorts of cooks are less likely to contribute knowledge in exchange. They want other people to write "PIHKAL For Dummies" for them, then they'll take the procedures and run them until a bunch of them get caught, the laws are updated, and the chemists need to come up with new ideas yet again.
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. You can hide in plain sight as long as you don't need someone to hold your hand with the final production of an actual controlled substance. That means less friction with anti-drug zealots when you're on a mixed board like SM, and less circumstantial evidence saved on the internet should (dog forbid) LE ever take an interest in what you've been doing online.
