Alkenes can be hydrated to secondary alcohols in markovnikov fashion by cold 70% sulfuric acid (which first makes the sulfate ester), hydrolysis of this ester supposedly gives the alcohol. There are hundreds of references for this kind of reaction in the literature, just not on safrole (but other allylbenzenes has been used, drone posted a reference list a long time ago).
However, some experimenters report that they got no reaction, some report that a reaction indeed did take place, but that the alcohol dehydrated to isosafrole, and finally BrightStar, who claimed that MDP2Pol was indeed formed (verified with NMR), but that it rearranged overnight to MDP1Pol (MD-propiophenone). Noone has heard about that kind of rearrangement before (MDP2Pol is stable when prepared via oxymercuration), and noone can really find out why it is so hard to hydrate safrole, when the reaction is a classic textbook example.
We need someone with analytical equipment to find out what reaction parameters are needed for MDP2Pol to form. But still, if that would fail - we might still be able to construct a high-yielding isosafrole or MD-propiophenone out of it.
Starting point: https://www.thevespiary.org/rhodium/Rhodium/chemistry/mdp2pol.html (https://www.thevespiary.org/rhodium/Rhodium/chemistry/mdp2pol.html)
- and TFSE is filled to the brim with discussions.