Is this correct that you can sub. ammonium chloride for methylamine and produce MDA. I used the search enine but did not find any good ref. for this.
The reason I used this approach is that I was totally unable to make the methylamine hydrochloride (methylammonium chloride, MA.HCl) by any method. I tried BrightStar's method, as well as about 4 other methods I found on the web. In all cases, I was able to make what were probably mixtures of MA.HCl and ammonium chloride, but I couldn't figure out how to assess the purity. I also didn't have any luck getting the stuff I needed to do a purification: absolute ethanol is difficult to obtain; in California, the best you can purchase at a liquor store is about 75%, so you're faced with a distillation even to get to 95%. Then you've got to get some anhydrous calcuim oxide, and I didn't know how to do that. I even made a bunch of chloroform to clean out other impurities (which you should do), and that was a pain in the butt and perhaps a bit dangerous, too.
The problem is that the ammonium chloride will cheerfully react by the same mechanism as the MA.HCl with the MDP-2-P, but it will make MDA in place of MDMA. I would not have minded a mixture of, say, 3% MDA and 97% MDMA, but I just didn't know what I'd get. Anyway, the method described below worked perfectly, and should make exactly 0% MDA and 100% MDMA.