One of the scariest things about buying drugs, other than your mother finding out and coming at you with an iron, is that you never know where they came from. Most people assume they’ve been shipped over from Colombia because that’s where ‘the drugs’ come from.  What they don’t consider is that the MDMA that’s going to be affecting their hearts and minds for the next few hours is often the product of a student’s jizz infected kitchen. We stumbled across a Chemistry student who was happy to explain why on graduation he preferred to use his expertise to go into making Class As rather than working as a researcher in something worthy.

So you made MDMA. Why did you get into that?
I guess it stems back to when I started growing weed at fourteen. My mum wasn’t the strict type so didn’t stop me being proactive. I used to hang round a hydroponic shop and I knew the owner quite well. I ended up studying Chemistry at uni, and after I’d done my BSc the owner of the shop introduced me to this guy who was interested in making MDMA so I said I’d try to help him out. We had a really shifty meeting in a pub and I ended up going to his house for a weekend to try to make it.

How difficult is making it?
It’s just two relatively simple reactions requiring pretty standard conditions. In theory anyone would be able to do it with enough reading up on it, but it helped me to have experience with the glassware, as there’s boiling and distillation involved. The difficult part, the part I wouldn’t have wanted to do on my own, is getting the chemicals and equipment. You need a vacuum pump which is expensive, and you need a business address to get the necessary chemicals as they’re watched by the police, in this case Safrole, the main component in Sassafras oil, is the most watched item. The other chemicals needed are benzoquinone, palladium, chloride, mercury chloride and nitromethane. My contact was able to get these as he had a business address so then he needed someone to do the chemistry side of it. That’s what he asked me about.