[ryao]

People do not synthesize drugs on their own without any prior knowledge. They take university organic chemistry classes and then start synthesizing drugs. The cooking analogy would be studying at a culinary school prior to preparing pufferfish without a license.

[bsder]

> People do not synthesize drugs on their own without any prior knowledge. They take university organic chemistry classes and then start synthesizing drugs.

The girl who needs mifepristone will not be an organic chemist. The trans-person who needs their hormones will not be an organic chemist. etc.

What part of: "Distilling alcohol is about as easy as it gets and yet people wind up poisoned from homemade hooch all the time." did you miss?

We know what happens when drugs are made illegal--they wind up adulterated with god knows what--sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.

The "solution" is making sure that these drugs are legal and available. The solution is social and political--we need people to put in as much effort into the politics as they do into dubious "tech" solutions.

[ryao]

Your comparison of ethanol distillation to drug synthesis assumes that recipes for drug synthesis are public like instructions for distillation. Recipes for drug synthesis are trade secrets, not public knowledge.

If you want to synthesize organic compounds (drugs or otherwise), you need to know organic chemistry in order to make your own recipes. To give an example, this guy made his own recipe for making cinnamaldehyde from styrofoam, using what he learned from his college Organic Chemistry classes and a substantial amount of background research:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMaTrgUKC1w

He did not follow a recipe from someone else because there was none. Chemists have worked out a number of reactions that can be chained together to make arbitrary organic compounds. Organic chemistry teaches the better known / more widely useful ones. That gives the foundation needed to do these things.

Please do not make me regret sharing my knowledge by bringing politics into a technical discussion. I am under doctor's orders to avoid political discussions.