I’ve watched many documentaries on how they make cocaine, and it always required a a mixture of gasoline cement and battery acid etc. Would a scientific laboratory be able to make it under FDA rules for example?
In: Chemistry
To start with almost every chemical you mention is not really a chemical, at least to a chemist.
Gasoline cement??? my guess is that you mean kerosine, Kerosine aka paraffin is a petroleum extract, that means it comes from crude oil and is refined out through a process of boiling the crude oil then cooling, distilling, and extracting. The portion known as kerosine is an aliphatic (mostly) meaning a long chain of carbon atoms linked together each having two hydrogen atoms attached except the two carbons at the end of the chain that have three hydrogens kerosine typicay is between 6 and 20 carbon atoms long. This material is liquid at room temperature and does not mix with water. Kerosine is very good at dissolving organic material from a range of sources in this instance coca from plant material.
Now you have an organic liquid that is highly flammable that contains the narcotic you want. Heat it up and the kerosine evaporates or explodes (bad).
The other chemical you mention is battery acid, to a chemist we are going to talk about sulphuric acid, H2SO4, This is a very strong mineral acid that will eat its way through almost anything. But in concentrated form it has an interesting characteristic, it is good at dehydrating things, if your coco plant is too wet (most are) you can use the sluphuric acid to help remove excess water, of course once you do this you then need to neutralize the acid, don’t worry baking soda does the trick. There are a lot of different grades of sulphuric acid on the market from 98 percent pure (oleum) to typical battery acid. If I was going to make cocaine I would start with oleum and dilute it but that means you have to buy specialty chemicals, battery acid is available everywhere. the one surprise is that the cartels with all their money have not gone into manufacturing sulphuric acid (it is not hard especially if you have cash), unless they have and I just don’t know it.
Bottom line to a qualified chemist extraction of narcotics Coke, Opioids, meth etc. is not particularly hard. Obtaining the materials to do the extraction, concentration and crystallization is restricted but there are ways to do that, I could produce pharmaceutical grade narcotics but getting the raw materials is a challenge so if operating illegally I purchase lower grade and lower purity products.
That still leaves the question as to why the cartels don’t make their own raw materials…. unless they do.
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