Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/23/japanese-chemistry-professor-b.html
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The officers found “traces”, but modern techniques can find “traces” of lots of things. Did the students produce anything in meaningful quantities, and of any practical purity?
I understand it’s not uncommon for organic chemistry books to discuss the total synthesis of something like cocaine, except to carry out such a synthesis (as opposed to isolating the product from plant sources) would be so enormously expensive as to be completely impractical.
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…11 students produced the drug (MDMA) under Iwamura’s instruction.
All we really ever got to do in chemistry class was set things on fire.
My school was so boring! 
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At some point, Iwamura had a license to manufacture illegal drugs for academic purposes but it had expired.
Then give him his license back, that was easy…
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Seth Meyers: To be fair, teaching your students how to make Ecstasy would seem like a really good idea if you were on Ecstasy.
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Ok. So. Who snitched?
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I wonder if that license was in the 70s/80s before the drug policies got so rigid?
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One of my organic chemistry professors showed us how to make meth, albeit in lecture and not lab. This was in the 90s, before everyone had the internet.
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I had a practical botany class where one project was making wine from grape juice when the majority of us were under 21. The wine was awful, though.
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My HS chem teacher: “Actually, I could teach you how to make LSD, but I don’t want to get fired. But it’s not incredibly difficult or mysterious.”
No, he never did teach us. But it was a good anti-drug lesson in a way, because if you think about half the students in your HS chem class, would you really trust them to not fuck up making something you were going to ingest?
It’s not using drugs that disturbs me. It’s the idea of using drugs with a disturbing lack of QA.
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Did you attend high school in New Mexico?
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Sell a man a Molly, and he will be wasted for a few hours. Teach a man to make Molly, and he will be wasted for the rest of his life.
– ancient proverb
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I mean, I remember being TESTED on how to synthesize LSD during my undergrad, and then shortly after a discussion about how to make it actually feasible with the lab manager over drinks. But unfortunately nothing more than that. 
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Maybe that along with being told to waft test tube concoctions toward your nose rather than sticking your nose into the tube? In freshman chemistry we had a prof who clearly came from the South; a very strong accent. In lab one day, he noticed one student examining his results by placing his nose close to and directly over his open tube. Said the prof: "What are you doing!? That stuff’s worse 'an horseshit!! Waft it, boy!! Waft it!!"
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My first reaction was… wow… that’s really easy…
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Burakinga Baddu
High potency agents are one of those places, along with analytical reagents and aircraft maintenance, where you pretty much can’t have too many GxP hardasses.
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Our high school chem teacher told us a likely-apocryphal story about some grad students who tried to make synthetic heroin, and then tested it on themselves. From the sound of it, they messed up the recipe a bit.
I’m still to this day not sure if the moral was “don’t make drugs,” or “don’t test those drugs on yourselves.”
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