Cocaine
Drug o the day #2
Benzoylmethylecgonine (Cocaine) is a serotonin–norepinephrine–dopamine reuptake inhibitor, basically it inhibits some enzymes and really messes with your CNS, it also makes an excellent topical (external, applied to skin etc) anaesthetic (anesthetic to you americans). It also inhibits hunger, which is probably why people assume crackheads to be skinny looking people.
Cocaine is sourced mostly (if not all) from it’s natural source, the coca plant, it derives it’s name from being and alkoid produced by this plant hence coca-ine. Synthetic cocaine is very inefficient to produce as it has 4 chiral centers(chirality talked about early on in this blog) resulting in 16 enantiomers and diastereomers (I’ll get round to a post on diastereoisomerism at some point) meaning before natural limitations to yield are taken into account only roughly 1/16th of the final synthesis product is cocaine, probably leading to an overall yield of closer to 1/64th (not a clue really, but it’ll be low) which leads to loss of profit. [The street name synthetic cocaine or new cocaine refers to PCP and other synthetic drugs not cocaine]
as you can see it’s a relatively complex structure to synthesise and the chemicals may cost a lot, so natural production is much easier.
I really don’t have much more to say as illegal drugs aren’t something I particularly study, just what people seem to be interested in, I’ll be moving back to my more comfortable pasteurs (see what I did there) soon.
However I may soon have a post on different drug application routes :)
