A lot of people miss the fact that this is more art project than practical solution. It’s meant to make a statement, but they have cherry-picked some extremely simple drugs to synthesize to make their point. I have some online friends who met through a forum for their rare condition. The forum they’re in had a splinter group dedicated to getting companies in China to synthesize experimental drugs for them that they c…
Before the 2017 “general ban” on psychoactive substances in the UK there was a thriving industry where “entrepreneurs” with the contacts for such labs would hire chemists to find them a new candidate analogue/derivative of say, a stimulant or hallucinogen or whatever, knock together a synthesis route, see if it works, and then have it manufactured in bulk for resale to head shops.
A small number of people got incredibly rich off this, some got busted when their product got banned and they didn’t dump the stock fast enough, but most made fucking phenomenal amounts of money.
The same “trade” carries on in some other European countries to this day, with “new” LSD derivatives cropping up every few months when one is invariably banned.
I vaguely recall there was even a few articles about this whole thing back in the day by some journalists, maybe at Vice or something? They had an interview with one of the chemists.