Question Do chemists have secret literature?

[Balthazar]

How do chemists in different parts of the world know how to prepare new psychoactive chemicals, where do they get their information from? DNM is full of ads for 2mmc, 3mmc, 3cmc, 4mmc, the new opiates and many others, here in the forum there are published syntheses for several, why don't we have the information that others have, and where do they get it from?

 

[Osmosis Vanderwaal]

What information do we nor have? In a way chemists do have secret literature, it is obfiscated by technical terminology. ex. Ver little literature has the word methamphetamine, theats a phenylethylamine, a phenylalkylamine and 10 other things People "familiar in the art" know basic things that are elementary to them, but rarely to the casual observer

 

[Balthazar]

Just an example. In some country they discover a new chemical, let's say in the United States they discover how to synthesize ethylone and a few months later chemists in India or Sweden start producing the same product. This does not apply only to drugs but to all new chemicals.They need to read some special literature where new chemical compounds are published and how they are synthesized.
Or is there another explanation?

 

[Osmosis Vanderwaal]

they read the chemistry journals and google patents. There are a ton of jounalsout therethat have limitless information and google patents is where most of what you see here came fromNot google patents, the the US patent service and other countries versions. If you know whaat you are looking for you can poat it into a search engine and find a paper that talks about it. Tell me what you are looking for and I'll show yu

 

[i_can_see-you_can_not]

Cathinones are a very bad example because typically, their chemistry just goes:
- make appropriately ring-substituted phenylalkylketone (typically via Friedel-Crafts reaction)
- alpha-bromination of the ketone
- SN2 reaction with the appropriate amine
It is really extremely simple - generally spoken. There is nothing special about them.

Most competent chemists could come up with this scheme, without ever having read much about cathinone chemistry. Of course any decent chemist would look up the scientific literature anyways to see if they missed anything, or if there are any tricks or caveats.

I would suggest you get a good introductory organic chemistry book. Once you complete and understand that, you can further your interests. Learning "name reactions", there are many books about that, or for instance the "Reaxys Reaction Flash App". With a good understanding and knowledge of standard methodologies, you can dig into retrosynthetic analysis.

There is no secret/hidden literature, or at least not much (JCLIC comes to mind, but a lot of it is leaked). A lot of the information is already archived and available online. Sci-hub or Annas-archive can help you to avoid paying for articles published by criminally expensive and predatory journals. A lot of books can be found on annas-archive or library genesis. However, some older journals or book are not digitised and for that it helps to be a bookworm and going to university libraries.

It has to be admitted there is one advantage professional chemists have: typically they have access to good databases like Sci-Finder or Reaxys which help searching for reactions. If you are well connected with chemistry students, you may find people willing to help you searching the literature.

Much of "clandestine chemistry" is just finding ways to adapt to certain precursor restrictions or circumstances, but overall still following the known literature more or less. Very few people actually push the boundaries, but they do exist.