This post was a real trip down memory lane, back to the days of the Hive [1].

Before Shulgin published Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved and Tryptamines I have Known and Loved, Donald Cooper of the Drug Enforcement Administration wrote this prescient 1988 document titled "Future Synthetic Drugs of Abuse":

https://erowid.org/library/books_online/future_synthetic/fut...

It's like looking into the 2000s from a vantage point of the 1980s. What was really necessary for wild and woolly synthetic drugs to take off was digital infrastructure. That is, tools for collaborative and secret discussion, research tools [2], and (more recently) darknets.

The thing that finally made me stop following the scene was that I liked the how-to hacking aspect of the chemistry. There were tons of threads about how to make equipment, source chemicals from unexpected places, and synthesize the critical intermediates that were on watch-lists so they were difficult/inadvisable to buy commercially.

The last forum I followed closely ("Blacklight") ended up with members just theorizing about interesting points in chemical space and then outsourcing the manufacturing to commercial contract labs, mostly in China [3]. The only actual chemistry that would be done outside China was instrumental analysis (to confirm composition/purity of products). And the scene became secretive and scheming about people spotting chemicals that were subjectively good enough to become popular and commercializing them in Europe before the law caught up. (It's globalization in miniature! Keep marketing and management domestic, but offshore the low margin manufacturing work.)

The Hive wasn't like that. Most of the chemicals the members wanted to make were old stalwarts -- amphetamine, methamphetamine, MDA, and MDMA were the most popular. All the close analogs were illegal already so members were united in finding ways to hack around the restrictions. Nobody expected to hack around the law itself, i.e. to escape without consequences if the law caught them with the output of their clandestine labs. All questions that indicated someone was trying to scale up to major commercial manufacturing would get banned anyway. So users were generally collaborative rather than competitive. Everyone would pitch in on e.g. trying to figure out how to remove pill binders from OTC decongestants so that the purified pseudoephedrine was suited for downstream transformation to methamphetamine. Even people who wanted to manufacture less popular or more obscure compounds really wanted to do it in their own garage -- not in a contract lab.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20040103031950/http://the-hive.w...

[2] Back when The Hive was active, there were huge ongoing request threads for people trying to source research papers. Other members would have to go to a library, photocopy articles from the stacks, and upload scans. It was a huge breakthrough when the American Chemical Society actually scanned its complete print run and made those available to subscribers online; then members could just download requested papers from their company's/university's account. Then sci-hub solved even the part where someone has to manually request a paper.

[3] This preceded the rise of imported fentanyl by several years. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if small time (but technically advanced) Western drug dealers actually kickstarted the trend of getting potent opioids manufactured in China.