For some unknown reason, Facebook found that this post, which I uploaded ten days ago, violates the community standards.

It turns out that the drawing of the molecule made by Geo Kreese was seen as promoting banned substances. So I'm reposting with a different visual, hoping that the gods of Facebook won't rain fire and brimstone on me.

I recently recounted how my personal cocaine consumption led me to look for a substitute. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15Bfyx9R3i/

I talked about how discovering the use of cathinone as a potentially cheap and pure alternative to cocaine that was also legal came as a godsend. The quality of cocaine in Tel Aviv at the time was very poor and the relationship with the drug was prohibitively expensive - and it was highly illegal. I developed an industrial method of producing synthetic 2-aminopropiophenone (cathinone) thereby turning potentially into actually see how I did it at Psychedelic Speakers

But it took me a while to understand a fundamental difference between cocaine and cathinone. If you remember, the way cocaine works is by preventing the transport of dopamine to the presynaptic neuron (reuptake inhibition), thus prolonging the effect of of our natural dopamine. That's all well and good, until you remember that endogenous dopamine is not an unlimited resource – when you use a lot of dopamine, the reserves are depleted and it takes time for the body to recover and rebuild its dopamine stores – this is also one of the main reasons for the famous down that comes after intense consumption.

In my experience (and that of many other users) snorting cathinone is very similar to snorting cocaine (and yes, I know that cathinone burns more in the nose), but in fact, even though it feels like a dopamine-rich experience, it's something else entirely from cocaine because cathinone does not increase dopamine – to the brain cathinone is dopamine.

That is, cathinone is cathinone, but it is similar enough to dopamine for it to anchor and activate dopamine receptors. Why is this important? Because it does not deplete the natural dopamine stores.

This trait is not a sweeping characteristic of all cathinone derivatives, mephedrone for example (which is also a cathinone derivative) is a partial serotonin reuptake inhibitor - and this is where I get to the heart of the post, which is: drug design.

How realistic is this term? IMO, it is a choice of words that exaggerates what it describes. Is it even possible to really 'design drugs' and plan what they will and won't do? In general, the answer is no, and in general, I think it is appropriate to replace the term 'design' with the term 'discovery'.

I discovered and conceived many new molecules in the hope that they would do something positive. It's almost always a shot in the dark, sometimes you hit, many times you don't. And 3-methylmethcathinone is a great example of hitting bullseye.

When mephedrone (4-methylmethcathinone) was outlawed in 2010, I searched for a molecule to replace it and applied an approach that could be called 'drug design'. That is, my search was much less random. I presuppose a number of parameters that make the chances of discovering a potent and safe substance better. The first rule is related to the phenomenon I described in this post about nitrogen, which means that I left a single atom of nitrogen that would serve as an 'opener' for the body. It is important to clarify here that this single atom must be in a single bond and not in a double or triple bond. Why? I'll start by mentioning the fact that a triple nitrogen to carbon bond is also called a 'cyanic bond'. That is, the bond may turn out to be toxic (and therefore, molecules with such bonds are pre-disqualified). But I did something else. I was looking for a molecule whose spatial structure would resemble that of dopamine, in the hope that the substance would behave like dopamine and replace it without exacting the endogenous dopamine supply.

The way I did it was to focus on the benzene ring. The benzenic ring has 3 types of positions. In mephedrone the methyl is located at the "para" position. This time I designed the molecule that the methyl would be at the "meta" position which made 3mmc, spatially, more like dopamine - and this gamble worked.

Because 3mmc did turn out to behave as I had hoped, it's a pretty rare case of 'drug design'