Meth from Sudafed

As I was taking a Sudafed pill this morning to clear up my sinuses, I was reminded of the presentations that were given regarding drugs and the brief discussion we had afterwards about the synthesis of methamphetamines. The structure of meth is this

And the structure of pseudoephedrine, the active ingrediant in Sudafed is this

Now one can see why we have to sign for buying Sudafed, and we are restricted to the amount we can buy at one time. Or rather, we are not restricted if we go to different stores, but the computer system will red flag us and send our information to some form of law enforcement. It would be easy to manipulate pseudoephedrine into methamphetamine just by reducing the alcohol group by various means (theoretically one way is to bubble hydrogen gas through a solution of pseudoephedrine and paladium or platinum pellets for catalysts).

So the hard part about making meth is not its synthesis. What really is the challenge is isolating pseudoephedrine from the Sudafed pill. The most amount of pseudoephedrine that can be found in a tablet s 240mg, enough for one "hit" of meth, though during the isolation process much meth can be lost if the "chemist" is not careful. If one pill has enough pseudoephedrine for a hit of meth, one may wonder why taking one of thses Sudafed pills doesn't give you the same effect. That alcohol group is enough to change the chemistry of the drug such that the two drugs will not have the same effects at the same doses. But that doesn't mean Sudafed itself cannot be misused as a recreational drug. Take enough of it and you can get F-ed up easily. Anywho, just thought I'd share what I had found on this subject.