Quick and Easy Home Iodine Tutorial

I’ve been wondering a long time when the DEA will stop chasing its tail and stop all the pointless restrictions that make life harder for the home chemistry experimenter. This video just goes to show that the worst thing the DEA can think to do in terms of legislation, is to mildly inconvenience no one. Someone over there needs to get their head out of their ass and realize that not every civilian out there with a test tube and half a brain is cooking up some meth. Restricting reagents isn’t even half the battle, and if it is, then you’ve already lost.

Any half-way clever sophomore organic chemistry student could probably think of a dozen mechanisms (of admittedly varying efficacy, hazard, and yield) to make the stuff using reagents that wouldn’t raise anyone’s eyebrows even purchased in industrial quantities. I’m not an advocate for getting people hooked on crystal meth, but I get so pissed off at pointless DEA restrictions I get strongly tempted to publish a complete guide to circumventing all of them. Anyway, the video is a nice little tutorial on making iodine, and I have the book, an excellent resource for students starting out in experimental chemistry: