An unidentified illicit drug has been discovered by Australian chemists | Hacker News Reader

An unidentified illicit drug has been discovered by Australian chemists

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91 pointsTrouble_007113 comments

With all due respect for the forensic chemists and their good work on identifying an unknown substance, it is fairly common for forensic groups to once in a while detect new chemical analogs of known drugs. A few years back, lots of new cannabinoids and cathinones were getting released constantly as older analogs were getting banned. Often, these novel analogs are pharmacological low hanging fruit. The drug in this article is also such low-hanging fruit: it is well known an N-methyl to N-ethyl substitution does not lead to reduced activity in this category of arylcyclohexylamine dissociative anesthetics (this was actually one of the SAR considerations taken by the designers of methoxetamine!). And indeed, this very same substitution was used here on 2-Fluorodeschloroketamine, leading to the drug from the article.

PS the Chinese abbreviation for "CanKet", 2F-NENDCK, most likely stands for 2-fluoro-N-ethyl-nordeschloroketamine. It is almost certain this drug was synthesized by a Chinese custom synthesis group (the most typical source for these type of substances at scale) and not by Australian clandestine chemists.

>It is almost certain this drug was synthesized by a Chinese custom synthesis group (the most typical source for these type of substances at scale) and not by Australian clandestine chemists.

Most people don't realize this, but you can order a synthesis of just about any (legal) chemical with enough money. People do it for pharmaceutical or nootropic drugs sometimes in group buys. It's trivial if you have enough money to find some vaguely legal analog of a recreational drug, and order a synthesis of it. 2f-dck is a ketamine analog that I believe is still legal and reported to be very similar in effect, and I'd guess 2f-nendck is somewhat similar to that. Not that I'm suggesting anyone should, there are risks and it's not an easy process. It's just interesting how easily accessible it is if you have the right information.

To the point to be annoying. I am running an open database of chemical properties[0], I get nearly every single day Chinese companies proposing me to buy whatever compounds they are producing including non legal ones.

Even more stupid, I get phone calls and email asking me if I can source stupidly well known illegal drug for a friend doing some research. Even if this is clear that I am just providing experimental data and no chemicals at all.

So yes, you can get chemicals very easily and you have a lot of providers which are not really looking at the legality of the stuff.

[0]: https://www.chemeo.com

A friend is looking to do research into any one of the following: Can-D, Chew-Z, skooma (moon sugar ok), Jet or UltraJet, spark, spike, spin or spank, and velocet. They are prepared to pay well. You can reach them here: https://youtu.be/PZqx-lMZHM0

Howzabout some clarky cat?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIAJemmO-bg

The first 5 minute of this is one of the funniest things I've watched.

This video contains content from LDS, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds

Weird. Mormons getting salty?

That's a pity. It's from Brass Eye (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brass_Eye), a piss-take on panicky documentaries, it's the drugs one and totally brilliant. And they got a mandrill on it.

Most of them are well worth a watch, get them if you can.

That's pretty great! I was able to see it through the Daily Motion link.

I did not see anything overtly Mormon, however. The LDS copyright block is confusing.

I could not watch the video, but from Urban Dictionary, this is a basis for a brilliant prank: ... there is an elaborate verbal dance that you need to go through with them as they pretend not to know what you are talking about, but perseverance is the key here.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5b9k3m - Brass Eye S01E02 "Drugs"

Worked for me in the US

Ok, me too, in Europe. Although the first 40 seconds are a black screen with no audio

> the first 40 seconds are a black screen with no audio

The same is true for the aforementioned YouTube link (which is accessible from the UK and Ireland according to https://polsy.org.uk/stuff/ytrestrict.cgi ).

I guess that was part of the original show then?

In case it isn't clear to some people, these are all nerdy references to fictional drugs in video games and science fiction stories where the drug plays an important role in the story

Sorry, only Zyme is available these days.

Off topic, but Cheméo is very nice: search by InChIKey, similarity search, the page of results as images. Great work!

Thank you! If you need more functionalities, just let me know.

Still legal for what purposes? Selling for consumption? I doubt it.

When you sell stuff as medicine, food or anything in between, of course it should be on you to prove that it's safe. That's not unreasonable.

Neither is it unreasonable to ask, if you sit there with 100kg of some novel molecule custom ordered from a Chinese lab, what you were planning to use it for. And it'd better not be selling it for consumption.

They are referred to as "research chemicals", so the implication is that they have been synthesizes for e.g. an experiment or animal trial. This is merely puffery to hide the fact that it is a loophole to get technically not yet illegal variants of drugs.

Will those labs also synthesize non recreational drugs? I would like to be able to stockpile some ace2 binding drugs. I have the formula and the ingredients but lack the equipment to do it accurately and safely. I keep things around in the event of a full economic crash and would just take risks and apply redneck-science if it came to that but a proper lab would be ideal.

They definitely will, this is after all the intended purpose of these firms, and some of the more professional among them are producing cGMP APIs at scale in a completely legitimate context. Although if you have a need for ACE2 inhibitors (not sure which kind of binders you need for which purpose ...) that are marketed and formulated it may be more convenient to just source a large amount of the pharmaceutical product, though I can't comment on the legality of doing that.

Indeed. Though as a semi-related aside, Canberra recently had some stats put out where quite literally less that 50% of "ketamine" tested was actually ketamine, most of the street ketamine out here now are these research chemical analogs.

Illegality is not an intrinsic property of a chemical compound, even though the title might suggest so.

What they have discovered is a previously unknown psychoactive molecule.

Depends on legislature. I think in the UK they broadly banned any "psychoactive" substance (ridiculous law, I know).

Including coffee and tea?

No, there was a carve out for established products.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/psychoactive-subst...

>excludes legitimate substances, such as food, alcohol, tobacco, nicotine, caffeine and medical products from the scope of the offence, as well as controlled drugs, which continue to be regulated by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971

It's a really shoddy law. The idea that all psychoactive substances are banned except 'legitimate' ones such as alcohol, tobacco, and nicotine is really funny.

The legitimate substances are the legally permitted ones by definition. No scare quotes required.

The property of legitimacy is with respect to laws, not common sense or popularity.

The use of scare quotes in discussions _about_ the laws are a useful reminder that “legitimacy” has a technical definition other than what the reader might think plain english meaning is.

In this case, legitimate apparently means “with sufficient political support”.

Illegality is not an intrinsic property of anything, so of course that's not what the headline suggests.

But it's not odd, unfair, or extreme to ban substances before they're explicitly known. For specific purposes or more generally.

If I have some novel medical compound, of course I can't just mix it into my cookies. If I come up with some entirely novel gaseous organophosphate thing, not only am I forbidden from releasing it in the subway, but the government is quite justified in asking why the heck I even possess that stuff.

The headline not only suggests it, it explicitly states it.

It says it's illegal, but that its illegality is an inherent property of the drug itself, as opposed to a conditional property coming from the laws of Australia, is just a fantastic straw man.

It reads to me like OP is trying to suggest he headline is somehow absurd. It is not.

> If I have some novel medical compound, of course I can't just mix it into my cookies.

Why of course? What justification leads you to "of course" here. Not saying you are necessarily wrong but doesnt sound like say taking aspirin and adding some vitamins, despite now being a novel medical compound, would make it immediately and obviously illegal, letalone for personal use in cookies or otherwise.

Not that the law ever had to or indeed does make sense.

Perhaps I should specify "cookies you intended to sell, or otherwise serve to people who have no reason to think they would contain anything but ingredients legal as food additives".

I hope you agree food additives should not be legal by default just because no one explicitly listed it as illegal.

Got it, that makes a lot more sense.

> I can't just mix it into my cookies

> releasing it in the subway

Why do you think these are reasons for making a substance illegal?

You can buy chlorine bleach legally at any hardware shop, but if you mix it into cookies or make chlorine gas and then poison people, you'll have committed a crime.

Likewise, you can buy a huge razor sharp knife in any home goods store. Should these be banned because it's possible to stab people with them?

If something has no legal uses to speak of, but has illegal ones - especially, profitable illegal ones - then that's good enough reason to ban it as I see it.

And that's definitively where novel analogs of pharmaceuticals, ordered in bulk from dodgy Chinese suppliers, fall.

This logic makes “date rape” drugs the most dangerous of all. But they’re not treated like that, are they? Possession of such is almost certainly probable cause to commit kidnapping, sexual assault, or conspiracy to lure people into those. Yet people sentenced to life for drug trafficking would have been better off selling the actual assault drug.

I'm not sure if even that's such a straightforward argument to make. I've recently been looking into buying some reagents for fungal microscopy, and supposedly Melzer's reagent is awkward to get hold of (particularly in the USA?) because chloral hydrate is a "date rape drug".

Another chemical branded as a date rape drug is GHB, but it is also popular as a recreational drug. Again, not something you can say possession of implies some intention to commit rape.

I believe GHB is also one of the few known drugs that can treat narcolepsy, and is therefore prescription only in the US.

Also note that alcohol is the most common 'date rape' drug.

Specialized date rape drugs are largely a fiction. It's just regular recreational drugs used in an especially evil way, and the vast majority that regular recreational drug is just alcohol.

It's also probably a regular event that young people experience blackout for the first time, haven't been taught about blackout, and assume they must have been fed something more sinister than alcohol.

Alcohol is treated much better than its danger would suggest, for cultural reasons (that most people, use it recreationally, and often in high prestige contexts). If you want more restrictions on alcohol, especially restrictions on profiting from it, I'm all on your side. But I think it's a bad argument to be nicer to importers of novel drug analogs.

> If something has no legal uses to speak of, but has illegal ones

We are talking about making chemicals illegal as soon as they are discovered, or even before they are discovered. There's no way to know what legal uses they might have if no one gets to use them.

Due to this kind of stigma it's taken decades for people to accept that ketamine is one of the safest and most effective forms of treatment for depression, for example, while many migraine sufferers report that low doses of psychedelics are an effective treatment - something very dear to me as a sufferer of migraines, although unfortunately I haven't found that these work for me. Psychedelics are also a potential treatment for depression that needs further research. Then there's THC, an amazing drug for chronic pain sufferers and cancer patients, again mired in stigma because it's "illegal".

Sadly because reactionary politics it's taken decades to start to get legitimate testing done on these.

> dodgy... suppliers

Yes, when something is made illegal that's the only way to get hold of it.

If you want to do research on legitimate uses for something that presently only has profitable illegal uses, then you can seek permission to do that in an organised manner.

I'm not terribly worried that we miss out on the "personal research" of recreational users.

It seems weird how you stress the profitability aspect in your two previous comments. As if something that is profitable increases its illegality - whereas when something is legal but really unhealthy, like nicotine, it can be as profitable as you want. Double standards, where being legal takes precedent over health.

> then you can seek permission to do that in an organised manner.

And how do you think that people suffering from <migraine> (insert illness of choice) will go about that? Wait a few years until a regulatory body approves their case, all while suffering from <migraine>? What if the regulatory body desidea that only people with degrees in chemistry (but not molecular biology) are allowed to do such research?

Such a bureaucratic processes are textbook examples really bad policy that pushes people to black markets. But certain northern European countries just love that approach, I know.

well said.

To add a less convincing, but imo just as important point: It's insane to think that an individual should need to justify their use to the government before ingesting a substance for medical purposes(or any purpose, for that matter) just because it has psychoactive properties, which we've decided is an inherently bad thing for some reason

There's a reason I keep harping on the profit motive. Such personal decisions aren't made in a vacuum.

Should people be allowed to try cyanide-containing apricot kernels to treat their cancers too? Maybe?

But don't you agree then that we should at least do something about those who make tons of money on such unproven cures, and spend a good chunk on it too convince more desperate people to give it a try?

> unproven cures

Unproven, or disproven?

I think we're one the same page when it comes to the government informing people of what is state of the art in research is, what is unkown, and what is bogus and disproven - but not when it comes to restricting access to people to (unproven) cures that might work for them.

There are a number of drugs whose highly beneficial side effects were only discovered after people took them for other reasons.

> whereas when something is legal but really unhealthy, like nicotine, it can be as profitable as you want.

I have never said that. Were it up to me, we would do our damndest to eliminate the profit motive in the production of those drugs also, like alcohol and tobacco, which for cultural reasons it's not practical to just ban.

I don't think the scientific method pushes people to black markets. I understand the "do something!!" impulse on behalf of people who suffer from things like migraines, but these people are especially important to protect from people with a profit motive hawking miracle cures.

Why would people who profit from life-wrecking recreational drugs be any less cynical than apricot-kernel cancer cure profiteers? I can understand that desperate people fall for such people's PR and want to try anything, but I will not let the cynical profiteers weaponize those desperate people to bypass the scientific standards for approving potentially dangerous drugs.

Depends. In quite a few Australian states, any chemical that is similar in effect to an illicit drug is also an illicit drug. Yes it's a ridiculous law. In Queensland:

> The definition of a dangerous drug (s 4 Drugs Misuse Act) includes synthetic or analogue drugs that:

- have a chemical structure substantially similar to a drug in the schedules to the Regulation (or a salt, derivative or stereo-isomer thereof)

- have a pharmacological effect substantially similar to those drugs

- are intended to have a pharmacological effect that is substantially similar to those drugs.

If I recall the legislation correctly, those are OR, not AND.

According to a travel guide the licking of toads is illegal in Queensland[0] due to its psychoactive properties.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad

This gives another perspective to fairy tales.

'Cane Toads: An Unnatural History' (1988) - IMDb : https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0130529/

'Cane Toads: An Unnatural History' : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_Toads:_An_Unnatural_His...

>'Cane Toads: An Unnatural History' site:youtube.com< : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='Cane Toads: An Unnatura...>

Is it just psychoactive toads, or can I continue to lick normal toads there?

Just the psychoactive ones. Go nuts with other toads, as long as they are not native though: they have protections too

Bufotoxin : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufotoxin

Toad Toxins : https://www.erowid.org/animals/toads/toads_health1.shtml

If the purpose of the law is to make psychoactive substances illegal, what would be ridiculous it would be to ban them one by one as they pop up (and they will never stop popping up)

That is, quite interestingly, what Germany is doing with LSD-like substances. They banned, in this order with 1 year between, 1p-LSD, 1cp-LCD, and 1v-LSD. 1d-LSD is currently (openly and seemily legaly) sold in Berlin.

Hardly a ridiculous law. It would be ridiculous if you could evade the law by making trivial changes to chemical composition, which is what was happening before the law was amended.

Except it hasn’t worked. The point of those laws are to discourage drug use, and yet drug use is higher in Australia than nearly anywhere else in the western world, and these analogs are rampant — because their legality or illegality is unimportant to most.

But that's not the point. That's an argument about drug laws in general.

> - are intended to have a pharmacological effect that is substantially similar to those drugs.

This one is interesting. So if someone with a 'bad intend' creates substance X, then substance X will be banned, even if it has no actual effect that is banned (and even if someone later figures out that it cures cancer)?

For some reason, anything that seems to alter consciousness is bad and is forbidden for use almost immediately by most authorities around the world. Except alcohol and tobacco, you can go wild with that because it's safe \s

I will never, ever understand why Marijuana is illegal, I can guarantee you, even if this thing is relatively harmless, it will be outlawed immediately.

Recreational additives become illicit drugs based on the characteristics of the people who use them. As another poster mentioned about LSD analogues in Berlin, the users are likely well below the radar of criminal association. Viagra suffers no possibility of becoming illicit because its users are in power. Using marijuana in the 20th century suggested the threat of new forms of desegregated music and society.

I can't tell which direction the causation goes in this case(I mean I'm sure it's both, at least to some degree). It also makes sense that drugs that are illegal are used by "criminals" or those associated with criminal behavior.

In regards to new substances that aren't illegal yet, they are likely to be sought out by those who already use other illegal substances with similar effects

> I will never, ever understand why Marijuana is illegal, I can guarantee you, even if this thing is relatively harmless, it will be outlawed immediately.

Because of racism or tribalism.

One great example of this is "the war on drugs." It was noted that marginalized and poverty-stricken communities (typically consisting of people of color) were the predominant users of recreational drugs. This worked out exactly as designed, allowing slavery/servitude to be unceremoniously reinstituted: https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/incarceration-rates-by-r...

The story is much more interesting than the misleading headline.

It's "discovered" in the sense that somebody is making and importing it, but nobody in Australia has seen it before. So they go into the details of what kind of chemistry goes on with an unidentified powder.

What did you find to be misleading about the headline? I'm only asking because it made me think of a black-market-sold drug ("illicit drug") that was recently encountered and recognized as distinctly different ("new"; "has been discovered") from other current-market drugs, which seems to match the description you gave of the article.

How can a substance be illicit if it was just discovered?

They’re default banned, in most Australian states.

https://adf.org.au/drug-facts/new-psychoactive-substances/

>> In Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria there is now a ‘blanket ban’ on possessing or selling any substance that has a psychoactive effect other than alcohol, tobacco and food.

>and food

Perfect, so bake it into cookies.

I'm assuming that the law is written such that it applies to ingredients which are both psychoactive and have no reasonable culinary value.

so sodium benzoate is okay (no psychoactive effect) and hazelnut is okay (use as a flavoring), but random alkaloids wouldn't.

buzzkill law, though.

Except for Kava which has recently been legalised. There's even a Kava company listed on the ASX! It just goes to show that when money talks, politicians listen.

https://fijikava.com/

Analog laws in most Australian states make these research chemicals banned-by-default.

"Chemists identify novel drug already in circulation"

The headline should have said 'identified'.

> Chemical X could only be something called 2’-fluoro-2-oxo-phenylcyclohexylethylamine. And they had never seen this compound before.

But it was previously discovered and named.

You don't need to name chemical substances. The structure is the name.

Not the OP, but first is the ambiguity introduced by "discovered" in regard to a man-made thing. One must ask if the writer intended "invented". In which case, how does one invent a drug that is already regulated or outlawed?

Or did the writer mean that the chemist invented a street drug which was then outlawed?

Or does it mean a known drug was outlawed and found for the first time by authorities within the country that outlawed it? That makes sense, but sounds like "Dog Bites Man".

Did not anticipate a detailed article on chemical sleuthing.

> but nobody in Australia has seen it before

More interestingly, "We contacted our offsiders at the UN Office of Drug Control, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, as well as several well-positioned researchers in this space from around the world. None had seen the compound before."

The drug is know about and had published details how to test - https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/do...

OPs entire point was the journey to find drug is what's interesting.

The fact they had not entered the known details into their database is not interesting.

That fact the Australians named CanKet after their capital is also funny. Because Canberra is a hole.

User review of CanKet - https://old.reddit.com/r/noids/comments/wv5q04/identificatio...

vouched. you're shadowbanned, it seems.

Or called CanKet because it was identified at the CanTEST Health and Drug Checking Service that was opened in Canberra.

I guess there's a reason your account is shadow banned

Ok, we replaced "new" with "unidentified" in the title above. Thanks!

If someone has a better title suggestion, we can change it again.

The DEA used to publish a monthly newsletter called Microgram which profiled interesting work coming out of their analytical labs.

Super interesting to read, but it's now behind some firewall for law enforcement only.

They also have a journal called Microgram where they publish scientific papers on forensic chemistry.

https://www.dea.gov/documents/2018/2018-01/2018-01-01/synthe...

Reminds me of one of my favourite Onion articles: https://www.theonion.com/new-wonder-drug-enables-users-to-ge...

'On Monday, Sloan Laboratories, a subsidiary of the Wilmington-based Merton Pharmaceuticals, unveiled Dexiflux-V, a new miracle drug its creators claim will enable users to get "high as a fucking kite."'

You van get this stuff online.

I used to take ket analogs and pcp derivatives all the time. DCK and HO-PCE were staples in my dorm in college.

I will probably end up with some bizarre form of cancer due to taking large quantities of these drugs with little history of human usage

Methoxetamine and 3-MEO-PCP and all the weird stuff in between!

Due to the well-established metabolic processes these go through, it is very unlikely to see any side effects outside of acute, high doses, such as Ket and bladder issues.

Crazy to think it took a constitutional amendment to repeal the prohibition of alcohol, but in 2013, little uproar as the Federal Analogues act essentially made all drugs with any desirable properties, de facto illegal.

Yeah that act didn't really do a lot though, can can still get this stuff on the clear net with very little risk of getting caught, and if you get caught? Little risk of prosecution

Around the corner from where I live in Berlin there is a store[1] that legaly sells LSD analogs. They also run a web shop[2].

It sold 1cP-LSD until summer 2021 (outlawed in July 2021, AFAIR), switched to 1V-LSD until that was outlawed by the government this September and is now selling 1D-LSD which, along BOL-148, is the last known LSD alike/derivative that is not outlawed in Germany (yet) AFAIK[3].

My guess would be that once those latter two get outlawed they may pay someone to find them a new variant ...

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/NDGuYNTSyE5ozAcv6

[2] https://www.lsd.shop

[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_LSD-Analoga#Rechtlic...

I need to travel to Berlin soon.

Note that before 1cp-LSD there was 1p-LSD. My impression was that 1cp-LSD, 1v-LSD, and 1d-LSD was published precisely the moment the previous *-LSD was banned. So it is quite likely that somebody already has a successor of 1d-LSD in his drawer.

What I find quite interesting is that Germany seems unable or unwillig to ban all *-LSD formulae. They are able to ban structural groups, but for LSD it is always quite specific when the new law is published. As if somebody is interested in keeping LSD access open.

BOL-148 is not like the others. All others are N1-acyl analogs of LSD, so unlike bol148 they rapidly metabolize to LSD proper. This also means until they make a prodrug or analog law, it will be easy to keep on thinking of new LSD prodrugs. Here are a few free ones that will certainly work, no payment to me required: isovaleroyl, cyclobutanecarbonyl, oxetanecarbonyl(both isomers), cyclopropylacetyl.

I remember about 20 years ago an article in I think either Rolling Stone or Spin on people whose business was making new psychoactive compounds, which was basically making new amines to slot into the same places that LSD does but with different structures.

Obviously this is a long time ago so my memory is a bit off, surely nothing else I have ever done has affected my memory in this case.

There's a Hamilton's Pharmacopeia on this

David Nichols was cranking out novel psychedelics at Purdue around that time. There's also a bit of a renaissance going on in the EU with 1P-LSD, 1V-LSD, 1cP-LSD, etc. The chemist responsible was recently interviewed and basically says they have a new substituted analogue ready to hit the market as soon as whatever they're currently selling is banned! German video but interview with the chemist is in English: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=iVNCt2zyIaQ

It's very similar to an unidentified drug in Honduras, I wonder if it's the same organization creating them and distributing them in different places.

'Tiburón or “Shark” is a chemically-altered weed that is said to be more addictive than cocaine and sells like hotcakes.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZhxFtmAoXg

> We still don’t know its full effects, but thanks to understanding its chemical composition, we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.

That's the small grudge I have with chemistry, especially organic - yes, it's the basis of life, but the discipline seems more like a catalogue of observations than a theory that would allow us to make deductions.

  > the discipline seems more like a catalogue of observations than a theory

That is exactly what it is. Just like e.g. Ohm's law is based on observation and not theory, and archeology, and psychology, and medicine, and physics, and almost every other field outside mathematics. Some of those fields have developed theories to explain the observations, yet even those theories are constantly being refined.

This is why CS was a branch of mathematics for so long.

Electromagnetism, to take your example, is very much a theory that we can use to make predictions about a new system once we can write down its description. Yes, we sometimes make new discoveries and we have to develop new theories for those (like when we discovered that electricity and magnetism are governed by the same force), but that doesn't mean that for every new circuit layout we have start afresh by collecting data. We can apply the theory to the description and get a reasonable prediction. And that's what feels different about organic compounds. We already have the formula, but we still can't deduce much from it.

How is it illicit if it is unidentified? Does Australia have a law against isomers?

There's nothing Aussies like more than banning or prohibiting things. It is almost certainly illegal and if it isn't, it will be tomorrow.

After the "novel psychoactive substance" boom of the 2010's some countries just blanket banned psychoactive substances with a handful of exceptions (alcohol, tobacco, caffeine).

Australia enacted such laws in 2017.

Everyone knew it was coming - eventually the politicians would tire of playing whackamolecule.

> eventually the politicians would tire of playing whackamolecule

"Whackamolecule" is a great word for this phenomenon - both concise and evocative.

YOLO - where can I get some?

Glow, Slo-Mo or Substance D?

Guessing substance D, feels very 2022

"fluor" is not a morpheme I enjoy seeing in a chemical name; this seems possibly quite toxic? (I am not a chemist)

Fluorine on an aromatic ring is not labile: other examples of substances with fluorinated aromatic rings are fluoxetine(prozac), citalopram (celexa) and paroxetine (paxil), which are antidepressants many people are taking daily without fluorine-related toxicity

Flourine/halogenated alkaloids in general like these may be toxic, but it's not because of the flourine. The halogens are used because they form very strong bonds in those positions (among other reasons)

How likely is it that someone tried to make fluorexetamine and messed up vs intentionally putting the F in a different spot?

Pretty unlikely. The F would be already in place at an early stage, the precursor is probably 2-F-benzonitrile, alternatively 2-f-phenylmagnesium bromide.

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