You’re listening to Short and Interesting – the podcast that reads to you short excerpts from old, weird, interesting books. Have you ever wondered how to make MDMA? It’s surprisingly do-able. All you need is a strong working knowledge of chemistry, a fair bit of laboratory equipment, a supply of various chemicals, and a recipe. This week, we’re checking out the recipe.

But not really. For legal reasons we’re not actually going to tell you the recipe for MDMA. Instead, we took what purports to be a recipe, and swapped all the ingredients with some other chemical, pretty much at random. So whether you know chemistry or don’t, I promise this will be utterly incomprehensible. But give a listen anyway, it is still worth your time to learn how drugs are made.

This appears to have been self-published by two individuals whose pen names are Bright Star and Rhodium. I have no idea who they are and cannot verify whether their purported recipe is genuine or viable. Proceed at your own risk. This recipe is very much in the public domain. I will not be linking to a copy of the actual recipe here, but trust me, if you put five minutes of effort into searching for it, you should be able to find it.

Music by Dan Mason. Check out and buy his music at https://danmason.bandcamp.com. For this podcast we’re using clips of three tracks from his 2019 album Hypnagogia. Available under the Creative Commons License, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. Creative Commons License details at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Check out our website at podcast.plutocrat.biz. Donations are gratefully accepted. Find us on Bluesky, @shortandinteresting. If you’d like to discuss copyright, contact us at copyright@plutocrat.biz. All other inquiries received at podcast@plutocrat.biz.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.