BEg2 chapter 15 methcathinone

[Allen Ruch]

"Toot-Uncommon." 

Ha ha ha ha! Thank you for that. 

—Quail

PS: Back when I taught chemistry, one of my favorite AP labs involved solutions of potassium permanganate. [Redox titrations against iron (II) sulfate. Great lab! You can use nineteenth-century wet methods to analyze the iron content of vitamin supplements within 0.5% error.] Even at very dilute concentrations, the solutions were as purple as wine. It was always so...tempting to drink... You had to be sure to place TOXIC labels everywhere, just so younger students didn't think it was grape juice. I still have a soft spot for KMnO4. 

But yeah, manganese toxicity is interesting. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4515672/


On 1/29/22, 12:11 AM, "Pynchon-l on behalf of Michael Bailey" <pynchon-l-bounces at waste.org on behalf of michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:

    “Well, for Igor it’s methcathinone, also known as bathtub speed, “The
    bathtub in this case being, my guess is it’s over in Jersey.”
         “Sid always has good product,” Igor nods, “not this cheap
    kitchen-stove Latvian shnyaga which is pink from permanganate they don’t
    get rid of, before long you are deeply fucked up, like you don’t walk
    right, you shake? Latvian dzhef, do me a favor, Maxine! don’t go near it,
    it ain’t dzhef! it’s govno!””

    1) permanganate - the “purpurstoff” from GR

    2) this stuff wasn’t scheduled till the mid-90s, I’m pretty sure I got
    something like it in the mail, back in the 80s, it wasn’t all that great
    though (but I’ve never reacted well to speed or coke.) Got drawn in by
    descriptions of traditional khat chewing.

    (There was this company called Inner Center in Hermosa Beach, if you sent
    them a letter saying you used these things as sacraments, they sent you a
    catalog with a bunch of products including cathine and/or cathinone, and a
    variety of pseudo ephedrine analogues under brand names like Toot-Uncommon
    and the like, all of which came in little plastic envelopes and created a
    certain localized numbness and perhaps increased concentration with a
    smidgen of euphoria. They even had parsley flakes saturated with 5-MeO-DMT
    which I just read is the main ingredient of toad venom. That did do
    something but honestly it wasn’t very pleasant.)

    3) Parkinsonism (“you are deeply fucked up, you don’t walk right, you
    shake”) is a known side effect of the permanganate leftover from sloppy
    synthesis of methcathinone

    4) Maxine isn’t drawn to it, but respects Igor enough to go through the
    motions of accepting his advice against Latvian “dzhef” (seems to be
    Russian for methcathinone) because it’s really “govno” (“bad shit”)

    5) “shnyaga” online definitions are vague.
    https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shnyaga&=true

    1) noun - most frequently used to describe some object or body part
    2) verb - used to describe an action mostly between two people such as
    fighting, having intercourse, etc.

    That is one catchall term!
    --
    Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l