I’ve been on a chemistry kick lately from watching NileRed and NurdRage (both of which make amazing chemistry videos btw), and something they talk about a lot is how hard it is for an independent chemist not working for a lab, company, or university, to buy chemicals suitable for experiments (i.e. pure enough and in large enough amounts). Not only that, often buying seemingly innocuous chemicals can get you put on a drug making or terrorism watchlist.

It can be a real pain to buy high grades of even extremely common industrial chemicals, most infamously it seems are the mineral acids: Hydrochloric acid, Sulfuric acid, and Nitric acid. These are used in an enormous amount of useful reactions like making plastics, fertilizers, dyes, medicine, and electronic components. But unfortunately, some of those reactions are also associated with making drugs, explosives, and chemical weapons, so it can be very hard to buy pure forms of these acids, and hobbyist chemists literally distill them out of things like drain cleaner or make it themselves from more readily available chemicals.

Moreover, most chemical supply companies will only sell to universities and companies. So even if a chemical had zero restrictions, hell something like really really pure sodium chloride, you still might not have a good enough source for running experiments.

It’s also interesting that most other STEM professions don’t have such strong restrictions for hobbyists. For example, some parts of the electronics hobby can be very dangerous and kill you instantly if you don’t know what you’re doing. But, any bored kid can take apart a microwave they find by the side of the road and extract some extremely dangerous high voltage electronics and a very powerful RF generator that can literally cook flesh.

But, on the flip side, you literally can create drugs, explosives, and worst case scenario chemical weapons using industrial or lab chemicals, especially if anyone could order whatever organic compound they wanted, they could order the most similar mass produced one and potentially be only a simple reaction away from something illegal (NileRed managed to turn a common additive in latex gloves into, no joke, grape flavour, and the chemical that make peppers spicy. That’s obviously legal, but imagine if someone wanted to make meth and had the entire industrially relevant chemical catalogue at his fingertips). Also, chemistry is pretty dangerous and amateur chemists get injured or killed every year, and that’s with these restrictions in place. Finally, not everyone is responsible about how they handle chemical waste, and depending on what reactions they did if they pour it down the drain or throw it in the trash it can fuck up the environment or damage the sewage processing infrastructure. Imagine if some teenager decided to make a bunch of freon because he was rebellious at the ozone layer.

What do you think? Should people not formally working for a lab or university have the ability to run chemical experiments at home? To what extent do you think we should be restricting the sale of lab chemicals to people?

(Full disclosure I’ve never tried running chemical reactions by myself and frankly I don’t see myself ever doing that. But, I do consume media from people, albeit often actual chemists just not working in a formal lab, who do it at home.)