Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by chromas on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:07PM   Printer-friendly

Breaking Bad: Japan Prof 'Made Students Produce Ecstasy':

A Japanese university professor could face up to 10 years in jail after allegedly getting his students to produce ecstasy, officials said Wednesday, in an echo of TV hit series "Breaking Bad".

Authorities suspect the 61-year-old pharmacology professor from Matsuyama University in western Japan got his pupils to make MDMA—commonly known as ecstasy—in 2013 and another so-called "designer drug" 5F-QUPIC last year.

The professor told investigators he was aiming to further the "education" of his pharmaceutical sciences students, an official from the local health ministry told AFP.

The ecstasy allegedly produced has not been found and has "probably been discarded," added this official, who asked to remain anonymous.

[...] Japanese law states that a researcher needs a licence issued by regional authorities to manufacture narcotics for academic purposes.

Next on the syllabus was how to start, organize, and operate a fast-growing business?


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:15PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:15PM (#831248)

    Invalid form key: 8FcJyh0qxZ

    • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @09:02PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @09:02PM (#831305)

      [grasping foil headgear] do you see, man?!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:20PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:20PM (#831252)

    The ecstasy allegedly produced has not been found and has "probably been discarded," added this official, who asked to remain anonymous.

    Is that a polite way of saying "consumed, sold or simply vanished into the ether"?

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:26PM (2 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:26PM (#831259) Journal

      You think university chem labs don't have disposals for dangerous(or fun) chemicals?

      • (Score: 4, Funny) by DECbot on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:29PM

        by DECbot (832) on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:29PM (#831260) Journal

        I certainly do. Grad students... what would schools do without them?

        --
        cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @08:09PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @08:09PM (#831284)

        You think university chem labs don't have disposals for dangerous(or fun) chemicals?

        I think the lack of a definitive statement means Professor Feel Good didn't tell them that the drugs had been disposed of safely. Which means they weren't. The university would not miss an opportunity to claim no one took the drugs, yet they could not make that claim.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Aurean on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:31PM (8 children)

    by Aurean (4924) on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:31PM (#831263)

    "[...]Japanese law states that a researcher needs a licence issued by regional authorities to manufacture narcotics for academic purposes."

    Ecstasy isn't a narcotic.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @08:13PM (7 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @08:13PM (#831287)

      narcotic (n) - a drug or other substance affecting mood or behavior and sold for nonmedical purposes, especially an illegal one.

      I'd say Ecstasy meets that definition.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday April 17 2019, @08:25PM (4 children)

        by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 17 2019, @08:25PM (#831292) Journal

        There's a lot of high functioning drug users who are like way uptight about whether the thing they take is actually "that bad" and invent spurious boundaries and redefinitions to separate the "good ones" from the "bad ones"

        It remains the truth that undiagnosed alcoholism will fuck up your life way more than manymost "dangerous street drugs", and that's symptomatic of something being terribly wrong with how drugs are designated officially, and we should never have treated psychoactive substance use or abuse like a crime. But sometimes the drug enthusiasts make it hard for me to remember that's my position, when they get into weird asinine denialism.

        • (Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday April 17 2019, @08:40PM

          by sjames (2882) on Wednesday April 17 2019, @08:40PM (#831297) Journal

          Drilling back, narcotic was at one time the proper medical term for the class of drugs that make you sleepy. Law enforcement so thoroughly butchered the term to mean any drug they wanted to bust you for that the term was abandoned in medical practice.

        • (Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday April 17 2019, @09:00PM (2 children)

          by Bot (3902) on Wednesday April 17 2019, @09:00PM (#831303) Journal

          >that's symptomatic of something being terribly wrong with how drugs are designated officially

          It is also symptomatic of what happens when a drug becomes socially accepted.

          --
          Account abandoned.
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Wednesday April 17 2019, @09:02PM

            by Bot (3902) on Wednesday April 17 2019, @09:02PM (#831304) Journal

            Before being labeled as a prohiBOTionist, I consider this professor is a hero. If people made XTC on their own, the war on drugs would be won. It would be only sufficient to jail people who are high in public, for safety reasons.

            --
            Account abandoned.
          • (Score: 2) by pipedwho on Wednesday April 17 2019, @10:34PM

            by pipedwho (2032) on Wednesday April 17 2019, @10:34PM (#831363)

            No, alcohol is problematic on its own. Caffeine is socially acceptable and has far fewer problems.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by pipedwho on Wednesday April 17 2019, @10:30PM (1 child)

        by pipedwho (2032) on Wednesday April 17 2019, @10:30PM (#831361)

        Well that pretty much covers everything that can be eaten or drunk.

        Alcohol? Narcotic.
        Caffeine? Narcotic.
        Sugar? Narcotic.

        Yay for the dictionary!

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 18 2019, @12:13AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 18 2019, @12:13AM (#831420)

          But 🍕pizza🍕 falls under that definition too! Oh no, please don't get pizzas banned!

          * It's a substance because it's physical matter
          * It certainly affects moods

          Can't have people going around having their moods be dictated by things that are bad for you!

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @09:50PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @09:50PM (#831334)

    Consider cooking meth. It's a great lesson for organic chemistry students.

    One popular method involves iodine and phosphorus. That is mildly interesting.

    The more interesting method involves lithium dissolved in anhydrous ammonia. The ammonia part itself is a wild adventure if you start from fertilizer. You pass a gas through something to remove all water, then probably through something cooled by a bath of dry ice in acetone. That get you liquid ammonia without any water. The lithium dissolves in a most extraordinary way. It ionizes all by itself, into Li+ ions and bare electrons! This creates an intensely blue liquid.

    I don't have a use for meth, and I so badly want to make it. That reaction is simply awesome.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @10:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @10:09PM (#831350)

      LSD or bust.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by jb on Thursday April 18 2019, @04:03AM

    by jb (338) on Thursday April 18 2019, @04:03AM (#831500)

    Authorities suspect the 61-year-old pharmacology professor [emphasis mine]

    If he'd done that in an organic chemistry or chemical engineering class, it would have been understandable, perhaps even supportable.

    But pharmacology is fundamentally not about making drugs. It's about studying the actions of known drugs and using that knowledge to design and test new ones.

    At university I was a pharmacology major (admittedly last century, but ancient Greek words retain their meaning forever). In our labs we worked with a wide range of drugs (including some which were illegal anywhere outside of the academic research environment). But we never synthesised any of them: almost all of them were purchased by the university from drug companies; a very small proportion were made in-house by the chemical engineering department.

    The only things the pharmacology department made themselves were a selection of ringers (not drugs at all, just solutions to fill organ baths with and dissolve drugs in, designed to be isotonic to whichever animal's bits we were working with on that day) and even those were made by staff or postgrads (never by us in our labs).

    The real problem here is not that he broke prohibition laws: it's that he wasted his students' time by teaching them something other than pharmacology (most likely chemical engineering) in pharmacology class. Given how expensive university degrees have become these days, that should be considered a far more serious act to have committed.

(1)