Monday, March 14, 2022

There's racemic nicotine on the market?

Tucked in the bottom of this New York Times piece on a loophole for vaping that allows for synthetic nicotine to be used in vaping was this odd comment: 
Dr. Sven-Eric Jordt, an associate professor at Duke University who has studied synthetic nicotine, said it posed many unknowns.

About 99 percent of tobacco-derived nicotine is a psychoactive molecule called S-nicotine, he said. But a mirror-image molecule, known as R-nicotine, makes up 50 percent of most types of synthetic nicotine. He said the R-nicotine molecule appears to be less addictive, but very little research has been done on it in animals or humans.

“It could alter nerve transmission in the brain in different ways from classic nicotine,” Dr. Jordt said, “but we don’t understand that at this time.”

According to the article, this material is being made in China. Who is making racemic nicotine, and how?  

1 comment:

  1. let me guess: a shady kilo lab in Shanghai that has been previously involved in designer mail-order drugs, and they use some simple chemistry i.e. 3-bromopyridine Grignard addition to NMP, followed by borohydride reduction in one pot

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