Legal Realities in Private Study?

[Ganoderma]

Something that seemed to slip my mind recently was the legalities of studying various things, not the study so much as the physical experimentation.

Recently (last few years) i have been devoting my free time to plant research, mostly of cacti, and in the last year have been getting more and more into the biochemistry aspects of plants. One thing i have been increasingly interested in is the chemical makeup of cacti, and other plants, especially in relation to plant relationships and related chemicals (chemotaxonomy?)

naturally when one studies cacti, especially the chemicals of, there is an abundance of study in Peyote. The cactus itself is legal here and no problems, but the thing i just realized was that the alkaloid mescaline is pretty much illegal in most countries.

So there lies my problem, and question. How does a private person study such things legally? not everyone has a company, institution or the like to back up a study and, for lack of an appropriate word, "legitimize" it.

So what does a person do that is seriously interested in something do in such a scenario....thus far i have just simply given up on this aspect, but i am sure many others are/were in the same boat.....and that MUST slow down scientific knowledge in many cases.

[Mercedes Benzene]

The United States, and many other countries for that matter, have a zero-tolerance policy for the possession of controlled substances, regardless of any potential educational use.
This is simply a public safety measure, and applies to many hobbies not including chemistry (amateur rocketry for instance). Using the example of rocketry, one must obtain special training and licensure before they can purchase engines of particular size and power.

The same sort of thing applies to the chemistry of "illegal" substances. A lab receives a license in order to purchase monitored/controlled amounts of said compounds.
It's funny that you mention mescaline, because my lab actually uses mescaline to produce analog chromophores. One must have a DEA license to purchase it.

In short, I'm sorry to say, but if you don't work at a legitimate scientific institution, it's not going to be possible to purchase chemicals such as mescaline.

This is a shame, because there are people such as yourself who want to carry out legitimate scientific work... and I suppose to some degree it limits scientific expansion, but it's the only way to keep things safe and fair for everyone.

[Theory5]

I know a guy.......
Yea mercades benzene is right, most countries only give certain scientific institutes those substances and usually there is a giant list of requirements they need to fill, and they dont give them a bunch either.
I never realized cacti contained alkaloid mescaline, but if it is legal where you are what is the problem? :-)

[Ganoderma]

the problem is it is illegal

the other problem is that even if i don't want to extract and study mescaline, i HAVE to extract mescaline out of the raw cactus when i extract other chemicals....and then again to get rid of it to clean up the other chemicals.....

perhaps a better example would be DMT and the hundreds, maybe thousands, of plants that contain it in small amounts....perhaps studying it without letting anyone know is easy enough, but what happens when you publish a paper???