Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved (1991)
I wonder why so many HN readers are interested in phenethylamine-type chemicals.  Sure, there will be a small percentage who will be consumers of said chemicals who&#x27;ve a vested interest and no doubt there are organic chemists who will have a professional interest in said molecules even if they&#x27;re never likely to work with them in person, but that still leaves many interested bystanders who&#x27;ve more than just a casual interest.<p>Even I—who is far too timid to take anything that doesn&#x27;t come out of a reputable pharmaceutical company let alone ever risk manufacturing any of these chemicals—have an interest and can pretty much instantly recognize one of these molecules the moment I see its skeletal formula—even if I can&#x27;t necessarily remember which specific one it is. So what is the principal interest among the mere curious—is it cultural, or the fact that society has gone to great lengths to ban them, or is it just a technical curiosity about the effect they have on humans?<p>There&#x27;s little doubt there’s much interest among HN readers in the subject as this is the second article to appear on HN&#x27;s same page-one only three stories removed from the first, the earlier one being Derek Lowe&#x27;s article <i>The Uselessness of Phenylephrine</i> (science.org). At the time of this post that article had received 559 comments. In my comment to Lowe&#x27;s  article, I referred to an older HN article of similar nature posted at the end of November last year on the availability of the precursor phenylacetone—aka phenyl-2-propanone, P2P—and that story also had a large number of comments—361 in total.<p>Incidentally, my post to Lowe’s article was, I thought, a pretty innocuous one wherein I essentially agreed with Lowe’s comments and provided the link to the older HN P2P story that essentially backed up what Lowe was saying, nevertheless it received a number of down-votes without any explanation.  It seems such stories are still quite divisive on HN.