The controversy and quite frankly inept laziness surrounding the results of the Texas A and M studies of the alkaloid content to determine the potential causes of the Locomotor Ataxia in goats eating the Guajillo (common name) Acacias and closely related sister species of Rigidula and Berlandieri is phenomenal.
People that seem to know so much here and there in other forums blow a rasberry and say blank blank. Something from back of horse.
I just today located some info as follows about Alexander Shulgin reading these results and trying to contact the 3 writers of the paper to see if the results could be confimed.
Alexander Shulgin wrote Phikal phenylethlamines I have know and loved and created many unknown to man and then simply consumed them and wrote results, I love that CIA tried to recruit him and he said NO WAY am I going to design poisons etc for you.
In my irritation with what happens so often on internet where every one seems to just quote someone and has no initiative to deal in absolutes, I today am calling Texas A and M agricultural departments Dr. Forbes one of 3 writters of the paper he is still there.
Here is a quote of Dr.Shulgin who is a reknowned chemist of ultimate respectability:
I am familiar with the literature concerning these two West Texas Acacia species, but not with the plants themselves. I had both these PHYTOCHEMISTRY papers in my Acacia file but I must admit that I have some very mixed feelings about them.
What caught my curiosity immediately was the casual indifference shown to what is certainly an extraordinary discovery. Here, amongst some 40 or so alkaloids found in each of these two species, there were five amphetamines that had heretofore been thought to be inventions of man. Two of these are Schedule II drugs, Amphetamine and Methamphetamine. Two are Schedule I drugs, N,N-Dimethylamphetamine and 4-Methoxyamphetamine. And the fifth one is a major human metabolite of Amphetamine, 4-Hydroxyamphetamine. To my knowledge, none of these had ever before been reported as being natural plant alkaloids. This unprecedented discovery elicited only a passing line of comment in the earlier of the two papers.
My first thoughts as to origin were directed towards the well known natural hydroxylated amphetamines such as norephedrine, ephedrine and N-methylephedrine. I know that ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, frequent precursors in the illegal synthesis of methamphetamine, can be reduced to methamphetamine as an artifact of analysis. The sample insertion conditions of the gas chromatograph can effect this conversion. But then, there was no mention of any of these hydroxylated alkaloids as being present in either Acacia.
Might a contaminated round-bottomed flask have been purchased at a garage sale outside an abandoned meth-lab and served as the source of these "man-made" compounds? Unlikely, even in Texas.
Even more dramatic, one of these amphetamines, the 4-Methoxyamphetamine, is the increasingly notorious PMA that is appearing as one of the lethal "Ecstasy" offerings in the rave scene.
Several months ago I tried to contact, individually, the two principal authors, by both e-mail and personal snail-mail, and I have received no response as yet.
There is certainly precedent for a drug which was originally man-made, to be discovered in a plant. N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) was first synthesized by Manske, in Canada, in the 1930s. It was over twenty years later that it was discovered in a plant from South America. But such an event usually evokes considerable commentary. Here it seems that an exciting story is being ignored. Am I missing something?
-- Dr. Shulgin
I have no idea if he ever got an answer and will try to contact him as well, worst case I will locate and gather several Texas samples and submit them ideally to Shulgin, UT to some student that might go the GC-MS and write a paper with results, and possibly some Nexians with true GC-MS access not some one just desiring the plant product for personal testing on their own body and mind.
It seems the results highly important to know since this effects livestock goats so profoundly (wobbles, infertility , possible teratogenic effects, death of goats during transport etc).
It annoys me to no end that seemingly not one person has not found reaffirming or denying the original results important.
Dr. Shulgin made some important comments on the results, and that no one would return any types of communications.
GC-MS insertion process could cause a reduction of ephedrine or related alkaloids, thus although various amphetamines might not occur naturally it could be reduced to form amphetamines. This has been proven to occur and is not theory. Probationers taking pseudoephedrine beware. In case your knowledge of chemistry limited ephedrines molecule is slightly more complicated than methamphetamine so it only requires a reduction of the molecule to convert it.
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