Chinese tryptamine export spam

I would have blogged this over on the norlonto.net homepage, but we’ve got a notice there we need to keep up until a bit of spam domain spoofing tarring our good name blows over…

I just got some unrelated spam at the norlonto.net enquiries address, apparently from a Chinese firm calling itself Shanghai Peak Science & Technology of Chemicals Co., Ltd., trying to flog us "Tryptamine & Phenethylamine, Protected Amino Acid, Hormone Steroid, chiral compounds and intermediates". Anyone familiar with Alexander Shulgin will recognise those first two words as the families of substances he and his wife have known and loved. You’ll certainly be acquainted with the first family’s friendly PR agent, the magic mushroom, and the second family’s highly successful, albeit media-savaged son, ecstasy.

Well, I can’t find any reference to the above company on the web, but there is at least one Chinese company apparently offering the same range of potent hallucinogens, including 5-MeO-DMT. They also claim to offer a custom synthesis service, and urge you to "Feel free to contact us to solve your company’s problems NOW! Quality assurance and customer satisfaction from gram to multi-ton quantities." Are there companies out there with such cosmically warped goals that their problems would be solved with several tons of DMT? Are they hiring?

To be fair, I’ve never really kept pace with the international legality of these substances, and maybe there are plenty of "legitimate" applications for these sacred compounds (i.e. state-sanctioned and probably less fun than smoking them) that warrant a business-to-business corporate enterprise in China. It just raises an eyebrow to get obviously manual spam (i.e. not mass-mailed to random addresses) to norlonto.net from these folk. They must know we’re not a furrowed-brow research pharmaceutical operation…