Author: Erica Li

The introduction of plant medicines from Indigenous cultures into the West by ethnobotanists drives the development of novel medical and research tools (Heinrich and Gibbons, 2001). This was the case in the 18th and 19th century when explorers and pharmacologists set out to understand curare, an arrow poison used by Amazonian tribes in regions of…

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) projects the legal synthesis of 8200 grams of MDMA (ecstasy) in 2022, from 50 grams in 2021 (Figure 1) (DEA, 2020; 2021). This increase has led to the proposal of new synthetic pathways for the manufacturing of this drug, but the environmental impacts of these syntheses have not been…