I know that chemists sometimes refer to alcohol as ethyl alcohol. Would it be feasible that if someone wanted to ethylate something they could use pure ethyl alcohol or the closest thing they could find to it(everclear).

No.

Go learn some chemistry

Synth

thought not, well, what chemical would one utilize for ethylation?

ethylation????----what are you trying to do--sure it isnt methylation???

kirb: ethylatin is just like methylation but with an ethyl group. Wasn't that hard to grasp?

You need an ethylating agent, ethyl iodide, diethyl sulphate etc.

Any alkylating agent is by nature toxic, carcinogenic and generally nasty.

what do you want to ethylate??

hi tryp, thanks for pulling me up on that one---and commonsense should have told me what you just did--keep up the good work

well, I was wondering, this most likely is not possible or else people would probably have been doing it since the seventies, I was just thinking one night, i know how people use acetic anyhdride to acetylate morphine to produce diacetylmorphine. So I wondered if you could do that with other drugs, I began to woder if you could take lysergic acid amide and add an ethylating agent to produce lysergic acid diethylamide, lsa is of course easily obtained from an extraction involving morning glories or hawaiian baby woodrose seeds, so i wondered if this might be an easy way to produce lsd. (forgive me if this sounds stupid, im chemistry retarded here, so please just bare with me) I know it sounds stupid but i was just wondering.

but then again i guess you couldnt ethylate it without having nasty chems left over from the ethylating agents(I guess that would be iodine and sulphur) so i guess you would have to start from scratch like lsd producing chemists do. oh well, i guess it was just wishful thinking.

[This message has been edited by GANJAMIN (edited 08-07-2003).]

There aren't any nasty chems left over in the final product after workup. This is in fact how many drugs are made.

However you can't just simply go from LSamide to diethylamide with an ethylating agent. LSD is a very delicate molecule and many things will destroy it or render it unusable. I'd suggest that if the molecule wasn't broken down by the ethylation conditions it would be ethylated in teh wrong place.