The real takeaway isn't that drug chemists are clever (they are) but that Derek's final point destroys the supply-side drug war premise: synthetic routes get re-engineered. They always do. Tighten precursor rules, they find new routes. The chiral resolution trick shows they're not pioneering—they're just applying pharma textbook techniques under a different incentive structure. The regulatory pressure that made pseudoephedrine hard to get didn't stop meth production; it forced them to get better at chemistry. You can't regulate away a human-designed synthesis any more than you can regulate away a software algorithm. It's not a supply problem, it's a demand + price problem. Every restriction just raises the barrier to entry and rewards whoever figures out the new synthesis.