R.I.P. Scout26
I'm on a few rehab sites and this bath salt stuff can ROYALLY *expletive deleted* you up. BAD, BAD, BAD stuff....
Skilled chemists can make synthetic cannabinoids that are not illegal but still have psychoactive effects just by changing a couple of molecules.
It's expensive, because the hair essentially is vaporized in a gas chromatograph. The machine is expensive, and it's labor intensive, because a lab tech has to walk through the whole process with each sample. Granted, computers do a lot of the heavy lifting and analysis now, but it's still some "real lab work".
In a former place of employment, I used to run prep-HPLCs to purify Delta-9 THC that the guys in the lab next door made synthetically. On a shift I was yielding about 200gm of 99.5%+ Delta-9 which we then mixed with ethanol. The stuff smelled divine.
That's interesting. Assuming that your process was stripping out aromatic esters, that implies that the THC-Delta-9 actually has a scent. (Honest question) Is that true?