Clandestine Chemistry

Clandestine chemistry is chemistry carried out in secret, most often in illegal drug laboratories set up to manufacture controlled substances outside the law. Larger operations are typically run by gangs or organized crime groups intending to produce drugs for distribution on the black market, while smaller operations are sometimes run by individual chemists working in secret to synthesize modest amounts of a controlled substance, occasionally driven by nothing more than a hobbyist interest in chemistry or by the difficulty of verifying the purity of illegally synthesized drugs otherwise available on the black market. The term clandestine lab is applied broadly to any illicit-compound production setup, whether or not the facility used actually qualifies as a genuine laboratory.