To buy 5-IAI at the moment is not as easy as most people would hope. It might appear that many vendors have 5-IAI in stock and that it is quite cheap but this is not the case. This is making the buy research chemical market a minefield at the moment.

The main thing that people do not realise is that 5-IAI is a very complicated chemical and extremely difficult for any lab to synthesise and produce in high volumes. It is also a very expensive process to manufacture meaning that prices online for buying any amount will be noticeably greater than people have been used to paying for older products.

So I'm sure you are wondering why this chemical is s elusive and difficult to produce. Well research needs to be done by anybody willing to buy it into the history of the chemical. Let's look at a quick summary of 5-IAI and its back ground.

5-IAI (5-Iodo-2-Aiminoindane) is a research chemical that was first developed in the 1990's. The man who led the development was David E Nichols who is probably the worlds most knowledgeable person when it comes to psychoactive chemicals such as LSD (acid) and MDMA (ecstasy).

As a professor at Purdue University he led a team to investigate and synthesise chemical analogues of MDMA which are non-neurotoxic. Some of these are MDAI, MDAT, MDA, 6-APB and of course 5-IAI. At the moment 5-IAI is very popular in the research chemical market because of it's close likeness to MDMA. It was carefully engineered by Nichols as a drug which acts as a releasing agent of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine. 5-IAI was tested in lab rats and was found to completely substitute for MDMA respectively. In humans it is a putative entactogen.

So clearly 5-IAI is far more sophisticated than previous research chemicals on the market such as Naphyrone and the Cathinone classes. That is why it is more extensive and harder to find.

It should also be noted by anybody willing to buy research chemical 5-IAI that until late August 2010 there is no stock of it that is of high quality available in the UK. This is because the very few labs that have tried making it are only just about getting it right in bulk amounts. Some chemical vendors have asked labs to make it and many labs came back to them and said that it was simply out of their capabilities due to the difficulty of the task.

Therefore I would suggest that once you have found a reliable retailer for this product who can prove its purity then you should buy from them again next time as reliable sources are few and far between.