This post is intentionally vague, if you want to purchase from this source I believe I've dropped enough hints to figure out what it is. I am making this post mostly to encourage people who want SN to go and find it, because it's not unobtainable, it's out there. You just have to look! If you find the product I'm talking about here, or any source really, please keep that information to yourself and let others figure it out on their own, as I will describe how I don't think this will be available if it becomes well-known (obviously)
I'm in the United States, and I bought SN from a brick and mortar store I regularly go to in my city (which is a major urban/industrial area), and am seeing that the same product is available to order on Amazon, eBay, and many other online sellers. I bought one of the eBay listings (I boycott Amazon), and sure enough, it is the same exact product. It does not specify that it is sodium nitrite anywhere on the packaging, which I suspect is a large part of why you can still buy it, but I suspected that due to its intended function it may be SN, so I looked up its datasheet. Industrial products in the United States are required by OSHA to have a Material Safety Datasheet (MSDS) which details any potential hazards which could arise from use of the product. Obviously, a toxic chemical such as sodium nitrite would be listed by name in the MSDS:
Sure enough, quite pure sodium nitrite. Much more than the apparentIy 10% maximum by volume in the USA, it's basically just SN with some room for impurities! I suspect the reason this product is still sold is because it is an industrial product nowhere near the food preparation or chemical industries where SN is normally found. Even so, I don't think it is technically legal for this company to still be selling this, and if it is, I'm sure if I post it here and everyone starts buying it, it will be made illegal quite quickly, which is why I'm being vague about it.
Because of that, I wondered if perhaps this was a different compound with similar physical properties to sodium nitrite (I wondered if they changed the composition to an alternative to address the SN ban). I tested both the store product and the eBay product, using the blood test, nitrite strips, and some other simple chemical tests, and I am quite confident that it is in fact sodium nitrite, as all of those chemical tests are exactly consistent with how SN ought to behave.
After lurking here I expected SN to be a lot harder to get, seems a lot of people have quite some trouble finding it. The purpose of this post is less so riddles about this specific source and mostly just to encourage people to do their own research, since with just a tiny bit of chemistry knowledge you can find this stuff pretty easily. Just be sure to run some chemical tests yourself to verify that it is surely SN, you definitely would not want to ingest some other nasty chemical with painful side effects. I could see this company trying to find an alternative compound in the future if this becomes well-known, and it is always good to test regardless of source.
I'm in the United States, and I bought SN from a brick and mortar store I regularly go to in my city (which is a major urban/industrial area), and am seeing that the same product is available to order on Amazon, eBay, and many other online sellers. I bought one of the eBay listings (I boycott Amazon), and sure enough, it is the same exact product. It does not specify that it is sodium nitrite anywhere on the packaging, which I suspect is a large part of why you can still buy it, but I suspected that due to its intended function it may be SN, so I looked up its datasheet. Industrial products in the United States are required by OSHA to have a Material Safety Datasheet (MSDS) which details any potential hazards which could arise from use of the product. Obviously, a toxic chemical such as sodium nitrite would be listed by name in the MSDS:
Sure enough, quite pure sodium nitrite. Much more than the apparentIy 10% maximum by volume in the USA, it's basically just SN with some room for impurities! I suspect the reason this product is still sold is because it is an industrial product nowhere near the food preparation or chemical industries where SN is normally found. Even so, I don't think it is technically legal for this company to still be selling this, and if it is, I'm sure if I post it here and everyone starts buying it, it will be made illegal quite quickly, which is why I'm being vague about it.
Because of that, I wondered if perhaps this was a different compound with similar physical properties to sodium nitrite (I wondered if they changed the composition to an alternative to address the SN ban). I tested both the store product and the eBay product, using the blood test, nitrite strips, and some other simple chemical tests, and I am quite confident that it is in fact sodium nitrite, as all of those chemical tests are exactly consistent with how SN ought to behave.
After lurking here I expected SN to be a lot harder to get, seems a lot of people have quite some trouble finding it. The purpose of this post is less so riddles about this specific source and mostly just to encourage people to do their own research, since with just a tiny bit of chemistry knowledge you can find this stuff pretty easily. Just be sure to run some chemical tests yourself to verify that it is surely SN, you definitely would not want to ingest some other nasty chemical with painful side effects. I could see this company trying to find an alternative compound in the future if this becomes well-known, and it is always good to test regardless of source.
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