Your comparison of ethanol distillation to drug synthesis assumes that recipes for drug synthesis are public like instructions for distillation. Recipes for drug synthesis are trade secrets, not public knowledge.
If you want to synthesize organic compounds (drugs or otherwise), you need to know organic chemistry in order to make your own recipes. To give an example, this guy made his own recipe for making cinnamaldehyde from styrofoam, using what he learned from his college Organic Chemistry classes and a substantial amount of background research:
He did not follow a recipe from someone else because there was none. Chemists have worked out a number of reactions that can be chained together to make arbitrary organic compounds. Organic chemistry teaches the better known / more widely useful ones. That gives the foundation needed to do these things.
Please do not make me regret sharing my knowledge by bringing politics into a technical discussion. I am under doctor's orders to avoid political discussions.
If you want to synthesize organic compounds (drugs or otherwise), you need to know organic chemistry in order to make your own recipes. To give an example, this guy made his own recipe for making cinnamaldehyde from styrofoam, using what he learned from his college Organic Chemistry classes and a substantial amount of background research:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMaTrgUKC1w
He did not follow a recipe from someone else because there was none. Chemists have worked out a number of reactions that can be chained together to make arbitrary organic compounds. Organic chemistry teaches the better known / more widely useful ones. That gives the foundation needed to do these things.
Please do not make me regret sharing my knowledge by bringing politics into a technical discussion. I am under doctor's orders to avoid political discussions.