Good article, reactive web design notwithstanding (stop. breaking. my. scrolling). I’m not surprised that obtaining the chemicals was that easy, even accounting for the mislabeling and fake products. A lot of these chemicals are pretty simple and have pretty general use cases in the fine chemicals space. Hell, I had occasion to use (2-bromoethyl)benzene, aniline, and propionyl chlorde in school for making random precursors and ligands, albeit separately. I wonder if they are at all harder to procure nowadays because of the fentanyl epidemic.
Edit: checked some of my old work, didn’t actually use (2-bromoethyl)benzene but did make a related compound as an intermediate for ligand synthesis using a very satisfying Appel reaction.