In my teens I had a chemistry lab at home. Started with a toy chemistry set, but augmented with many chemicals from oter sources.  Back then pharmacies still carried things like elemental iodine, potassium chlorate, potassium permanganate, ether, etc.; and the pharmacists would not mind selling them to a nerdish kid like me, no questions asked.  From other places I easily got caustic soda, lead, ethanol, acetone, hydrochloric acid, mercury, calcium carbide, ... 

Looking back, after reading tons of MSDSs and "toxicity" sections in Wikipedia, I discovered that I died several times over before I even started to shave.  Today, lead has become as dangerous as plutonium, one pint of acetone will turn by itself into ten pounds of cocaine, one whiff of 190-proof ethanol will send everybody in a mile radius to the hospital, ...  Sigh...