In the TV series Breaking Bad, Walter White finds a chemistry work-around for not having to use the hard-to-come-by pseudoephedrine as a precursor, but instead uses methylamine in his high-volume recipe for methamphetamine.
Would this really create a sky blue color in the meth, or was it artistic license?
I don’t think it’s fair to say that Walter White found a workaround - in the 1960s and 1970s cooking meth using methylamine was pretty standard, pretty much all of the crank that biker gangs sold would have been made that way. It wasn’t until the 1980s when the DEA started cracking down on the precursor chemicals that people started using Sudafed for manufacture. He was really just using an old technique that is pretty well known but went out of favor in the US due to legal difficulties, and that any of the Mexican cartels would be familiar with.
And I’ve seen Colibri’s information in everything I’ve read about the blue color too, it’s just artistic license by the show runners. The actual prop they used was rock candy with blue food coloring, so you’d sometimes see them snacking on the ‘meth’ after lunch when filming.
So it’s a contradiction that Walt’s meth is both blue and highly pure. It can’t be both.
It’s also not exactly realistic that someone as cautious as Gus Fring would do business with someone like Walt, who he already knows is a loose cannon, for the sake of such a small increase in purity. And even Jesse knows this:
I was reading that exact Breaking Bad Wiki page–a website I had never seen before–just this afternoon before even seeing this thread–SerenDipity strikes again!
Walt makes magic meth. That’s because he’s a meth wizard.
Not only should Walt’s meth not be blue. In the real world, the P2P method doesn’t create very pure meth. A P2P cook gives you a mix of two forms of the meth molecule (d-meth and l-meth), which are mirror images of each other, and only one of which is psychoactive. Walt has apparently found a way to isolate the kind he wants, but there’s no actual way to do this. To make very pure meth in the real world, you want the pseudoephedrine method.
Another possibly unrealistic thing is the length that Walt goes to in order to get hold of methylamine. If he’s such a genius-level chemist, he should have been able to synthesize his own, as it’s not that hard to make. I have seen it argued that it wouldn’t be practical to do so on the scale that Walt needs, but it seems odd that doesn’t at least consider it.
(Note: IMNA meth cook, I just looked into this when I was obsessing over BB a while ago.)
The precursor that the FDA cracked down on was P2P - phenyl 2 propanone, AKA phenylacetone, another chemical used in the “old school biker meth”, as Hank referred to it in the show. Walt supposedly synthesized his own P2P. Why he stole the methylamine rather than just synthesizing that as well may be more for dramatic, rather than realistic reasons. As stated in this writeup:
Well, in principle, you could separate them, so long as you had some other chiral chemical to do it with. And there are plenty of chiral chemicals around, due to living things producing and using them. So it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that a genius chemist could figure out some trick for it.
This is veering into Cafe Society topics rather than General Questions, but I’d say that while Fring is very cautious much of the time, he still has his own weaknesses that overcome this. Constantly going to the retirement home to taunt the remaining cartel member, for example. So I don’t think it’s out of the question that when confronted by Walt, it’s not just about the purity, it’s also about his ego getting out of control and wanting to control Walt because he wants to be the top dog.
I have lived in Albuquerque and before I moved there I talked to a friend of a friend who was on the ABQ police force. He did say they were seeing blue meth in the city after the show came out. I think he said it was food coloring that the cooks were using.
Even in episode 6 of season 1 (Crazy Handful of Nothin’), when he whipped up a batch of mercury fulminate to look like meth but with more bang than fulminated mercury would actually boom, after Tuco asks what that was, he says something like, “Mercury fulminate… with a few tweaks of chemistry.”
So, it shows the writers seemed aware of the true properties of the substance (they did have consultants), but now I wonder what Walt could’ve done to the mercury fulminate to make it much more explosive. Not only that, but establishing Walt had inspired/insightful ways of tweaking stuff for his own proprietary methods.
*Sorry, if this is heading more toward a Cafe Society direction, but I was more curious to the actual, factual (or not) chemistry in the series. Of course, move the thread if need be.
The explosiveness of mercury fulminate was busted by Mythbusters, who found that the amount of the chemical used by Walt, and the force applied in throwing it, would not explode. But using enough fulminate and force to blow out windows would also kill everyone in the room.
They also showed that hydrofluoric acid was much wimpier than shown. While it is known for dissolving just about anything but plastic, it’s actually a comparatively weak acid.
I also don’t think it’s commonly used in high school chem labs so that you would have gallons and gallons of it sitting around. (I think my high school lab had one bottle.) Likewise I don’t think there would be any reason for a meth lab to have 30+ gallons of the stuff just sitting around.
I think it’s fine here as long as the main focus is on chemistry. (I know I drifted a bit from that in one of my own posts.) If it gets too much into the plots, I’ll move it.
Food dyes are used in very small quantities. Walt’s meth could easily be 99+% pure and a deep blue; 1% “contamination” would be 10,000 ppm, whereas you only need a few hundred ppm of the dye.
Walt could easily add a dye as his trademark without significantly affecting the overall purity.
I had the same thought. But Walt was never about gimmicks and prided his brand on being the best, purest product out there.
And, IIRC, in the last episode of season one, Tuco questions the color. Walt tells him it’s a result of a new chemical process he’s using and assures him is just as good as his other batch, if not better.
It just doesn’t seem Heisenburg-like to add some food dye. Though, you’re right it wouldn’t make a dent in the purity. Food coloring goes a looooong way.
That article also says that the chemist they interviewed likes to think, just for fun, that the blue color is due to Walt’s super sekret way of weeding out the bad chiral twin of meth, which is what allows his P2P method of making it to be so pure.
I agree that it doesn’t fit with Heisenberg’s personality. No matter how small the quantity, he would still see it as deliberately contaminating his product. Still–it could be done.