In the TV series Breaking Bad, a high school chemistry teacher turns to meth production and quickly outclasses his competitors by use of his superior skills in the lab.
How realistic is this? That is, realistically, there must be little innovation in the area after all this time. I can accept he’d make better “product” than some half-assed amateurs, but could someone with outstanding skills in the lab really make a meth product that outshone the meth produced by the pros?
I always wondered about that to. Not so much whether Walt could make high quality meth, but whether his customers would care. I usually don’t see alcoholics spending a lot of time seeking out aged whiskey or fine wines. I figure meth-heads would be the same way.
I’m skeptical as well. I was under the impression that folks buying meth aren’t exactly particular about the quality of the product, as long as it gets them high.
Not my area of expertise, though.
The chemistry is fairly simple, any trained chemist could make meth in their sleep.
The hard part is getting the reagents and precursors and glassware that while not essential make things 100X easier and more professional, all this stuff is if not actual controlled substances then “watched” chemicals and equipment. There was a bust some years ago involving a ebay seller selling stuff like red phosphorus, turned out it was a DEA front.
This is what bugged me about Breaking Bad, they show Walter stealing glassware from work that he claimed was broken but no mention is ever mentioned where he is getting the chemicals needed to synth the large batches of meth he is making.
IIRC they go to the Home Depot, and occasionally steal from chemical supply companies.
Eh? Its a plotpoint in the first season:
Walt and Jessie steal a drum of chemical precursor from a warehouse.
Later, presumably the Gus provides it.
Its purification that separates the men from the boys in organic chemistry - at least as far as this sort of simple stuff goes. So mixing a bunch of chemicals (the reaction) is generally straightforward. Taking that crude reaction and purifying it to pure methamphetamine would be where a modicum of skill came in, and would separate an expert from someone with no training.
While I was never personally a member of the drug subculture, I’ve known many people who were. Marijuana users fairly obsess over the quality of one hybrid versus another. Heroin users seem to value a quality product to the point where “China White” is a term that even a fair number of non-users have heard. I knew a lot of cokeheads and they definitely got excited if they found a source of coke that hadn’t been stepped all over before it hit the streets. I don’t know any meth users, or I don’t think I do anyway, but why wouldn’t they value a very high quality product that would allow them to get higher or stay high longer for their hard-earned dollar?
I don’t know much about meth, but you know alcoholics aren’t just homeless guys chugging bottles of Wild Irish Rose. I’d venture that a significant percentage of alcoholics are of the “high-functioning” variety, those with good educations and well-paying jobs who drink a lot of high-end booze.
There are high-end and low-end varieties of almost all drugs, from alcohol to tobacco to marijuana to cocaine. There’s $5 Mad Dog and then there’s $130 Glenlivet. There’s GPC and then there’s Chesterfields. There’s brown Mexican schwag and then there’s that bright green shit with the crystals and the little red hairs. There’s crack and then there’s whatever Charlie Sheen is snorting.
Not that I would know anything about any of that, it’s just what I’ve heard…
I know people that are really into sub-types of marijuana, but marijuana isn’t a narcotic. The alcoholics and opiate addicts I’ve known have been notably un-picky, so I figured meth-addicts would be similar. I have no idea if that’s really the case, though. And happily I haven’t been in close contact with that many alcoholics or opiate addicts, so even there I may be over-generalizing.
IANA a chemist or specialist in addictive drugs, but I wonder if variations of meth exist, and the stuff that Walt makes could be more potent, or more importantly for business, more addictive.
In the show, Walt’s meth is blue, supposedly a result of his unique formulation. When the DEA analyzes it, one agent refers to it as “old school biker meth.”
The issue with well made meth is that it will get a user higher than meth made by a less skilled chemist. While I am not a drug user, I have been friends with a number of hardcore drug users and let me assure you that they are obsessed with finding high quality drugs because high quality equals better and longer highs.
Yes, that’s because he used a different process after stealing the drum of something.
I don’t think Walt got rich because his product was better. Yes, it seemed like users preferred his stuff, but that didn’t allow him to take over the market. He got rich when he hooked up with Gus, who was running a full scale production facility, and needed someone who knew his stuff.
Meth users definitely care about quality and people known to be particularly good “cooks” are sought after, but ironically some of the less complicated methods can produce a higher quality. In the 80’s meth production was largely about using phenyl-2-propanone or P2P, and then about synthesizing P2P when it became a controlled substance. I understand the P2P method is fairly complicated and takes some knowledge about chemistry and produces a relatively low quality methamphetamine, but it used to be the predominant method in the 1980s. One prison informant a colleague of mine spoke to was a chemist (degree and everything) for a motorcycle gang in the mid 80’s; once a month they’d drive out to the house in the country where he worked, pick up the meth and drop off a couple of women and a stack of bills as thick as his wrist.
Nowadays the P2P method is overshadowed by the Red Phosphorus and the Birch Reduction (aka “Nazi”) methods, which are less complex and produce both a higher yield and quality, particularly the Red Phosphorus method. These methods are largely responsible for the meth explosion of the last 20 years or so and were responsible for Mexican nationals wrestling away the meth market from motorcycle gangs in the south, but haven’t necessarily become widespread all over the country. Some quick googling shows that in 2000 eight meth labs were busted in Pennsylvania (which would barely be a busy weekend in Texas), and of those eight five were P2P method, two were Nazi method, and one was Red Phosphorus. So theoretically, yes, what the show deescribes could be possible: if the area only has a few labs making smaller quantities of meth with the P2P method, it would be possible for somebody to come in and dominate the market by setting up a superlab to make large quantities of higher quality meth with the Red Phosphorus method. That’s pretty much exactly the opposite of making “old school biker meth,” though.
Meth users who are have the option often will choose a product of higher quality. Not all of them, certainly; some of them want to spend the least amount of money to get high, I’m sure, just like some people go to McDonalds because they aren’t so interested in haute cuisine as they are the simple need to eat.
Meth is judged kind of like diamonds. Crystals can range from cloudy and yellow to colorless and practically transparent. Some of them are sort of chalky when you break them up and some snap cleanly in half like a piece of hard candy. Really bad meth (i.e., it has made its way around the block a few times and has been stomped all over by everybody) isn’t even really crystals anymore, but just a bunch of powder.
The good crystals, the ones that are still of good size, color, and clarity, are entirely different from anything else (taste and smell, the nature and duration of the effects as well as the amount of substance needed to produce them, etc) and the users who can afford to will gladly pay a premium for them.
I’ve never seen the show being discussed and I’ve never manufactured illegal drugs, so I’m not really addressing the OP specifically as much as the idea that meth users in general don’t care about quality.
Actually come to think of it, the reason the P2P method generally has a lower yield and potetency may be because of its relative difficulty and the greater knowledge of chemistry it requires. If Walter is a super badass chemist, maybe he’s tweaked (heh) the P2P process to make higher quanities of higher quality. I’ve only seen two or so epsiodes of the show, so I couldn’t say.
I love Breaking Bad, but I thought the whole “purity” thing they do with Walter and Jesse seeing who can cook the most pure is silly, because at the end of the day they will cut it to sell it, and they’re smuggling it within the US so there’s not really much point in making something super pure.
For the kingpin drug boss, why would he care if it’s 90 percent or 99.9 percent pure really? He’ll just ask his cook to make a larger quantity of it if it’s less pure.
The purer it is, the more you can cut it and still have a salable product. Simply put, if you start with 1 kilo of 100% pure product, you can cut it to have (let’s say) 4 kilos of street product. If you start with something only 50% pure, you can’t cut it to 4 kilos and have something easily salable.
You can no longer make money with meth in this country. Our government restricted the sale of Pseudoephedrine and that solved the entire meth problem. Right? :dubious: