Methdirection

I am not going to tell you how to make meth.

 Honestly, I do appreciate the thousands of hits I have been getting on my normal blog since posting "Methadventures" but really, seriously, I am not telling you exactly how to make it.

Ever.

I will tell you the story of "Torch" as an object lesson.

"Torch" aka Little Bill, Tiny Bitch, NoWanker and Ned, was one of the longest lasting inmates on my crew. He was in for involuntary Manslaughter, plus manufacture and distribution of a controlled substance.

He was a meth-cook. A chemist that graduated from some tech school and went straight into the business of making his own. 

Surprisingly to me, he started out making steroids. But, as he told me, "Those Guys are CRAZY!" so he switched to what he thought was a safer product.

Meth.

He was a font of information, chemical structures, balances, cellular level absorption and on and on. By education and inclination I am an Anthropologist (I know, worthless culture studies) so I really had no Idea what the hell he was talking about.

It seemed incredibly complex and dangerous for a little bit of money.

Thats what I thought until he told me how much he was making in a week. As much as I made in two years.

Oh, before I forget and ramble on, boring you to death, I should describe Torch.

He was skinny, and wasted looking. He had all of his own teeth and some hair. The rest of his face was melted. He tried to grow a beard to hide the ugly, but it came in all patchy and different colors and coarsness. He said that was from the skin grafts. His neck and chin looked like pitted black plastic. With a thin covering of elmers glue over it, making it a little shiny.

The process of making meth includes a lot of flammable steps, one step, I seem to remember reacts violently with oxygen. You know, Air.

He was cooking a batch with two of his friends and someone blundered. Both his friends, and the Lady that lived next door died. He was "Lucky" and just got his face melted off.

He got ten years for each of his buddies and double Life for his neighbor. He said she used to bring them cakes. 

He was resigned to his life. One of the very few inmates I ever met that accepted that he was being punished, and he felt he deserved it. That lady Haunted him every night. He didn't have much in the way of eyelids so sleeping was difficult for him.

One day I saw a piece of his face fall off.

Medical care for inmates, in spite of popular misconception, is neither good, nor free. They had to pay it back. And when you only make a dollar an hour and have to pay the prison 30% of that to cover your meals, skin grafts take a really long time to pay off.

So, a piece of his face fell off. About a 3 inch square piece. I was sickened and alarmed. Everything I knew about everything told me that this was a BAD thing.

Torch was unconcerned.

I approached him, warily. He was lightly rubbing the newly skinless section of his chin and grimacing a bit.

To my unspoken question he replied.

"Oh, its just the plastic working out of my skin. Anybody that cooks meth without the right gear gets it. Little deposits of plastic from the process get absorbed into your skin and the body pushes them out over time. I cooked for a long time"

And, as he scratched another few crunchy bits out of his skin. I left him to his contemplation of past trangressions.

So, I will never tell anyone how to make meth.

Ever

Methinformation

I know how to make meth.

Not from watching television or movies, not even from wiki. 

Its a strange story.

Years ago, I needed a job. Badly. It wasn't the money. I had a little legal dispute with the evil orange empire and they lost. So I was getting a paycheck every two weeks. However, I was going crazier. I have worked since I was 12, part time during school and full time plus during the summer. That's what happens when the Family business is landscaping and construction. You want to eat and not be naked, you work.

So sitting around doing laundry and watching the infant was making me nuts. Really. For three days I rolled dice and wrote down every number that came up to see if there was a predictable pattern.

(Incidentally, 5 is the least common number rolled while 7 and 9 share the title of "most rolled")

At the end of this time of random number prediction the wife took matters into her own hands and started applying me for jobs. One day, when the mental anguish has faded I will write a blog about the painful process of  a 30 year old white guy with a background in construction and money collecting for various semi-shady money lenders interviewing for jobs in the real world. With real humans. As a last resort she applied me to a job working for the Military, the last line of the job description made me laugh "MUST BE ABLE TO DEFEND ONESELF AND OTHERS FROM PHYSICAL ATTACK"

Yeah, right.

So I applied, interviewed and they overlooked my various eclectic skills (I can stick a knife or a 16 penny nail into anything 20 feet away for example) and hired me.

The first day on the job, my hair cut, my steel toed boots and canvas pants fitting quite nicely I reported to the "Chief" to meet my crew.

Federal inmates. All of them facing life and multiple life sentences. Murderers, Rapists, Drug Dealers, Unsuccessful high dollar item thieves, and soft pasty white squishy accountants.

My crew.

I asked if I got a gun, they handed me a shovel. I had a guard, he was supposed to shoot the crew if they tried to escape and or tried to kill someone. (me) He didn't seem to be to enthused about his job, cant say I blamed him. He was half my size and I was half the size of 1/2 the crew. The accountants never lasted more than a week or two. Some of those guys actually scared the hell out of me, some I felt bad for, most though. Were just tattooed bodies getting out in the sun to work away from their box. We talked, a lot. I learned really quickly that there are certain words used in the real world that have entirely different meanings in the box.

As a hint, NEVER call a 6 and 1/2 foot inmate a "punk" they take it badly. Luckily I had my shovel with me.

I got some really cool scars at that job. Got pushed into a roll of concertina wire and got to have the interesting experience of pulling myself off while grown men howled and wept with laughter at my predicament. Saw a little tiny dude knock a really big dude out cold for throwing a spider at him. He really didn't like spiders I guess. It was a job.

Oh, and I learned how to make gin, tattoo ink, tattoo guns and meth.

I've never put any of this knowledge into practice. Although I did think seriously about making the garbage gin for a Halloween party......

The thing about Meth. The thing that astonished me, really truly hurt my brain. Is the fact that it is poison. Really. Poison.

In the real world, the non "breaking bad" real world. Meth is made from the strangest concoctions of chemicals anyone has ever heard of.

Blue aquarium rocks. Drano. A specific brand of stainless steel cookie sheet. Certain paints. Certain permanent markers. A lawn fertilizer. A gopher poison.

Anything you could think of that would kill you to ingest.

Here it is, the thought that I thunk during all of this. 

Who?

Really. Who was the sick minded human that one day, playing in his shed, his lab, his bedroom? Who was the guy that saw evaporated crystals as the result of a botched lawn treatment gopher poison application and said.......

"DUDE! We could TOTALLY smoke that shit!"

Possibly this guy?