|
|
This post is concerned with making meth; particularly with what it is made from. My hope is that maybe someone will read this and decide not to try meth for that first time.
Methamphetamine can be made out of chemicals found in hardware and convenience stores and can take about three hours. The byproducts of manufacture are toxic and smelly – smelling somewhat like a gas leak.
Some think making a batch and selling it is an easy way to getting rich but it really is not. You stand a good chance of killing yourself or at least poisoning yourself if you do not end up in prison.
And if you are thinking of trying out crystal meth…keep in mind that some moron cooked up this batch in a dirty kitchen with no idea of quality control. You just may kill yourself.
So what is in meth? That is actually not an easy thing to list; there seem to be several completely different ways to make it. The recipe I found came from an Internet search and takes about 3 hours to make.
It uses dilute hydrochloric acid that is found in brick and driveway cleaner, lye, starting fluid spray for your car and many nasal inhalers. These ingredients are boiled, kneeded and evaporated in a specific way to make meth crystals.
Not something I want to run out and smoke…
Welcome Back! Thanks for visiting!
I love to search Google News for drug abuse information and today I searched on ‘Meth Labs’. I was amazed to find 1600 entries in google for the past few days alone…
Anyway, meth labs are extremely dangerous to run; explosive, a lot of toxic chemicals and chemical byproducts and can be contained in something as small as a suitcase. Did I mention they were illegal?
Most meth labs are found because of their peculiar smell so labs are usually located in remote areas although they have been found in apartments, houses and even hotel rooms – anywhere there is a way to heat a pot.
The latest means of production is a meth lab in a moving vehicle using the ‘one pot’ process or ’shake and bake’. The ingredients are mixed in a 2 liter soda bottle using lithium as a heat source – lithium heats up when in contact with water.
This method of production only makes small amounts of meth but has the advantage of diffusing the smell easily and making cleanup easy; by merely dumping the used soda bottle and toxic chemicals out the car window. And…a moving lab is harder for the police to raid.
But rapidly expanding gases produced when lithium and water mix may turn the soda bottle into a bomb if it is not ‘burped’.
Wastewater Drug Detection is a new method of tracking drug use across the nation. I’m surprised no one thought of this sooner…
Wastewater from toilets sinks, showers and tubs can be analyzed for trace amounts of cocaine, methamphetamine, Ecstasy and other drugs to give an indication of drug use in the community which created the wastewater. Patterns of drug use can be identified and analyzed. Tests can also detect caffeine, vitamins, antidepressants and just about any substance you could imagine.
In a sample test several communities in Oregon had their wastewater tested and trace levels of cocaine and meth could be detected and mapped by community by the day. As expected higher drug levels were found in urban areas than in rural areas which could be because of the greater population concentration. Cocaine tests from wastewater across several communities also indicated that cocaine use could be at a higher rate than previously thought.
Tests such as this implemented on a nationwide level show a lot of promise.
When you think about it, common sense will tell you that drugs and child abuse go hand and hand. But one must be very careful making these assumptions because what seems ‘obvious’ may not necessarily be true.
For instance, most heroin users drank milk when they were little so does milk cause heroin abuse? I’m sure there is someone somewhere who thinks so.
This may have been a poor example but the point is that even though 2 events may be related or correlated it does not mean that one event causes the other event. Each event may be completely separate from the other.
This is why controlled studies are performed; studies that eliminate all outside variables and whose results are run through statistical tests to gain a ’significance level’ giving the results of the study a probability level of being correct. But I digress…
Coming back to the point, does the taking of certain drugs cause child abuse or are they both caused by some common factor? Studies have been conducted to determine this but they were generally run poorly so results are questionable.
Those studies seemed to suggest that babies born to mothers who were abusing opiates or amphetamines were 13 times more likely to experience some kind of physical, emotional or sexual abuse than babies born to non-drug abusing mothers.
Almost half of all babies born to drug abusing mothers experienced some form of abuse as opposed to 6% to non-abusing mothers.
Curiously, babies born to methadone abusing mothers had a significantly lower incidence of abuse and the last part of the study showed that a significant number of drug abusing mothers with abused children stopped abusing their children once they entered a drug recovery program.
Interesting things to think about…
I like The Montana Meth Project and its campaign so much I decided to include more posters.
Once again I need to post a warning about the graphic and violent content in these posters. They aim to shock and that they do…hopefully enough to stop any half way interested person from from trying methamphetamine just once and destroying their life.
And, these posters are freely copyable for personal use…
Methamphetamine has many undesirable side effects including what is known as ‘meth bugs’ or ‘meth mites’. This is the sensation that bugs are actually crawling on and under your skin.
Other drugs have their ‘bugs’ too such as cocaine where heavy use will result in hallucinations of bugs crawling all over you. Severe alcohol withdrawal, or the ‘DTs, will do the same but in the case of meth bugs it is not an hallucination..
Nor are they real…they are an actual sensation; an irritation of the nerve endings in the skin causing this feeling.
When taking meth your body produces an artificial fever as a side effect resulting in sweating. With long term use, many cycles of sweating and drying will remove the skin’s natural oils which will irritate the nerve endings causing the sensation of bugs under your skin.
The problem is that when something itches it will pretty much be scratched. And this is an itch that does not go away so constant scratching turns to sores and in many cases become infected.
Check out the picture above for a good view of meth bugs in action.
Just what is tweaking? Well, it’s something done by a tweaker….
Tweaking, in the USA, refers to a heavy methamphetamine user; one who has been up at least three days and moves in short, fast, choppy movements. This term is more widely used in the western US than anywhere else.
A tweaker is a very heavy user chasing that first euphoric high but never quite reaching it and since they have probably not slept in a week they can become quite dangerous to others. Tweakers can appear quite normal on the outside; clear eyes, coherent speech but the one unmistakable characteristic of a tweaker are the eyes moving side to side very quickly in small movements.
Imagine being up for a week, unable to sleep even if you wanted to; feeling very speedy and irritable because meth is now used to maintain a sense of normalcy instead of making you high and you need it to feel normal right now but have no money.
So you go into a bar and begin drinking as much to calm down a little as to feel high from the alcohol. Someone trips and accidentally spills a beer all over you and you become so enraged you blank out and attack that person…
This is the life of a tweaker; violence, misery, dishonesty and humiliation. This is the life of someone who dies young or ends up in detox on a prison ward as a lifer…
Many of our currently illegal drugs were once legal and purported to have medicinal application such as opium, heroin, cocaine and various hallucinogens. And because they could be obtained so easily, many famous people were using…and many of these famous people became addicted.
Freud was an advocate and user of cocaine for many years. He believed it to be the wonder-drug and a surefire cure for depression. And it has been rumored that not only was his famous psychoanalytic theory a result of cocaine use but that he had a drug intervention at one time.
The last Russian Czar, Nicholas II was taking opium, morphine, cocaine and hallucinogens during his last 2 years of rule.
Sir Winston Churchill was addicted to barbiturates in the 1950’s.
Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe in World War II, was addicted to codeine and was probably taking cocaine as well.
Smoking hemp was a popular pastime for these US presidents: George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and Franklin Pierce.
Ben Franklin, Edgar Allen Poe, Marcus Aurelius, Florence Nightingale and Charles Dickens all used opium recreationally.
It is rumored that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” in 3 days while under the influence of cocaine.
Adolf Hitler could not function without his daily injections of methamphetamine.
And last but not least let’s not forget that Coca-Cola was first introduced in 1886 containing cocaine, caffeine and syrup. The cocaine was taken out of the soda in 1903 due to public opinion.
Methamphetamine, or simply meth, is one of the more insidious drugs out there in my opinion. And what makes it so dangerous is that it can be made by anyone at all.
It is not my intention to explain how to make meth because I do not really know how but it is my intention to help you realize when you might happen to stumble across a methamphetamine lab so you can inform someone in authority.
You see, meth labs can be portable; set up in the woods, in an apartment, stored in the trunk of a car…
Now you see why meth is so dangerous, but wait, as the tv commercials say; there is more.
The basic ingredient needed to make meth is pseudoephedrine, formerly found in many OTC drugs to relieve nasal congestion.
Or pseudoephedrine can be created from a chemical reaction using the toxic ingredients in this picture.
And it can also be extracted from urine, although this will only create a diluted form of pseudoepedrine.
Meth labs are toxic and dangerous; if procedures are not followed to the letter there will be an explosion or toxic traces of whatever base ingredient used will be left in the finished product. The fumes created during the cooking process can blister lungs and the cooking process also creates some very toxic byproducts which are usually just dumped into the environment.
So how do you identify a meth lab?
First of all by the smell…the cooking process creates some fearsome smelling fumes which is why most meth labs are portable and setup in isolated areas.
So if you are in some isolated area and start smelling some strong chemical smells, you may have stumbled across a meth lab…
|
|
Recent Comments