golfrumors — 7 years ago(October 14, 2018 03:33 AM)

I just finished watching Breaking Bad and wondered how accurate it is and Patrick Keefe in the New Yorker said it was pretty accurate as far as the drug trade goes:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-uncannily-accurate-depiction-of-the-meth-trade-in-breaking-bad
He linked to an interesting article of his about the Sinaloa Cartel:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/how-a-mexican-drug-cartel-makes-its-billions.html?pagewanted=all
In Mexico they call the dissolved bodies in barrels "stew" but they use lye, not hydrochloric acid. Apparently the chemistry on the show is basically correct but often would require much larger quantities or some other tweak.
Precursor chemicals are a big topic on the show. From the New York Times article:
In 2007, Mexican authorities raided the home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is believed to have supplied meth-precursor chemicals to the cartel, and discovered $206 million, the largest cash seizure in history. And that was the money Zhenli held onto — he was an inveterate gambler, who once blew so much cash in Las Vegas that one of the casinos presented him, in consolation, with a Rolls-Royce. “How much money do you have to lose in the casino for them to give you a Rolls-Royce?” Tony Placido, the D.E.A. intelligence official, asked. (The astonishing answer, in Zhenli’s case, is $72 million at a single casino in a single year.) Placido also pointed out that, as a precursor guy, Zhenli was on the low end of the value chain for meth.
The cartels use ephedrine, not methylamine.