SnapShot: Breaking Bad....

Ever watched a TV scene and felt the hairs on your neck rise because it looked a little too real? We take you behind the tape with a former police supervisor who trained at federal academies, ran field operations at clandestine sites, and testified as an expert on meth labs—then weighed that experience against the pop-culture juggernaut that turned a high school chemistry teacher into a criminal icon.

We start with the on-the-ground reality: how officers learned to recognize dangerous setups, shut them down safely, and protect evidence and neighborhoods from toxic contamination. From rural backroads to cramped apartments, the process demanded precision, protective gear, and calm under pressure. Then we stack that against TV’s most famous meth storyline, noting where it mirrored real methods and where it deliberately left out critical conversion steps to avoid copycat risk. It’s a rare look at how accurate storytelling can educate without crossing safety lines.

From there, we zoom out. You’ll hear a concise history of meth—from early synthesis and mid-century pill sales to the legal clampdowns that pushed production underground. We unpack how precursor controls changed the game, first shrinking local cook sites and then driving manufacturing to cross-border superlabs with industrial scale. That shift changed purity, pricing, and risk, turning small-town cleanups into complex international cases. The through-line is sobering: when chemicals get restricted, supply chains adapt, and the fight moves to new terrain.

Finally, we connect the dots to everyday life. Cartel pipelines fuel thefts, break-ins, and constant pressure on community safety. We talk about the human toll—families dealing with addiction, investigators facing threats, and the exhausting grind of long cases that still matter because they prevent the next round of harm. If you care about smart drug policy, real-world policing, and how pop culture intersects with public safety, this snapshot delivers clarity without sensationalism. Listen, share with a friend who loves crime dramas, and leave a review telling us what part challenged your assumptions most.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Quick Welcome And Topic Reveal
• 0:11 Police Training In Meth Labs
• 1:43 Fact-Checking Breaking Bad’s Chemistry
• 3:58 A Brief History Of Meth
• 6:02 Policy Shifts And New Cook Methods
• 8:25 Superlabs, Cartels, And Today’s Threat
• 11:15 Narcoterrorism’s Local Impact And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to a murders to music snapshot. It's 10 minutes of something fun, entertaining, or maybe useless, and maybe 10 minutes you never get back, but here we go. So tune in. Today we're going to talk about breaking bad. Remember that TV show that came out in 2008? And you know, a few weeks ago I was talking to a buddy of mine, and he didn't know this about me, so I thought I would share it with you because it's kind of cool and interesting. So in 2003, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, about that time that show was releasing, I was doing methamphetamine labs. And it wasn't like I wasn't producing it. Uh well, I was, but I wasn't doing it illegally. I was doing it legally. You see, I was a police officer during that time, and I was a specialist in methamphetamine labs. So I went to a lot of training. I went to D the DEA Academy in Quantico, Virginia. I learned how to make methamphetamine. I made it a lot, and uh I taught people not only how to make it, because you got to understand how to do it, so you can understand how to investigate it, but I taught people how to break down labs and then I would go in, and at the time I was in Alaska, and there's a lot of rural area, right? There's a lot of places out there to make meth. And in Alaska, they don't have a whole lot going on, so there was a ton of meth labs. During those years of 2003 to 2008, I was probably in 60 or 70 different meth labs during that time period. And I became a supervisor in the field, meaning that it was my job to manage and run these labs and to make sure that everything was done correctly, and then at the end of the day, figuratively speaking, go testify in court as an expert in meth labs. So I know a lot about it. And I spent a lot of time teaching and training, educating other police officers and citizen groups about meth and the effects of it. Well, when I'm watching Breaking Bad and I see Walter White out in the desert, if you remember that first scene, he's got the motorhome, he drives out in the middle of the desert, I think he wrecks it, it's kind of sitting caddywampus, and he goes in the back and he starts to make his meth. And he gets his little uh glass mason jar and puts a bunch of pills in it, pseudoephedrin pills, and adds some acetone and water and shakes it up, and that separates off and he dries off the water and gets the residue. That's the pseudoephedrine. So he takes that and he adds that with some other chemicals, and before you know it, he's got his first batch of meth. Well, when I'm watching that show for the first time, I know how to make meth. I've done this a lot, and I look at this whole process, and what struck me is it was so dead accurate. It was spot on. The the way that he made the methamphetamine was he literally missed one step. And I think they did that so people wouldn't copy the method. What they missed was at the end of the meth process, when you're making it, the the end result you're going to get is an oil. And in that oil, the methamphetamine is suspended in a chemical formula in there. It's a solid that's suspended in this oil. So in order to get that solid out, you have to hit it with hydrochloric gas. And to make hydrogen chloride gas, you either add rock salt and sulfuric acid or tin foil and muriatic acid. And when you combine those together, it off-gasses HCl or hydrogen chloride gas. And sometimes you'll put that in like a uh, you'll put it in another water bottle or maybe a gas can and take a rubber hose and it bubbles down there in that reservoir, and then the gas comes off, and you stick that bubbling hose down inside your oil. The methamphetamine crystals stick to that hydrogen chloride gas, makes a solid, and it falls out to the bottom. And then you strain it through, say, paper towels or coffee filters, and that's how you have your methamphetamine, your crystal meth. Well, that is the only part of the process that they didn't show. They showed the oil and then they showed the crystal meth, but they didn't show the conversion in there. But I thought it was super, super cool that I understood what they were doing. You know, and when I'm talking to my buddy a few weeks ago about this, and he's like, man, did you see that episode? And I'm like, dude, it was totally real. So, you know, methamphetamine, where did it come from and why? Methamphetamine was first synthesized in the late 1800s, and it was synthesized over in Japan. And then in the 1900s, they used it for the kamikaze pilots. They used to get the kamikaze pilots high on meth and inject them, dose them with methamphetamine. That way they kind of felt good about augering in to our boats and wherever else kamikaze pilots were going to fly and kill themselves about. But then by the 1950s, after the kamikaze pilot thing was done, it was actually sold over the counter as a legal drug for weight loss and depression. But by the 1970s, there was about 12 billion of these pills being sold annually. Now, 12 billion methamphetamine pills being sold over the counter, somebody thought, man, we might have an epidemic or a problem. So they started to enact some laws and some legislation that limited the production, the legal production of these pills. And as a result of that, that's when the black market and the underground started. So in the 1970s, groups like the Hells Angels, motorcycle gangs out in California started making what was called pope dope or proped dope, P2P, phenyl2propanone, was the chemical they used to make meth and vetamine. And they would make that in large vats, like bathtubs, and they'd make decent sized quantities. But the problem with that method is that it was very hard to get the phenoldupropanone. So they had to figure out other ways to do it. And did you know there's about 50 different ways to make meth? So P2P is one method popular in the 50s. Well, when the DEA decided that this was a popular method, they started limiting the precursors for the P2P method. Well, when you hamper one good thing, you have to find a way to make it again. So that is when methamphetamine other productions came up, and something like the red phosphorus method. So that's what was popular in that 2003 to 2008 method or era was the red phosphorus style of methamphetamine production. That's the one where we have pseudoephedrine, you know, pseudophed, we have red phosphorus, which we get from like matchbox, you know, the strike plate on matches. We have stuff like red devil lye, we have acetone, we have sulfuric acid, we have tin foil, muriatic acid, all these things they put together to make this methamphetamine. And we wonder why it's rotting people's teeth out, right? So in 2003 to 2008, there was a huge outbreak of this methamphetamine red phosphorus method, which is what spawned and spurred the show breaking bad. Well, in 2008, again, the DEA and their infinite wisdom realized that we have to put some controls on the methamphetamine precursors. So at that time, they limited the controls and they uh they made everybody start presenting their IDs. If you were around during that time and you had to go get cold medicine, you probably remember, and maybe it's still that way today. You have to give them your ID in order for them to write it on a log, and then they give you your one box of pseudophedrin and you walk away and you clear your head cold. So that is what they enacted in 2008 as part of legislation to start limiting the production of homemade methamphetamine. Well, when you do that, just like in the 70s, we had to change the way that we do things to make meth, so more methods became available. You know, another method that they use is they use it's called the one-pot method. And in that, they use pseudoephedrine that they can get, but it's a less of a quantity. And they take that pseudoophedrin, they put it into a bottle, they put ether from starter fluid cans into that bottle, they put lithium strips from lithium batteries into that bottle, they put a couple caps of water into that bottle, and then they put the top on the bottle and they shake it up. Well, if you know anything about chemistry, you'll know that ether is highly explosive. You'll know that lithium reacts with water and causes a fire. So when they do this, you can actually see in this two-liter soda bottle, you see flame shooting up inside the ether, and it's not exploding because there's no oxygen. You're in an oxygen-deficient environment. So therefore, but if you were to crack that lid, you might have an explosion. So you see these flames coming up, and all of a sudden it starts bubbling and boiling and reacting, and this ugly yellow, scummy foam comes to the top. That's your methamphetamine, you strip it off, you clean it up, you dry it out, and there's your meth. So again, in 2008, they had to come up with other ways to do this. Did you know that there's a way to produce methamphetamine simply by rotting a peach, scraping the mold off of the rotten peach, and then using that as a using that through a synthesized process to make meth? It's totally out there. So methamphetamine, it became a huge problem. But in 2008, we started uh to see methamphetamine production moving across the border south into Mexico. Now, in Mexico, they go back to that P2P method. The chemicals are a little bit easier to get, and remember, you can make those bathtub quantities, large quantities. So they moved into what's called superlabs. A super lab is something that produces 10 pounds or more of methamphetamine. So in Mexico, they're able to produce 10 pounds at a time, 20 pounds at a time of methamphetamine and bring it across the border through the uses of cartel or mules or up people's buttholes or whatever. They bring it across the border and they sell it in our United States of America. And that is how the methamphetamine production today is happening. Now, I'm not saying you don't have those small mom and pop labs or, you know, bathtub labs or red phosphorus labs that, you know, maybe out there here or there, mobile meth labs, that type of stuff. But it's definitely not as prevalent as it was back in that 2003 to 2008 era before they really started limiting the precursor material and putting legislation in place to slow down that production. Now, how does this come full circle? If you remember, my last, my last criminal case was a cartel murder, and the cartel was smuggling methamphetamine across the border from Mexico. So I'm here to tell you that it is still a problem in our United States of America. It is still something that happens, it still comes across the border. Don't let people tell you that it's not happening, it's not coming across the border. Mexico and the people south of us aren't necessarily responsible for anything negative. They're all positive. And I'm not, this is not going to get into an ice conversation, but what I'm gonna say is there are problems south of the border. There are problems north of the border. We're not perfect. I get it. But the problems south of the border, my own experience, the cartel, the same ones that followed me home and followed me around and threatened me, and the ones that worked me out of a career because my last four months I worked 150 hours a week and you know, all of this to put seven cartel members in prison. That same cartel is alive and well. Even in my local area today, the cartel is alive and well, and they're bringing pounds and pounds and thousands of pills, and now it's fentanyl and all kinds of stuff up across the border and sling it in our streets. So the next time you hear about a drug bust, the next time you hear about things going on out there in the world, maybe you think narcoterrorism doesn't affect you. Narcoterrorism totally does. It's when your house is getting broken into, when your shit's getting stolen, when the tweakers are out there stealing your metal fences to turn it in for scrap metal money in order to buy meth. You're all victims of this thing called narcoterrorism. It's still alive and well. Next time you see a cop out there on the street doing a drug bust, give him a high five, give him I love you. Hey, thanks for doing a great job. That is breaking bad.