Manon Eileen – a Writer's Blog

You may have noticed that I have been somewhat absent the past few weeks – lo siento! I have been insanely busy with writing the last few papers for my Master’s. I’m done, now, though! Finally.

As I shared a while back, I handed in my Master’s thesis proposal. My supervisor was excited and enthusiastic about my proposed research! While writing those last few papers I got more and more anxious to get started.

To refresh your memory (or to enlighten you, if you’ve been confused by my recent tweets :p), I am currently researching dystopian science fiction movies. Most people who I tell arch their brows at me, confused about how I could possibly mix that with criminology. Let me tell you.

Gattaca

I am looking into how dystopian science fiction movies discuss “formal social control”, that is every kind of control exerted by the authorities (either in classical government form or, as is sometimes depicted in sci-fi, the corporation who plays a governmental role), often in the shape of law enforcement. Not only am I looking at law enforcement, though. Control also includes punishment, so any kind of prison system or punishment modality, and crime risk management. Additionally, I’m looking at how certain scientific technological developments are portrayed in science fiction, but only tech development that is related to social control (such as the use of eye-scanners and DNA profiles for identification).

Society and Movies are Linked

The theory, among some cultural and popular criminologists is that film and society are linked inherently. Sociologists have often thought that movie only portrays “real life”, and so often for crime films, in analysis, people wondered how accurate the depiction of reality was. According to for instance Rafter (2006/2011) is that it’s not important how accurate it is: she says that film is influenced by reality, but that reality is also influenced by film – it’s going both ways (her example, for instance, is John Dillinger’s fascination for movies).

With my research I hope to shed light on what kind of developments have taken place in late modernity (approximately from the 1970′s to now), and how this has influenced formal social control. Science fiction movies are as much a depiction of a possible future as well as social criticism on society today.

The Movies

I will be watching about 40 science fiction movies in the next month, among which In Time (2011), Blade Runner (1982), Soylent Green (1973) – in the law enforcement category, A Clockwork Orange (1971), Children of Men (2006), The Running Man (1987) in the punishment modalities category, Banlieu 13 (2004), District 9 (2009) and Battle Royale (2000) in the crime risk management category, Gattaca (1997), Sleep Dealer (2008) and Strange Days (1995) in the scientific development category. I’ve already seen quite few, though, but I’m also seeing lots of new (to me) movies.

Sleep Dealer

I’m very excited that I can combine my love for science fiction and film with my academic field! I’m very daunted about having to write a coherent, cogent thesis on the matter though. Nevertheless, I don’t think anyone has ever had as much fun writing a thesis as I have, lol.

What are your favorite dystopian science fiction films? What do you think of the capability of sci-fi to deliver social criticism?

Recently I researched Neal Shusterman’s novel titled Unwind, and in particular, the concept of restroactive abortion for harvesting organs.

I critically assessed whether this concept could be a solution for the worldwide shortage of donated organs. Current solutions that are offered at the moment are the concept of “presumed consent”, where the state assumes you will donate your organs at death, unless you have explicitly stated otherwise. This is only used in a few countries in Europe, but other countries are considering adopting this policy as well.

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Unwind takes place in a near future United States of America, after a Second Civil War has taken place, fought over abortion. The pro-choice and pro-life groups reached a compromise: a constitutional amendment, the Bill of Life, was passed and from then on, parents would be allowed to sign an order for their children between 13 and 18 to be “unwound”. These children are aborted retroactively, taken to “harvest camps”, where their body parts are harvested. The only condition to the Bill of Life was that the lives of these children don’t “technically” end: because all useful body parts are (required to be) taken and reused, the groups reasoned that the children are (technically) not dead, because the individual body parts live on. This is called the “divided state”. The story takes place many years after the Bill of Life was passed and the practice of unwinding is then common and accepted.

As the term suggests, retroactive abortion means abortion after birth, for the sole purpose of organ harvesting, and for the parents to rid themselves (and society) of children that in their eyes are unmanageable. In Unwind, every one child in 2,000 is unwound each year.

A great alternative… or not? Pros and cons(equences)

Retroactive abortion would go great lengths in solving the problem of the organ shortage. On average in the U.S.A., 100,000 people are waiting for an organ, however, only 30,000 transplants are performed each year, and 6,000 Americans die per year while waiting for a transplant. Currently, there are about 35 million children between 13 and 18 years old in the United States (United States Census Bureau, 2011). If the Bill of Life were to be passed today, every year, 0.0005% (1 in 2000) of all children between 13 and 18 years old would be unwound, resulting in 17,500 full-body donations. With every unwound body, multiple patients could receive viable organs, if each Unwind would provide for only five of 21 transplantable organs, the waiting list could be cleared in merely a year.

However, the problems retroactive abortion could cause are serious as well. It seems fairly unimaginable that any pro-life group would agree to abortion of any kind, even by rationalizing that “technically” the soul lives on as the separate body parts live on in the “divided state”. In the novel, the main character is an Unwind who escaped the government on the eve of his arrest (and becomes an AWOL Unwind, absent without leave, as they’re called). There are many of these AWOL Unwinds: shadow people, hunted by the state. Out of necessity, they steal food and other materials and have to defend themselves with violence. The children are never asked their consent for unwinding, and most of them would not agree to it. The disregard to free will in this is quite astounding, the children are left no choice whatsoever, as they are taken away from their homes by bulky officers of the National Juvenile Authority, with force if necessary.

Additionally, resistance groups have come into existence. These groups are strongly against the notion of unwinding. Some of the se groups’ members are turned into “clappers” – they are injected with an unstable chemical substance. At the target location, e.g. harvest camps, all they need do is clap their hands and they explode, they are suicide bombers. There are also resistance groups who do not use violence like the clappers, instead, they rally the AWOLs and bring them to a safe haven where they can hide until they are 18 years old and can no longer be unwound. It is realistic to imagine that crime and violence would increase after a law such as the Bill of Life were passed, even if most of it isn’t visible “on the surface” for most of society.

Another serious problem retroactive abortion poses, however, is the carelessness with the plenty organs and body parts. The masses in Unwind have become used to the notion of retroactive abortion and the abundance of organs. Resistance as mentioned early is actually exceptional – generally, people no longer feel any moral objection to using organs and body parts freely. For instance, eyes are transplanted as fashion statements, or, if an arm is damaged severely in an accident, the entire arm is replaced as to avoid the hassle of reparative surgery. The general carelessness of people about the body parts harvested from the children is actually something that is seen in reality, albeit to a lesser extent, as well. Scheper-Hughes’ (2003)  illustration is painful:

“Dr B. Clemente, Medical Director of Capitol Medical Center in Manila, saw no conflict in advertising to foreigners (especially to patients from the USA and Canada) the availability of modern transplant services at her modest hospital and of fresh kidneys procured from local donors for whom (she said) ‘a few hundred dollars or even a large sack of rice is payment enough’.” 

The body part has become a commodity, it has become a good to be traded, with which relatively rich Western buyers can save their or their beloved’s lives and relatively poor Third World sellers can pay off their debts or satisfy their need for monetary gain. In this sense, this trend could eventually lead to extremities as seen in Unwind, however unlikely it would seem.

To conclude

Ultimately, retroactive abortion would most likely not be accepted worldwide. Although in the U.S.A. alone retroactive abortion would save at least 6,000 lives a year because people no longer have to wait to receive a replacement organ, instead, nearly three times as many youngsters would be lost per year. If retroactive abortion is not a practical solution, and presumed consent is not either in certain parts in the world, all possible alternatives need to be considered that could satisfy cultural and religious demands to solve the organ shortage and prevent further extremities such as organ theft, trafficking and harvesting without consent.

Have you ever considered the worldwide shortage of organs? 

I love science fiction books that go into our real world problems. What other sci-fi’s have you read (or seen) that deal with current problems?

This is the fourth and last installment series on the Global Drugs Trafficking. Before, we discussed the basics of drug trade (Discover the Trade, pt. 1), how organic drugs are grown (How to Grow Coca and Opium Poppies, pt. 2), and how the drugs are produced (How Heroin, Cocaine and Meth are Produced, pt. 3).

Today, we’ll discuss the distribution of the drugs. After production, the drugs need to be distributed around the world. As is usual for the posts I write on drug trafficking, my source is the UNODC World Drugs Report (2010).

Distribution closely linked to demand. Where the demand is, the drugs go.

Distribution of Cocaine

Cocaine demands are high worldwide. However, there has been a shift in where the drug is in demand. Before (1998), cocaine was particularly popular in the USA. Nearly three-quarters of cocaine produced was shipped to and consumed in the US. In the past few years, demand for cocaine has increased in Europe and the amount of drugs distributed to the US and Europe are almost equal.

On the figure on the right you can see the global cocaine flows and how they have changed between 1998 and 2008. What is particularly interesting is that cocaine, these days, is more often shipped from South America to the African continent, where it is then shipped to Europe. Additionally, the Caribbean route seems to have become less popular (perhaps because of the alternative African route).

What I miss in this figure, is that it lacks information on cocaine flows to Asia. In the World Drug Report, it is mentioned that cocaine is consumed in Asia, and it has become increasingly popular on the continent. However, unfortunately I can’t say anything about the flows to the continent.

Ways of Transportation

From the Andes Region to the US

Most of the cocaine enters the US through the Mexican border. Border cities Juárez (Mexico) and El Paso (TX, USA) are where most of the drug-smuggling magic happens. The US has put fences along the national border between the two cities and regulate all road customs, but the cartels have found their ways to still get the drugs across. They have dug tunnels, and they’re not the tunnels you’d imagine. Some of these tunnels are thousands of miles long, with electricity and little mine-like trains running through them. The US border patrol has found a few of these tunnels in recent years.

Juárez is actually one of the most violent cities of the world. Since Mexico started their drugs war to break the power of the cartels in 2006, over 15,000 people have died (“Life and Death in Juárez, the World’s Murder Capital“, The Guardian, 2009).

Other cocaine shipments enter the US by water, often through big ports in Florida (particularly Miami) and Texas.

From the Andes Region to Europe

We Dutch quite often hear about cocaine smugglers in the news. “An individual was caught on Schiphol airport (Amsterdam), smuggling 2 kilos of cocaine in his belly”, or someone was caught with twenty kilos in a suitcase, or they had it concealed in their clothes. Twenty kilo, or even two, is nothing. It’s even irrelevant, which is interesting because you rarely hear about the large amounts of cocaine seized in the European ports.

Most cocaine enters Europe through the big ports. The port of Rotterdam (The Netherlands) is an important one, but due to language barriers, the cocaine smugglers (who evidently mostly speak Portuguese and Spanish) head for the big ports of Spain and Portugal. The amounts that are caught in these ports are astonishing. Occasionally “small” hauls of 300 kilos are seized, and in August 2011, the UK seized their biggest shipment of cocaine ever. The shipment consisted of 1,2 tons of cocaine, worth an estimated £300 million (nearly US $500 million) and it was destined for Rotterdam harbor (“Seized Cocaine Shipment Is The Largest Ever Seized In Britain“, UK News Gateway, 2011).

Distribution of Heroin and Opium

As I portrayed in the first, more general post on global drug trafficking, heroin has become slightly less popular, worldwide. Because of this, it has also become cheaper and thus has become more popular on the African continent and Eastern Europe (no exact causal correlation here, but this is, in a very basic sense, what’s happened).

On the figure on the right you can see the heroin and opium flows from Asia. Approximately 80% of all heroin produced comes from Afghanistan, next biggest producer is Burma (Myanmar) and a few percent come from the countries surrounding them. A few tiny percent come from the Andes Region, which aren’t even displayed in this figure.

Afghanistan has three main routes through which the heroin is smuggled, but after it’s passed through these main routes (through Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia and Russia), the heroin and opium are spread all over the continent. They seem to have a multitude of ways to smuggle the drugs.

Most of the smuggling goes by land – often carried by camels and other pack animals, in caravans. From Iran, the drugs are often carried to other destination by air or sea, in cargo containers. The shipments to North America are most often smuggled by plane.

Interestingly, what’s mentioned in the World Drug Report but not clearly displayed on the figure is that most heroin coming from Pakistan goes to the UK and The Netherlands. Pakistan is also the biggest supplier of heroin to Africa.

A recent BBC report (“Nigerian officials find heroin in shipment from Iran“, BBC, 2010) mentions a seizure of 130 kilos of heroin in the seaport of Lagos, Nigeria. The entire shipment was worth nearly $10 million, and the drugs were hidden in engine parts. What’s interesting is that in the World Drugs Report, a figure displays the nationalities of people caught in Pakistan for heroin trafficking, 32% is Pakistani and 32% is Nigerian. 14% falls in the “Other” category, the remaining 22% is made up of a lot of other African nationalities. That’s very interesting!

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 What are your thoughts about the global flows of heroin and cocaine? Are there any bits of information here that surprised you or that you find particularly interesting?

The last few weeks I have been so busy! It’s insane and often I feel like I’m drowning. Doing a master’s is no joke, let me tell you. The pressure is HIGH.

Every two weeks I have to hand in an essay on some topic in critical criminology. It’s hard, that’s for sure. I handed in my second last week, and this would be the first we’d be graded on. I was nervous as hell, I’m very motivated and excited about this master’s, but am also really scared to fail.

We have a feedback conversation with our professor every week after we hand in our assignment. I was nervous as hell, honestly. The first essay (not graded) she didn’t like so much.

She told me she graded my essay highest of all 50 students! I was giddy! I couldn’t believe it, actually. She only had two minor remarks. I got 85% and such marks are exceptional, she said.

I would like to share the essay – I hope you enjoy reading it. The assignment was to write an essay about the criminalization of [something], the examples offered were smoking and bestiality.

The Criminalization of Love: Defeating Crime by Abolishing Its Source

Love is defined in many ways. Wikipedia, a popular source consulted monthly by nearly half a billion people, offers the following definition: “Love is an emotion of a strong affection and personal attachment”. When you ask someone what they wish for in their lives, it is often a combination or variation of good health, happiness and love. You could say love makes people tick. Love drives people, sometimes even to irrational behavior: a mother would go great lengths to defend her child or a soldier would protect his country to death. No matter the consequences, they persist because of love.
But what if, one day, an influential group of scientists would state: “love is evil: love leads to passion and greed, love leads to anger and fear, love leads to murder and war, love causes all crime.” This could be picked up by influential groups such as religious groups or politicians: wouldn’t it be great to eliminate the cause of crime and evil? What kind of consequences would it have if in the future love would be banned and criminalized?

In two novels, the situation of the illegalization of love has been sketched and philosophized about and make excellent examples to demonstrate the case of love being criminalized. In 1984 (1949) by George Orwell, love is highly frowned upon and sex is repressed. Reproduction is merely an obligation to the political system.
In Lauren Oliver’s Delirium (2011), love is considered a disease (amor deliria nervosa) and at age 18, everyone receives a medically developed cure. Love is believed to be the cause of everything bad, of hurt, crime and war. In the world of Delirium, abolishing love has greatly diminished all crime.

With these examples at hand, I will try to demonstrate what the process of criminalization (Siegel, 2012) of love would look like.
First, in the process of criminalization, there would be the construction of the problem of love: love, it could be said, is the direct or indirect cause of all evil in human existence.
In the second step, a link between the deviation and the emotions of the public is created, for example through propaganda. In 1984, an entire Ministry is dedicated to censoring all media. Currently, in reality, you could consider the propaganda to be very pro-love: love is idealized, especially in the combination of the “loving family”. If love were to be criminalized, propaganda would instruct quite the opposite: love is evil and should be avoided at all times.
The third step of the criminalization process would be identifying people and their deviant behavior behind the “evil”. In the case of love, anyone could be “evil”, as anyone is capable of love. This could warrant population-wide paranoia and distrust.
The next step of the process is “creating the criminal context and its serious consequences”. Now, certain groups would be demonized, and the gap between the “good” and the “bad” people would widen. If it has become clear particular groups would be especially vulnerable to love, say, adolescents because of cognitive change, people would become especially paranoid of them, for those that love are seen as inherently bad and prone to commit other heinous crimes.
Often with such major changes in society, a resistance movement comes into existence (i.e. in World War II against German occupation, or later, the Polish resistance against communism), a group of dissenters that are willing to rise against the system and try to force it to let go of the new laws, with or without violence. This would be quickly picked up by mass media and would be used to portray the bad consequences of love.
The fifth and last step of the criminalization process shows the “solution” to the problem and the effect of criminalization. In 1984, because of transgression of the law, the protagonist is arrested to be imprisoned, interrogated, tortured and eventually brainwashed into submission. In Delirium (2011) the solution for the repression of love is the cure. In reality, a cure seems unlikely, so instead, the solution could be more as sketched in 1984, imprisonment of love criminals.
A distinction would have to be made for the severity of the transgression: i.e. being in an actual loving relationship with another human being is the worst, loving a certain kind of food would be the least. For smaller transgressions, fines could be given. Maybe a “three strikes and you’re out” system could be used for the habitual love criminal, they could be imprisoned for life or even capital punishment could be a solution. These solutions might seem harsh, but, since this is what they are trying to prevent: who is to say these habitual offenders would not start to commit other crimes?
Since love is internal and hard to detect, the system would have to monitor people closely and might even become totalitarian, which could lead to society as seen in 1984, where people are monitored constantly through cameras and microphones everywhere.

Now that we have established the criminalization of love and its possible widespread, paranoia-inducing qualities, we can review the theory that describes a possible consequence for society: what Stanley Cohen termed moral panics in 1972 (in Beirne & Messerschmidt, 2012: 11).
In 2009, Jenkins (Ibid.: 11-12) suggested how a moral panic comes into existence: the new, major change in society would be displayed accordingly by the mass media. Surely, the emergence of the new repercussions of love will be portrayed (i.e. arrests, major court cases, etcetera), both to remind people of the new rules and to show them the consequences of transgression and possibly even to shock them into submission. If the cases are generalized and made to seem they could happen to anyone, the effect will be even more substantive. Those in resistance movements will be portrayed as the biggest evil, the new terrorists, by the mass media. Eventually, the collective would panic about love and love criminals: they become the new villain (or hero, depending on which side the viewer is).
Although extreme, a possible consequence of the criminalization of love could be witch-hunt much like those in the Middle Ages. In Orwell’s 1984, where everyone is recruited by Big Brother to spy on, basically, everyone, and to report them if they suspect them of breaking the law. In reality, people could start to suspect each other of thought-crime (in this case, people do experience love but they hide it from others), or doublethinking (here, pretending to agree with the criminalization of love while in reality, they don’t), terms coined by Orwell in 1984.
On the other hand, people could panic because of fear for the state. If the system truly becomes totalitarian, people will fear falling in love against their will. Naturally, this would not be apparent in propaganda, which will only suggest the state makes society safer, but instead, the system could become considered evil by the public.

In Oliver’s Delirium, the protagonist is the daughter of a woman who was immune to the cure for love and loved, and thereupon committed suicide. After her mother’s death, she is always considered by her environment to be the girl who might be immune too because of genetics. This pertains to Howard Becker’s theory of labeling (1963), and his theory is actually quite applicable to the idea of love crime. In society, there are always those labeled as “unstable”, or more generally, “prone to commit crimes”, either because they are in a certain ethnic group, of a particular age or have a specific background. The theory suggests that because of these labels these people commit crimes, as they (unconsciously) feel they cannot escape their label. In the case of love as a crime, there will certainly be groups more prone to love, or at least considered to, i.e. adolescents or parents (they cannot help but love their children).
But, as love is such a common phenomenon, not merely certain stereotypes could commit love crime. Without a cure for love, people from all layers of society would be able to commit this crime and thus would render the labeling theory mostly defunct. Basically, everyone becomes an outsider.

However unlikely it seems love would be criminalized, we can speculate that the consequences for society would be significant. Possibly, as in Delirium, people are cured of love, crime rates could fall. On the other hand, without a cure, people could already be criminals merely if they love something or someone, which could raise crime rates instead. Distrust would dominate and one could see love criminals even in the youngest babies and the oldest elderly.
Propaganda would influence the attitude of the populace toward love: love is evil, to love is evil and those who love are evil. This could lead to widespread distrust toward large groups of people, especially resistance movements, and eventually, everyone. Solutions such as imprisonment of love criminals, lifelong imprisonment or even capital punishment for the habitual offender could be posed.
Shortly after the criminalization of love, it would feel unnatural and awful for people not to be allowed to love, and could even fear the state for arresting them over something they cannot help. But as time passes, individuals could become used to it, and perhaps, like in Delirium, individuals would be happy that love is not allowed, because it, they are convinced, simplifies life and makes society safer. But would people, even those who would propose the criminalization of love, be willing to sacrifice the freedom to love to supposedly increase safety?

Becker, H. S. (1963) Outsiders. New York: The Free Press.
Beirne, P., & Messerschmidt, J.W. (2011) Criminology: A Sociological Approach. New York: Oxford University Press.
Love. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved September 30, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love
Orwell, G. (1949) 1984. London: Secker and Warburg.
Oliver, L. (2011) Delirium. New York: HarperCollins.
Siegel, D. (2012, September 27) Criminalization. Lecture conducted from Utrecht University, Utrecht.

This is the third post in a five-part series on global drug trafficking.

Discover the Trade – Global Drug Trafficking Pt. 1
How to Grow Coca and Opium Poppies – Global Drug Trafficking pt. 2

Today I will explain how heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine are manufactured. I won’t go into exact details because I don’t want to promote the production of any of these drugs, but should you be interested, the instructions are readily available online (which is interesting on its own).

Opium, Morphine and Heroin Manufacture

In the post on cultivation (part 2), I explained how the plant is grown. When the plant is ready for the production of opium – because that’s what the manufacture begins with – the petals of the flowers fall away to expose an egg-shaped seed pod. Inside is opium in its crudest form, an opaque, milky sap. This is extracted – the farmer makes vertical slits in the skin of the pod

an Afghan Cooking Room

with a special knife. When the sap oozes out, it turns darker and thicker. It turns into a brownish-black gum, also called latex.

The opium then enters the black market, where it is sold as bricks, cakes or balls, wrapped in plastic or leaves. However, most traffickers refine the opium into morphine close to the poppy fields because morphine is easier to smuggle than the pungent, jelly like opium.

The refineries are little more than rickety labs, equipped with oil drums. There, the opium is mixed with lime in boiling water. Organic waste sinks to the bottom and on the surface, a white band of morphine forms. This is drawn off and reheated with ammonia, after which it’s filtered and boiled again until reduced to a brown paste.

The paste is poured into molds and dried in the sun. It is now morphine base, which feels like modeling clay. The base is smoke-able in a pipe or ready for further processing into heroin.

C.R. Wright, an English researcher, was the first to unknowingly produce heroin in 1874. He simply boiled the morphine base and a common chemical over a stove for several hours.

The modern technique entails a complicated series of steps and requires a good laboratory, because a particular stage of the heroin production is notoriously risky. If the chemist were careless, certain gases could ignite and produce a violent explosion.

Cocaine and Crack Cocaine Production

Dried coca leaves are crushed, chopped and/or pounded and mixed with a solution of alcohol, kerosene or gasoline. This is to separate the cocaine from the leaves. The resulting liquid contains unpurified cocaine alkaloids and possibly waxy material from the leaves. To remove the wax, the liquid is heated and then cooled again, which solidifies it.

A Cocaine Factory

The alkaloids are isolated next. This is done with acid and some basic mixtures, and when isolated, the alkaloids are treated with kerosene. The kerosene is then removed. Gas crystals of crude cocaine are left at the bottom of the tank. These are typically dissolved in methyl alcohol, after which they are recrystallized and dissolved in sulfuric acid. The result is cocaine that is about 60% pure.

At this point, the cocaine is freebase cocaine, very similar to crack cocaine.

Next, the freebase cocaine is converted to salt, or cocaine hydrochloride, or regular cocaine. If the cocaine is not converted to salt, it would lose its potency for long. Also, if not converted, it’s not soluble in water, which means it couldn’t be injected or snorted.

When cocaine is converted to crack, they basically revert the previous process.

Methamphetamine Manufacture

A Meth Lab

As methamphetamine is not based on an organic ingredient, it’s manufactured in all parts of the worlds. The highest concentrations of manufacture have been found in East and SouthEast Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa.

Production of methamphetamine is relatively simple, but entails risk with flammable and corrosive chemicals, particularly the solvents used in extraction and purification. Consequently, meth-labs are often discovered by fires and explosions caused by the improper handling of volatile or flammable solvents.

Many of the ingredients are readily available in household products, or over-the-counter medicines for cold or allergies. The ingredient the manufacturers look for are ephedrine or pseudoephedrine. The original product has to be reduced to this ingredient. The maximum conversion rate for ephedrine and pseudoephedrine is 92%, although typically, illicit methamphetamine laboratories convert at a rate of 50% to 75%.

Methamphetamine labs can give off noxious fumes. If produced by amateurs, manufacturing methamphetamine can be extremely dangerous. If the red phosphorus overheats, because of a lack of ventilation, phosphine gas can be produced. This gas is highly toxic and, if present in large quantities, can explode when it comes in touch with a different

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To describe how methamphetamine is made would require me to explain all sorts of chemical processes. Frankly, I’m far from a chemist, so I wouldn’t even understand it myself. Basically, they follow a recipe, after which the methamphetamine crystal comes into existence. Often, the crystal is crushed into a powder, which is snorted, injected, eaten or in a different way consumed.

Had you ever read about how they are produced before? What did you find particularly interesting? (I’m personally amazed by the fact that cocaine is part gasoline/kerosene, actually. I had no idea). Are you as amazed as I am about the lengths that people go (they often endanger their own and their family’s health) to produce these products?