Shake And Bake Methamphetamine

New method for making meth requires little source material and makes only a few doses:

This is the new formula for methamphetamine: a two-liter soda bottle, a few handfuls of cold pills and some noxious chemicals. Shake the bottle and the volatile reaction produces one of the world’s most addictive drugs…

The “shake-and-bake” approach has become popular because it requires a relatively small number of pills of the decongestant pseudoephedrine — an amount easily obtained under even the toughest anti-meth laws that have been adopted across the nation to restrict large purchases of some cold medication.

The do-it-yourself method creates just enough meth for a few hits, allowing users to make their own doses instead of buying mass-produced drugs from a dealer.

“It simplified the process so much that everybody’s making their own dope,” said Kevin Williams, sheriff of Marion County, Ala., about 80 miles west of Birmingham. “It can be your next-door neighbor doing it. It can be one of your family members living downstairs in the basement.”

Add in how the internet has directions for doing anything, allowing anyone to follow a youtube video recipe, and this could be huge. r-strategists want ease and reduced risk. Avoiding Law Enforcement will be a high priority.

If this is an evolutionary trend in the drug manufacturing process, there could come a day when the drug war would have to be surrendered. Imagine if every legislatively controllable aspect of drug use were capable of being done in private by individuals. You go to the drug store, buy several legal items, bring it all home legally, mix it together within the privacy of your house, and then take a single hit of some recreational drug without anyone else knowing. No dealers, no networks of individuals, no interstate transportation, and no opportunity for government to intervene, short of invading the privacy of your house pre-emptively. Even crazier, no cartels making it relatively expensive. Imagine a full year of highs for maybe $50.

If it reaches that point, it will be interesting to see the effects on r/K. On the one hand, r-strategists would then be able to partake of the strongest dopamine agonists freely, and in choosing being high, would take themselves out of the governmental and societal equation. On the other hand, society would have a major dopamine stimulus, pushing a lot of people toward an entitled, hedonistic psychology prone to rabbitism.

I’d predict a major schism forming in society, with the druggies becoming more entitled, more opportunistic and criminal, and more triggerable and neurotic. As they did, the non-druggies would become more resentful and hateful of a segment of society which they would blame all their ills on. As now, all it would take is a resource shortage to set off a Darwinian civil war.

Interesting times approach.