Friends finally convinced me to watch Breaking Bad. Here are a few questions about the series, in no particular order…
Why do all of the meth customers seem to be in extremely poor health? The Wikipedia article on meth says that the drug was heavily used by the Germany military during World War II yet it is hard to imagine a fearsome or successful army of meth heads from Breaking Bad. The Wikipedia article says that Americans interested in losing weight took the drug all through the 1950s and 1960s. They weren’t called “meth-heads”. What makes meth circa 2010 so much more dangerous than meth circa 1940 or 1960? [This Washington Post article says that many meth users are “functional” so perhaps this is like peanuts, which have gone from “staple” to “poison” during my own lifetime.]
I got on the subject of Breaking Bad with a divorce litigator that I interviewed for a book project. She asked “Why does Jane [Margolis, Jesse’s girlfriend, an attractive apparently healthy young woman,] get so excited about $500,000 in cash? If she wanted money without working she could just collect child support.” [Note that Jane lives in New Mexico, a state where unlimited child support is available and a couple of one-night encounters with high-income guys would have her at $500,000 in profits within a few years. (New Mexico courts will also order a father to pay for day care on top of child support, so she wouldn’t actually have had to take care of any children.)] Regarding the risk that Jane would lose custody of profitable children due to her heroin use, the attorney said “Only if she came into the courtroom with a needle stuck in her arm.”
Similar question: Lydia Rodarte-Quayle seems devoted to a child and also to making cash via some means other than working. She lives in Texas, a state where child support is capped at about $20,000 per year (only a $10,000 per year profit over the USDA-estimated cost of having a child in the home). But instead of taking the risk of being involved with drug trafficking, why wouldn’t she simply move to Wisconsin, California, or Massachusetts and collect her millions through legal tax-free child support? [See the “Women in Science” article for more details on real-world child support profits.]
I was talking about the show with a friend from Israel and he said “When they’re setting up the meth lab under a commercial laundry on the show why don’t any characters mention the Ayalon Institute’s ammunition factory under a commercial laundry[, built and operated in the 1940s in Israel]?”
With a business executive friend we wondered “How is that Gus can kill his henchman Victor and then be confident of hiring a replacement? Most legal American businesses struggle to recruit reliable help.” Why is it apparently so easy to find people to work in an illegal enterprise where there is a risk of imprisonment? [see my talent management consultant posting]
What do actual criminals do to launder illicitly earned cash? Walter and his wife have to run a car wash to launder a few million dollars. But don’t major drug operations make more money than that? Could they not just drive a lot of cash across the border and deposit in a bank in a countries where not as many questions are asked? What do real-world drug lords do with U.S.-generated cash? [I did a quick Google search and found this CBS News article about HSBC helped to launder billions (separately, the daughter of the top HSBC exec became a child support profiteer, working her 6-year-old daughter for about $600,000 per year (NY Daily News)). But the article doesn’t say how it actually works. Do customers just back up a minivan full of cash to the bank’s loading dock?]
And why didn’t Walter move himself and his family across the border after he’d made $20 million or whatever but before he’d been caught? He was able to get $11 million in cash into each 55-gallon oil drum. Couldn’t he have smuggled a couple of those across the border? At that point he and his family become tourists in one or more foreign countries. U.S. law enforcement might look for Americans spending beyond their legally declared incomes here in the U.S. but would the police in Germany investigate an American tourist who was paying for hotel rooms, groceries, and car rental in cash? How about the police in Argentina or Brazil?
Is making pure meth truly challenging? If the drug cartels that make a lot of meth are big and well-organized, as the media and government tell us that they are, why can’t they do as good a job as other Mexican manufacturing enterprises? Aren’t there Mexican pharma firms making drugs at least as complex as meth and to international standards of purity? If so, why couldn’t people who had worked in legal pharma in Mexico set up a factory making meth as good as what Walter and Jesse were making?
Why are these criminals always chatting on their phones, wired and mobile? Wouldn’t they be worried about wiretaps? At least take the trouble to speak in codes?
Finally, could it be that Breaking Bad will discourage young Americans and Mexicans from choosing crime as a career? None of the criminals on the show seem to be able to hold onto their savings or lives in the long run. Aside from missing out on a lot of excitement and a few spending sprees they all would have better off working at Walmart.
[And yes I do recognize that the show is fictional and some of the above is likely just to make it more dramatic. An expat family living in a resort hotel in San Carlos de Bariloche and periodically dipping into their cash barrel to pay for hot chocolate wouldn’t make for must-see TV.]
Couple of your questions I know answer to.
1. Meth is very easy to make. That’s why it’s called “cooking”, since pretty much any moron can do it in a kitchen. The results though are horrible – a very large load of impurities, most of which are highly poisonous. So if someone were to use pharmaceutical grade meth (as happened in the 40’s or 60’s) – it had much much less of side effects than what typical “meth head” is using now.
2. In several posts you’ve mentioned that “one night encounter with a radiologist that bags you ton of child support for years”. Although I’m sure it does happen on occasion, an absolute majority of my high income friends are smart enough to wrap the tool when having a one night stand. So perhaps trying to do it intentionally is a rather hard endeavor, requiring lots of “effort” and a dose of luck.
3. Drug cartels in Mexico even had specially designed bags that would perfectly fit into cashier’s holes in HSBC banks. So yeah, pretty much “drive up the van to bank full of cash and unload”.
Denis: To your point 1, why can’t today’s meth heads be supplied with pharma-grade meth? Is it too hard to set up a factory? Too hard to get it over the border?
Regarding point 2, none of the divorce litigators that we’ve interviewed have mentioned any would-be child support profiteers having had difficulty establishing a pregnancy, although they have referred to condoms being punctured with pins and/or retrieved from trash cans. There is some sample bias, though, in that the litigators weren’t hired (by either side) until a pregnancy was established. By definition they wouldn’t have clients who had tried and failed to become pregnant.
1. I’m not really sure. I would think competition plays a big role. You need to set up factory (easiest part likely), large distribution channels (much harder), etc – and on the other hand there’re two guys with a pressure cooker. Their shit is going to be cheap and easily locally available. Majority of clientele doesn’t care (meth is a blue collar drug mostly, and effects take quite some time to show up). And economy of scale works (at least partially) against you – the bigger you are, the more likely you are to attract authorities. But that’s just a guess.
Meth can be very devastating if abused:
http://fav-meth-head-of-the-day.com/faces-of-meth/
Probably these are people with addictive personalities. It’s just like alcohol – some people are social drinkers who suffer no ill effects and some become alcoholics and destroy their livers.
Meth is easy to synthesize if you have the precursor material, which is (pseudo)ephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed (this is why Sudafed is no longer on the shelves but behind the pharmacy counter). Without access to ephedrine feedstocks (in sufficient quantity) it’s very difficult. Pseudoephedrine itself is not easily synthesized. It’s made by yeast fermentation of dextrose in the presence of benzaldehyde, followed by various separation and purification steps – not the kind of think you can do easily outside of an industrial setting.
I had a different question.
Everyone agrees that Gale’s coffee is absolutely the best coffee they have ever tasted. At the time Gale is making coffee, Walter and Gus are partners, and Gus is an owner and expert in franchise and distribution.
Is Gale’s legal coffee plus Gus’s franchise expertise worth more to {Walter, Jesse, Gus, Gale} than the illegal meth business?
Starbucks had a net income in 2013 of $481 million.
Rand says the US meth market in 2010 was $13B
“AZCentral” says the US coffee market around 2013 was $30B.
60 Minutes’ piece on Boston mobster Whitey Bulger said he lived in CA for years by doling out cash. I guess you wouldn’t HAVE
to immigrate with your barrel.
jerry: That is an awesome point. If people can make money with “hand-drip” pourover coffee (i.e., humans doing for $4/cup what a Mr. Coffee machine does for next to nothing), Gale’s fancy machine should have been worth $billions in legal revenue.
My first question is why Walt needs to scratch up extra income to pay medical bills. He’s a public school teacher with a disabled son. Albuquerque schools offer several tiers of insurance with copays for teachers. He should have the gold plated insurance package and a steady middle class income.
Brian: That is a good point. http://www.aps.edu/human-resources/salary-schedules/at2-salary-schedule shows that someone like Walt with a PhD (assuming he finished it; we never saw him in his cap and gown) should be able to make $82,605 per year for working 184 days/6.5 hours per day. And http://www.aps.edu/human-resources/benefits/medical shows that a teacher has an “out-of-pocket maximum” on his or her insurance plan of $2,250 per year if the providers are all within the network, $4500 per year if the providers are out of network. So that’s a maximum of 5.4% of gross income assuming all health care is out of network. That’s less than what Walter would be paying if he were being tapped by a child support plaintiff (about $9780 per year according to the calculator at nmcourts.gov; compare to the $6205 per year revenue stream that a foster child in New Mexico would yield from the state or the $9000 per year USDA-estimated cost of having a child in the home and it is clear that suing a doctor is smarter than suing a cancer patient or teacher…).
The elephant in the living room here is the “narrative” or perhaps the “meta narrative”. Every fiction drama and every sitcom on TV conforms to the same meta-narrative. If you disagree with the meta-narrative, you have to start your own culture, or join a counter-culture already in progress.
PS: The counter-culture from the 1960s doesn’t count. That’s the mainstream culture now.
To answer the meth head health question: The health effects are largely dramatized by the media. The people who do suffer extreme health problems suffer them because of poor hygiene, lack of sleep, improper nutrition, etc. as a result of their addiction, not as a direct result of ingesting meth. Take “meth mouth” for example – Crystal meth does cause teeth grinding and dry mouth, however it’s lifestyle factors that are the primary cause of this condition.
Lack of pharma grade meth: government intervention messes with the economics. DEA restrictions on precursor chemicals make the easier high purity production methods too expensive (see: old school biker gangs). The most common method today involves ephedrine/pseudoephedrine and the process maxes out at around a 90% purity level with an experienced chemist and lab quality equipment. Your average street chemist can cook up 50-75%, and the increased profits from higher purity levels don’t justify the additional costs incurred from employing highly trained professionals with state of the art manufacturing processes.
If you really want pharma grade meth, go see your psychiatrist! Desoxyn is still legally available in the United States (although reasonably difficult to obtain), and close chemical cousins i.e. dexedrine, adderall and vyvanse are among the most prescribed drugs in North America.
Great acting, great photography, and a central truth of the recreational drug industry in America – that it is a violent destructive force in our society that kills people, corrupts governments, and distorts our economy are not enough for you? Okay, next time they’ll get the chemistry and the economics right.
What have you seen, on TV or in the movies lately, that’s better than this?
In a story about Lori Arnold I read she stated the meth they produced when they could get the precursor chemicals bulk had many fewer side effects over the stuff now made from over the counter Sudafed. No idea how true it is, or how easy it was to get the precursor chemicals in the 90s. But I image there is quite a big difference from laboratory meth in the historical examples and the stuff cooked up by your average high school dropout.
I only watched the first few episodes, but my first question was why he couldn’t get the cancer treatment through his insurance plan. I forget if they addressed it or not, but it seemed unbelievable given his position as a teacher. But of course if he could it wouldn’t make good TV.
WW selected the cheapest plan available and the hot shot oncologist he wanted to see wasn’t in their network.
“And why didn’t Walter move himself and his family across the border after he’d made $20 million or whatever but before he’d been caught?”
You missed the point of the show: Breaking Bad is about the male ego. Walter didn’t money to keep making meth money “for my family,” as he always claimed. As he later admitted to Jessie:
“You asked me if I was in the meth business or the money business. Neither. I’m in the empire business.”- WW
Most works of fiction are based on somewhat improbable premises if not outright magic. You just have to suspend your disbelief and take it as it is or it will ruin the fun.
Much of the death and injury from illegal drugs (overdoses and poisonings because purity is not regulated, needle borne diseases, shootouts between rival drug dealers, etc.) is a result of their illegality. Much the same thing happened during Prohibition. You could argue that making drugs legal would be even worse in that more people would use them if you could just get them at your local pharmacy. Again the experience of Prohibition shows the opposite – alcohol consumption probably went UP during the period when it was illegal.
Wachovia, owned by Wells Fargo, now owned by Berkshire Hathaway, laundered billions of dollars of Mexican drug money. They got off with a comparative slap on the wrist.
E.g.,
“For the time period of 1 May 2004 through 31 May 2007, Wachovia processed at least $$373.6bn in CDCs, $4.7bn in bulk cash” – a total of more than $378.3bn, a sum that dwarfs the budgets debated by US state and UK local authorities to provide services to citizens.”
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/04/04/wachoviawells-fargo-the-drug-cartel-banks/
On a smaller scale of laundering, it also seems the sources of funds for real estate can be kept pleasantly fuzzy. I believe I read an article about Miami realtors successfully fighting some disclosure rules a while back, but can’t find it right now. Here’s how it’s done in New York:
http://nymag.com/news/features/foreigners-hiding-money-new-york-real-estate-2014-6/