Breaking Bad And Reality

Closer than you might think:

The one feature in the show that is most glaringly off is the gleaming subterranean mega-lab that Gus constructs for Walter. To be sure, labs like these exist—just not in the United States. One major challenge for any meth producer, which gets scant attention on the show, is how to source adequate precursor chemicals, which are heavily regulated in the States. In real life, it would be impractical to undertake the sort of industrial-scale production that Walter does (two hundred pounds a week) inside this country, because of the difficulty of acquiring the necessary chemicals. It is much easier to shift production to Mexico or Guatemala, as the major drug cartels have done, where mega-labs (that dwarf Walter’s) churn out meth for export to the U.S. Meth is still cooked in this country, but generally in smaller “shake and bake” batches more typical of what you see in “Winter’s Bone.” Otherwise, the show’s portrayal of Mexican cartels is devastatingly accurate. It has been suggested that Vince Gilligan has a sick mind, but nothing he could dream up, even the unfortunate fate of Tortuga, can rival the creative barbarism of the cartels. Many viewers were repulsed when Walt and Pinkman used acid to melt a body in an early episode, but this is such a common disposal technique in Mexico today that it has acquired a nickname—the guiso, or “stew.” One plot device that drives much of the third and fourth seasons is the notion that Walt is irreplaceable (and therefore, likely to survive) only until someone else, whether his lab assistant Gale, or Jesse Pinkman, can learn to reproduce his recipe. A federal prosecutor in California told me recently about a case in which a group of American ecstasy producers entered negotiations with a Mexican cartel to manufacture large volumes of the drug, but ended up abandoning the deal when they realized that the cartel intended to keep them around just long enough to learn their recipe, then kill them.

That is just plain scary.