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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

The insane thing for me is seeing how tightly meth purity correlated with the airing of Breaking Bad.

It's not insane, and it's the other way around. The writers consulted directly with DEA agents, they were being told how the meth trade was changing and wrote reality into their show.

Pseudoephedrine restrictions drove the search for new chemistry and the new chemistry brought in the large scale labs.

I was thinking the same thing, though I couldn't remember the timeline. Makes me wonder if there was something already in the zeitgeist, or if it was fueled by the obsession with purity in the series. I could totally see Breaking Bad causing chemists to want to up their game, or causing chemists to get clowned for having low purity.

yes, while the show probably popularized the idea of purity for meth, in general strict prohibition leads to increase in purity and potency. We've recently seen that with heroin/fentanyl. There is probably still no "fentanyl of meth", and thus so far only purity increase. Once a more potent, fentanyl-like, meth appears, it will probably similarly get into and displace a lot of classic meth trade.

What? Prohibition historically showed the exact opposite.

I suspect higher purity & potency of street drugs has much more to do with more sophisticated operators operating outside of the US than strict prohibition. Same with fentanyl.

I believe OP wanted to make the point that one of the most important things for people profiting from the illegal sale of drugs (meth or heroin/opiates) is to minimize the amount that has to be trafficked (1kg of 10% meth vs 100g of pure meth or 1kg of heroin vs 10g of fentanyl).

I believe this explanation is too simplistic...

yes, the "Iron law of prohibition" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition

"the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs."

Prohibition encouraged higher potency but purity was highly questionable. The stills themselves often leeched contaminants from the metal used to make them, as well as the heads and tails of the distillate, which should be discarded but might not be.

The production case for a stronger stimulant is weaker. Heroin is a really complicated molecule. It is only made from a natural precursor. Meth can be made by two major pathways, and P2P can be made by at least four off the top of my head. It was the fentanyl equivalent for cocaine. For anything else, you balance the increased complexity of synthesis with any increase in potency.

The pyrovalerones are basically the fentanyl of meth. More potent, shorter lasting, more dangerous.

i'm a layman here, so just googled it:

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Pyrovalerone

"Pyrovalerone is a DEA Schedule V controlled substance. Substances in the DEA Schedule V have a low potential for abuse relative to substances listed in Schedule IV and consist primarily of preparations containing limited quantities of certain narcotics."

He's talking about the derivatives (nicknamed Pyros because they're related to Pyrovalerone) like α-PVP, MDPV and others.

More commonly "bath salts"

Aren't cathinones the equivalent for meth?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substituted_cathinone

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