History of meth

Salon recently reviewed a couple of books on the history of methamphetamine. That's not exactly my favorite topic, so I won't necessarily be digging into these tomes, but the review does do a great job of summarizing the subject matter in a quick and easy to digest fashion. Ah, the intertubes - continuing to substitute for actual substance. At any rate, check it out for such interesting tidbits as:

When the Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act finally went into effect in 1989, its impact was muted. Like the mythical hydra, the meth industry almost immediately sprouted new and improved means of manufacture, through the Mexican drug cartels that wrested distribution from long-established U.S. sources such as the Hell's Angels. Factories as far away as India, Pakistan, China and the Czech Republic began shipping tons of ephedrine powder to facilities south of the U.S. border. Owen writes, "'The Mexicans do it so simply, so quickly, and their network is so mobile and tight that they can make meth today and have it sold in the Midwest tomorrow,' a top official from California's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement told the Los Angeles Times in 1995." Even more troubling, Mexican ice is rumored to be 98 percent pure, rather than the 20 percent to 80 percent found in most home-manufactured meth.

Mmm... 98 percent pure. Apparently when one of the authors actually gets a chance to try the 98 percent pure stuff, it turns out to be quite a revelation:

"Right from the first line, I could tell this was as different from the old biker meth I used to do as the biker meth was from the adulterated amphetamine sulfate of my teenage years." His experiment turns into a sleepless, five-day hallucination that involves wild sex with floating holograms and the appearance of FBI agents who accuse him of aiding terrorists. When he comes to, he muses that "the fantasy elements were so seamlessly intertwined with reality, I had spent the last four days living in a David Cronenberg movie and I couldn't tell the difference."

Yowsa!