Remember the story mentioned in Last Days last month about the woman caught mixing meth in a Tulsa Walmart because she couldn’t afford to buy the chemicals?
Turns out that the recipe she was using—aka the “shake and bake” or “one pot” method—is causing more havoc in America’s hospitals than the older ways of making meth.
ST. LOUIS — A crude new method of making methamphetamine poses a risk even to Americans who never get anywhere near the drug: It is filling hospitals with thousands of uninsured burn patients requiring millions of dollars in advanced treatment — a burden so costly that it’s contributing to the closure of some burn units.
So-called shake-and-bake meth is produced by combining raw, unstable ingredients in a 2-liter soda bottle. But if the person mixing the noxious brew makes the slightest error, such as removing the cap too soon or accidentally perforating the plastic, the concoction can explode, searing flesh and causing permanent disfigurement, blindness or even death.
She wasn’t just making meth in that Walmart—she was making a potential firebomb.
I’m typically for universal health insurance, and everyone getting access to the same quality care, but I’m sorry… If you fucked yourself up mixing up meth, your ass should be kicked to the curb. Let the poor bastard who ISN’T responsible for mutilating himself mixing up something as evil as meth get some help.
@1 Don’t you think the person who fucked him or herself up making meth deserves drug treatment, if not burn care? Wouldn’t it make sense to, you know, make them better, rather than send them out into the world with a rabid drug addiction and a $100k medical bill?
@1: we should treat meth sentencing like crack cocaine, but even harsher – like no medical treatment for self-inflicted burns! poor drug abusers will get the message this time for sure.
empathy is for losers!
@2: More than the kid burned in a car accident, or the guy scalded by a pot of hot oil spilling off the stove? No. I don’t. Not even a little. It’s not like they’re going to pay the bill for drug treatment any more than they’re gonna pay for the burn bills.
Any time your thought process boils down to ‘You know, putting these highly dangerous chemicals in a plastic bottle and shaking it vigorously near my face and/or crotch seems like a REALLY good idea,’ I cease to care about your well-being.
See, the War On Drugs IS the War On Terror.
#2: Empathy is not digital, an on or off state. It’s analog. And yeah, it sucks that they blew themselves up, but the people I have the most sympathy for are the ones who didn’t damage themselves doing what’s probably one of the STUPIDEST things around right now. You know, the people who can’t get treated because Mr. Meth cost the hospital so much money they had to close the burn ward.
I’m curious. Exactly how much are you willing to pay to get the meth addict fixed after he blew himself up? And why does he deserve the treatment as much or more than, say, the guy caught in a car fire? Or house fire, or cooking accident, or any number of things that don’t involve drinking drain cleaner?
Perhaps Walmart should post the correct recipe along with OSHA-approved warnings. And the cash registers can be programmed to recognize the combination of ingredients being purchased and automatically print a cents-off coupon for salve and bandages.
Or am I missing the point?
umm there’s nothing new about this method, it’s been around for at least 5 years.
glad to see it’s becoming popular. hopefully it kills enough people and chokes up enough government agencies that at least one more person will realize how stupid the war on drugs is.
We’re not just talking about tweakers blowing themselves up, they can take others with them. Someone doing a shake-‘n’-bake in a furnished room, or an apartment, or any place containing other people, is likely to burn up more than themselves. Firemen get injured, too.
We has a drug problem, America! And, we has a medical insurance problem! Both problems need solving. Universal public health care got shot down in favor of private insurance. And, the “war on drugs” is an utter failure.
Are they two different problems? Maybe. But I imagine I see some convergence. If everyone had access to free medical care, maybe tweakers could get their problem dealt with somehow, before they get desperate enough to shake-n-bake themselves to hell.
@8 – Yes, overall relapse rates are around 90%. However, if they make it 6 months, the rate drops to around 50%. And a single relapse doesn’t make it impossible to continue or return to treatment.
There’s no magical formula for “turning a meth addict into a productive member of society,” but there are plenty of people who have made that transition.
On the other hand, treating addicts like worthless pieces of shit that would be better off with a bullet in the head than a treatment center does strike me as a pretty good formula for insuring that they stay a worthless piece of shit.
@10: No argument the war on drugs has failed, and will continue to fail, and is indeed destined to fail (although it does make the DEA and local law enforcement a pretty penny). But the whole point of meth is that it’s cheap. It’s not like the end of the war on drugs means that poor people who are stupid enough to make meth at home are suddenly going to stop. They’re not going to be able to afford legal marijuana or any other drug. The problem isn’t going away. And maybe it makes me a fascist to say it, but I do NOT want meth legalized. Again, not that it would be cheap enough for those who currently make it to afford anyway.
@12 Maybe. What if we took all the money we spend in the war on drugs and spent it on, oh, I dunno… either national health or at least public health care? What if we defined drug abuse as a medical problem and not a criminal problem? What if we let the public health system deal with the problem instead of the criminal justice system?
I can’t imagine they’d do any worse at it.
@15: We’re not talking a burner, hops, grains, yeast, and specialized equipment here. We’re talking drain cleaner, starter fluid, and a plastic jug. By the time the state is done taxing the shit out of a drug as dangerous as meth there’s no WAY it’s going to be cheaper than making it at home. Hell, a pack of cigarettes is what, like $8 these days? You’re telling me meth isn’t going to have equal price hikes?
Oh, and I brew beer. It’s less than $1 a bottle. So yeah, it’s still cheaper to make at home unless I want to drink beer that tastes like piss.
In the burn unit these were among some of the worst burns that we’d see. They’d always tell us stuff like they were making fireworks in their garage or some other retarded thing. It costs a fortune to autograft burns that are as serious as these. I’m totally okay with refusing these lowlifes admittance to the hospital.
@13 If marijuana were legal, to possess, use, grow and sell, it would be cheaper than dirt. Well, corn, anyway. It just grows. It doesn’t need fancy soil, or fertilizer, or herbicides or insecticides. It’ll grow practically anywhere under practically any conditions, if we’re talking about garden-variety weed-grade pot, a la the 1960’s. And, as the oldies remember, you didn’t need purple buds to get high. The $20/ounce stuff got the job done.
yeah, no amount of treatment is going to make this woman productive again.
Instead she decided to start her brew right there in the store. She risked the lives and safety of her fellow “humans” to save a couple minutes.
You might get her off drugs and into Jesus, but this woman ain’t the next Picasso. The best our money gets us is a new receptionist at the treatment facility.
@16 You left out an ingredient, the active one.
If it weren’t for the diet pill and cold pill lobby, the damned thing would have been banned years ago, and we wouldn’t have this problem.
I’m not really familiar with how this method works, but given it involves a plastic bottle I’m assuming no actual flame is involved. You see plastic melts. So we’re probably talking about chemical burns. Pressure builds up in the bottle from the reaction. Opening it or popping it causes caustic liquids to spray out. So no fire bomb. No burn down shooting galleries etc.
Going back to the heroin relapse rates, there was an interesting study with servicemen who were heroin addicts during the Vietnam war. If they came home and got treatment they had a high rate of relapse. If they got treatment while still in Vietnam there relapse rate was dramatically lower. Something like 80% to 10%.
The point is that a quick trip to rehab isn’t really enough. The change of environment made a critical difference in that case. If we were truly willing to do what it takes and spend what it takes we would be able to be much more effective in getting people clean and back into society as more productive members. Of course these days the only thing that deserves any investment is the investors profits.
@21- fuck you! Some people’s lives or at least productive lives being able to breathe and see involve being able to purchase anti-histamines. Be angry at the drug companies for being cheapskates and continuing to make dry tablets since they are cheaper instead of the slightly more expensive gel-tabs that CANNOT BE USED TO MAKE METH!! The “shake-n-bake method only works by grinding up dry pills and mixing them with the other ingredients causing the chemical reaction- btw- also be angry at Wal-Mart’s shitty excuse for security that didn’t notice this woman for an hour opening packages, grinding pills and mixing ingredients!
@4, et al: my point was in favor of a universal healthcare system where the treatment would be covered by the government. Right now they have neither medical nor drug treatment available, so they blow themselves and those nearby making meth. With universal healthcare, even if you didn’t want to treat the burns of those who blow themselves up, wouldn’t you still approve of treating the disease itself with free rehab for those who need it? Maybe prevent some fucker from blowing people up mixing meth.
Also, I’m sorry — a drug addict’s life is no less valuable than anyone else’s. Period. I wasn’t actually advocating not treating people, I was suggesting that universal healthcare could treat and prevent more than just the burn, and even if you don’t like the idea of saving a self-inflicted burn injury, perhaps you could see the value in state-funded drug treatment.
@23: I don’t know about the method specifically, but I’m assuming that it only combusts on contact with oxygen. As long as the plastic bottle remains intact, it doesn’t blow up. A weakness in the plastic would let in oxygen and . . . boom.
@15: BULL SHIT Budweiser is less expensive than homebrewed beer. The stuff I make myself is generally $0.75-$1.00 a bottle.
@ 10, 11 Nice to see some empathy remains in the USA.
Of course people who want to punish victims of such fucked up habits like meth addiction have no idea (and probably never will). I can’t imagine what kind of shit I’d have to go through to make me consider meth as a viable option (let alone taking the risk of making my own), but some shitheads just want to see such “weak” people fucked up and fucked over even worse.
@31 So you propose, what? Murdering all of them? Just because rehab isn’t 100% effective doesn’t make it useless.
Just wait until Brendan Kiley finds out that hazmat suits are used to clean up homes that have been used as meth labs.
@31, I think you’re the one being naive. I’m simply pointing out that it’s possible to lower relapse rates after rehab and although the vets being treated in Vietnam is kind of a unique example, it shows that there are other factors involved.
Doing a half assed job and then pointing to the half assed results as proof that it can’t be done at all doesn’t really wash here. Effective rehabilitation is possible, but it’s not easy and it’s not cheap when you look only at the up front costs. I have friends who were well on their way to blowing themselves up in a WalMart but managed to get clean and now you’d never guess they were ever anything like that. Successful, stable, good people who I’m thankful were able to get clean. Obviously not everyone winds up that way and I think we can do a much better job with them.