Methamphetamines Pollute More than the Body

I saw a poster in the employee area of one of the cabin rental company that I work for that showed some of the items used to make meth. A lot are normal cleaning supplies and they wanted everyone to be on the lookout for anyone trying to steal supplies for that purpose. It is just hard for me to believe that anyone could come up with such a recipe.

I used to work for a mortgage lender that put on classes to educate realtors about the long term dangers of meth labs. As a result, I learned just enough to be scared (insert profanity here)less. There is LOT of work required to bring the levels of toxicity down to safe levels and most land lords have no idea what they are doing. It's not their fault but that doesn't reduce the danger. A fresh coat of paint won't create the barrier needed. Kids end up taking the brunt of it if they are living in a toxic home. Usually the bathroom and kitchen are where meth is cooked, but if it gets into the vents, well, it can ruin the whole home.

An interesting tip is that the chemical residue reacts with spray starch (you know, for ironing) and turns pink/purple. I know when I got home, I sprayed my apartment around the vents because we have shared heating between units. If you're checking out an apartment, take a can with you. You might gets looks, but who cares?

No doubt about it, that is some BAD stuff to be messing around with!

jess
www.anonymity.at.tc

Um aren't these the exact things found in your local auto mechanic's store?!?!?!

And there are more of those around unregulated than meth labs....

So what is ths BS about if we cant even clean up the legal shops/labs we have around us?!

"In fact, 26,000 acres of Tahoma State Forest were ruined because of meth pollution."

Uhh. Really guys? You firmly believe that statement? Hopelessly exaggerated statistics is unnecessary and self defeating to an otherwise great article. To quote TheMachine1 on digg.com

"You would need a low yield nuclear weapon to ruin that much land. Looking it up it was more like some scattered dumping on 100 acres.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/Story?id=93314&page=1

[Closing an entire forest for a meth lab cleanup was a first in Washington, and no national forest has ever been shut down because of meth, said Kim Thorsen, deputy director for law enforcement and investigation at the Forest Service. State investigators said it was necessary because the remnants were spread over about 100 acres and they needed to make sure they had found and cleared everything.]

Sounds like a side effect of prohibition to me. Untrained, unqualified people are producing a product in dangerous ways to satisfy a demand. Good thing prohibition reduces drug demand.... ohwai-

I'm not going to stand up and defend methamphetamines or the people who make them, but as a professional chemist I am very tired of hysteria about chemicals from people who don't understand chemicals. Everyone who squirms at the phrases "made without chemicals" or "does this package contain any chemicals?" knows what I'm talking about.

Among the very worst perpetrators of this hysteria are cops who, frankly, wouldn't know cyanide from cyanoacrylate, and are liable to run off screaming to the DHS if you show them the label on your bottle of superglue. The hype and spectacle around meth-lab clean ups, what with the ET-suit-wearing HAZMAT teams and so forth, is due in part to this ignorance, in part to out-of-control litigiousness and liability in the US, and part to the PR value of making the job appear more dangerous than it really is.

So why don't you fill us in on the particulars of the hysteria here, Sean?

What parts are hype and spectacle, what parts are real?

As an interesting tidbit for those who don't already know, methamphetamine is a naturally occurring substance, found primarily in plants belonging to the Acacia genus. A. berlandieri, for instance, contains not only meth, but also mescaline, DMT, nicotine, and a handful of other psychoactive compounds.

A second interesting meth-related fact is that Adolf Hitlers personal doctor (Theodor Morell) administered intravenously a mixture he called 'vitamultin forte', which was basically a multivitamin with meth. Nothing like a shot of meth with your B-12 to start the day. History channel made an interesting special on this called 'High Hitler'. Ironically enough, meth might have saved the world from Nazi domination, due to the fact that the meth ended up taking a severe toll on Hitler's ability to make critical decisions at critical junctions in the war.

As far as this article goes, I tend to agree with those who feel the concerns are largely overblown. The societal damage that meth causes dwarfs any negative environmental impacts that meth labs have ... it's a little bit like criticizing the cocaine industry for utilizing gas guzzling vehicles to transport their product.

I thought I might go down the list and talk about my appraisals of the real dangers of each of the chemicals on this list. I can only do one or two a day, though, so there'll be several posts here.

From the top, then, with "starting fluid."

Ether is not a single chemical, but a class of chemicals. When most people say ether, they mean "diethyl ether," which has been successfully and safely used for more than a century for inhalational anesthesia on millions of patients. This is also the ether used in starting fluid. Diethyl ether is STILL preferred for inhalational anesthesia in developing countries, and less flammable ethers (such as isoflurane) are first-choice inhalational anesthetics in the first world. Ether is much less toxic than carbon dioxide, which would kill you at concentrations far lower than that at which ether is administered in an operating room.

The real danger with starting fluid, as with many of the chemicals on this list, is explosion. Of course hydrocarbons are highly flammable and ether in particular is dangerous because of its low autoignition temperature and tendency to form explosive peroxides. These are legitimate concerns, but like many chemical safety issues they have been vastly overblown by regulators and media scaremongers. Many people, for instance, will relate the story of Richard Pryor's infamous "freebase accident," supposedly involving an accidental ether explosion while making freebase cocaine. Turns out this never happened. It was revealed after Pryor's death that the ether explosion was a cover story promulgated by his PR folks to conceal the fact that Pryor had deliberately soaked himself in rum and set himself on fire in a truly horrifying attempt to commit suicide.

paint thinner -

Also known as "white spirit," it's mostly made up of 6-carbon alkane chains (hexanes). Besides these saturated ("aliphatic") hydrocarbons, paint thinner will typically contain ~0.1% by mass of mixed cyclic, unsaturated ("aromatic") hydrocarbons like benzene. Here, perhaps, the concerns over personal toxicity are slightly more grounded, as hexane is known to have anomalously high (but still relatively low) toxicity compared to other alkanes like pentane, heptane, and octane. And several of the likely trace aromatic species, like benzene, are also known carcinogens. Here, again, however, it pays to put these things in perspective. Gasoline, which you are exposed to every time you fill up your car, contains up to 60% aromatic species, including benzene, by mass. Hexanes are also a major constituent of gasoline. Take home message: Paint thinner is safer for you than gasoline. And in terms of environmental impact, well, consider the amount of paint thinner spilled each day in the world versus the amount of gasoline, and then consider that only a very small fraction of total paint thinner release is attributable to meth lab use.

freon

Freon is certainly bad for the ozone layer but in your body it's completely inert. You can breathe it safely forever so long as there's not so much of it around that it displaces the oxygen in the air and suffocates you. It's not even flammable. And while its ecotoxicity is beyond doubt, the significance of freon emissions from meth labs is insignificant compared to, say, the emissions from old fire extinguishers. Plus it hasn't been manufactured in years, and it is actually illegal to do so in all but 3 very small countries, so the possibility of increased freon production in response to meth lab "demand" is nonexistant.

I'll come at it from another standpoint. I lived across the street from a suspected meth house. At night sometimes, when the wind was right while outside my house, i could smell chemicals in the air and and it actually made my body buzz. If thats not air pollution i don't know what is. You may scoff at this but i have always been susceptible to chemicals and botanicals. Eating a raw onion will give me a buzz.