Shake-and-Bake Meth?

By Mathias Kamin

About two years ago someone in the Midwestern United States realized that they could place a handful of pseudoephedrine and some other household chemicals, such as common fertilizer, into a 2 liter soda bottle, flip it around, wait half an hour, and voila there’s a gram or so of methamphetamine, so enough to get you high.

The old way which involved a “lab” was usually set up in someone’s house or made in a factory in Mexico. In order to “cook” or make the meth a producer needed hundreds of pseudoephedrine based cold pills, and gallons of other chemicals, and a steady controllable heat source. This old process could take hours, and would released volatile chemicals into the air.

Since recent legislation in the Western and Midwestern United States was passed that limited the number of pills one could purchase, and in some states made pseudoephedrine based cold remedies prescription only, users have found these “mom and pop labs” are having difficulty getting the large amounts of cold pills for production.

Now meth users can drive around town making their own supply with what they just bought at the quick stop pharmacy and the lawn and garden store. This new method is no less dangerous to the person concocting the substance or to the community at large. Police and EMT have witnessed severe burns from explosions due to this shake-and-bake or one pot method.

In fact in some ways this new form of meth making is more hazardous to the community at large. Police are finding that once the drug is made and used the people who just made it toss the “lab”, in this case the bottle, out the car window. The residue left in these bottles is highly noxious and can cause serious injury to anyone that comes in contact with it.

The user is in danger too, for the chemicals reacting inside the bottle cannot react with outside oxygen or they will combust. This combustion happens when the user unscrews the top of the soda bottle before the reaction has completely taken place. You can see how patience might be a problem for someone with a life destroying addiction to the substance being made in the bottle.

Police as well have to reevaluate the way they handle traffic stops. Before 2007 opening a soda bottle and smelling its contents might have led to a DUI, now that brown sludge in the bottom can quite possibly be more than the remnants of a rum and coke.