From the Lab to the Street: How 3 Illegal Drugs Came to Be
There's a huge gap, temporally and culturally, between the inventors of illicit drugs—usually rather austere, cerebral, and disciplined—and their consumers.
"We're not going to need pseudoephedrine," Walter White mutters through clenched teeth. "We're going to make phenylacetone in a tube furnace, then we're going to use reductive amination to yield methamphetamine."
The chemistry lab is the heart of AMC's Breaking Bad. Although this lab may have had scrappy beginnings, it is still a lab, a home of science. And that's fitting: Many illicit drugs today have their origins in formal laboratories, though ones that were much more above board than that of Walter White's.
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