Uncle Fester’s Meth Recipe

I am going to comment on the relationship of persons to methamphetamine, while little Nicky does creep-mousey  up my arm:  An ‘Appeal to Authority’ is the logical fallacy used in an argument over which source to trust.  Luckily, Steve Priess’s works are not stellar examples of chemistry, since tweaks are capable of “thinking outside the box”.  One dealer told me a sunken back room was a soundproof; that they could put someone in there tied to a chair and, by implication, get the truth out of them.  If  Uncle Fester were to the level of a great chemist, with a PhD, the Ph standing for ‘Philosophy’, philosophy being the branch of knowledge  containing logic, the discipline, or greater, that would be one thing.  This thing we have here is not.  Fester’s first book had a shitty recipe.  Fester’s a pioneer.  While he was pioneering, he was neglecting the non-pioneer, or “chemical” efforts.  Fester wrote later meth books, and by today has presented many good things.  I got tired of paying for his books, and I don’t think it is a good idea to have one of those books among your chemistry stuff.  I believe I did establish for my own edification that Fester did put an update containing the HI method in a book, but I saw the text posted on the internet.  Internet recipes are more of a threat against the downloader in terms of their evidentiary potential, showing intent (other elements of a crime: means, opportunity, motive, knowledge, furtive gestures-what’s that, probable cause to search?), which doesn’t help.  In fact, the way to make meth involves the proper way to get away with it as well as the proper recipe.

I want to mention two other people and perhaps by doing so it will become clearer how exactly to make meth.  If a guy shows up who you feel knows this, you ask him.  That is what I did.  I took what the guy said and ran with it.  Now I know.  Criminals actually have social mobility, always downward.  They don’t suddenly “come up like God”, unless they pull a score.  Chemistry doesn’t have a lot of luck involved.  It might be more a case of training, ya think?

My two friends are Robert Miskinis, and, oh!  Guess what, I have to track the other one down, he’s way back.  I hate this.  Due several factors my brain doesn’t work as well as it should and I get substitutes.  The other day I was thinking that my initials, SEB, should be represented by the numerals 5,3,8.  I was driving and my speedo/odo gets to 53,800 miles and I go, “Yep”.  It was Valentine’s Day.  BTW (where’s Nicholas?  He gave up pestering me.  He has to go to the swing), I want to write about a new theory in which we punish science for being handmaiden to the military and also having no plausible way of solving the energy crisis or stopping global warming because the great scientists whose initials are on the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements would want it that way.  One of these guys is named Valentin, and he discovers several elements.  I am loaded one time.  I am “higher than a Georgia pine”, as my mother says.  My eyes are all dilated on speed, I smell, and I am doing my previous phase of writing in approx. 1991.  I am tweaking and I can’t stop writing after I put the letter inside the envelope.  It is not so much a letter as it is a manilla envelope stuffed with scraps of paper.  I continue my correspondences on the outside.  I have about three or four of them and I am prepared to pay to send them.  I stand in line at the local Post Office and one Venae Valentin turns around in front of me and looks at me and we get into it and she requests I be removed.  I end up with a Domestic Terrorism charge and serve seven days on twenty.  I am served with a restraining order but I don’t realize that’s what it is.  I go to the Post Office again and get Violating a Restraining Order, 38 days.  Lately I come to find Ms. Valentin as a book coordinator in a Children’s Library in Westminster.  That’s her life.  She doesn’t even know how intertwined it is with chemistry, because this guy Valentine is awesome.

Robert Miskinis is a guy who, like Fester, gets busted, and he vows to cause the establishment grief, and he reconfigures himself as a seller of chemicals.  I ask him, “How are they making speed these days?”  He replies, “I like the HI method”  This takes place on a visit he makes to my employer, SAIC, in La Jolla, CA.  But, I take the conversation away from the premises before asking him, so we can have some privacy.  He has a little Asian guy with him.  We go to a sandwich shop, he tells me, I mean, what, five words?  I go, “HI method?”  He goes, “Yeah.  You get it going and then after awhile you put in something else.”  His attitude was kind of like, “Do you want me to draw you a picture?”  I am kind of like, “Naw.  I got it.”  So, I went about getting everything, he sold ephedrine so there was that.  The red P came to me from a coworker who was developing a ‘fluid energy mill’ in our lab, just using lab space.  The HI was 47%.  I think we pulled a thing where you order it through the company, at least one time, since the first time didn’t work and I had to dump and remake.  It came in a pint, 473 mL, and that goes into a 1L rb flask.  I may have chosen Myriad Industries to supply it.  They’ve been in SD awhile, as one of those places that will sell anything to start with and then gets more selective later on, forgetting who their friends are, I suppose.  I gotta go get Nick.  I have a cat showing up already.  I know good ‘ol Ken at Myriad.  He sees me on the stairs back in the day in the facility, and he goes, “Steve, what are you doing here?”  I can’t fault citizens.  They are dug in, they have families.

My other guy I correspond with in about 1979 and he wants to make cocaine, and he is doing quite well.  There existed a form of communication called a Western Union “Speed Letter”.  I get that from him.  I wish I had it still, but momentos are not for our kind.  Like Clint Eastwood says in “The Outlaw Josey Wales”, “What if everything you loved was raped and burned?”  I always get a substitute name of “Bob” if I can’t remember a name.  Yesterday driving back from YL I see a giant white sticker in the back window of a minivan of a map of Hawaii and the Old English lettering “808”.  Bob must be their area code.  My buddy of the speed letter is in Ohio, and he advertises a “DEA Watch List” in High Times magazine.  I have Larry Flynt’s tail numbers somewhere.  The guy apparantly has his skull drilled to relieve pressure, but is killed by one punch in the street from a nigger with a big fist, you know the kind.  High Times feels outraged by the guy as far as the speed and recasts itself as just a celebration of the glories of herb.

Miskinis advertises in the chem magazine you always get for free in the era 1980-1985 as ‘Safe-Lab’, but his location of drums of ephedrine and sundry parts is called ‘RJM Laboratories’, and it has a North Hollywood outlet as well as the Santee outlet, but the DEA takes care of those.  The DEA takes care of Chem Lab, Inc. due to a 50-lb batch running in a storage unit belonging to the owner, but they don’t raze the storefront, so the employees are selling chems at a slight discount for awhile.  Chem Lab specializes in beaucoup quantities of benzyl cyanide and the place in Placentia reeks of it.  It smells good, floral.  I own some heliotropin, isn’t that a nice name, 500g, which smells like vanilla, only better, for a spell, but never to incorporate it into a molecule, as we were hankering to turn out MMDA if we were anybody, at one time.  It works for some.  It is 3,4-methylenedioxybenzaldehyde, aka piperonal, not to be confused with piperidine, pyrrole, anthracene, aniline, which basically reek toward carcinogenesis and make PCP.  I am generalizing.  There must be things that smell good and give you cancer, and you have to pull your head away before you get it.  I am going to pull my head out of my ass and go parent, but I’ll come back to this.  I have to tell what happens at Calbiochem.