The more ghoulish and extreme Breaking Bad becomes, the more it seems to traffic not in realism but in horror, Patrick Radden Keefe says, after spending six months interviewing drug traffickers and D.E.A. agents for an article about the business side of a Mexican drug cartel — and the more accurately it captures the reality of the cartels and their business. He has one quibble though:
The one feature in the show that is most glaringly off is the gleaming subterranean mega-lab that Gus constructs for Walter. To be sure, labs like these exist — just not in the United States. One major challenge for any meth producer, which gets scant attention on the show, is how to source adequate precursor chemicals, which are heavily regulated in the States. In real life, it would be impractical to undertake the sort of industrial-scale production that Walter does (two hundred pounds a week) inside this country, because of the difficulty of acquiring the necessary chemicals. It is much easier to shift production to Mexico or Guatemala, as the major drug cartels have done, where mega-labs (that dwarf Walter’s) churn out meth for export to the U.S. Meth is still cooked in this country, but generally in smaller “shake and bake” batches more typical of what you see in “Winter’s Bone.”