Home Cooked, Ep. 3: Lab School

In 1999, the state of Missouri destroyed more than 900 clandestine meth labs. Among the officers tasked with carrying out that constant cleanup process, fear reigned. In response, the state trained an astronomical amount of resources on understanding the problem. A slew of state and federal laws were passed to limit access to meth’s precursor chemicals. But meth cooks got scrappy, replacing older recipes with new, soda-bottle scale techniques. What was it like to police meth in this era? What was it like to use it?

Home Cooked is a five-part audio series on the 50-year history of meth in America. In the early 2000s, the “Faces of Meth” were tacked to cork boards in high school hallways and the nightly news was full of meth lab explosions. In this period, the stimulant was stigmatized as a “white trash” drug, and thought to favor rural trailer parks and farmhouses over inner-city drug dens. Today, however, meth use is increasing rapidly among non-white populations in big, east-coast cities like New York and Boston. So what changed? And why was meth seen as a hillbilly drug in the first place?

Home Cooked is a production of Rural Remix, a collaboration between the Daily Yonder and Rural Assembly.

Episode 3 Sources

Drug Enforcement Administration. “2020 National Drug Threat Assessment.” March 2021.

Garriott, William. Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America. New York: NYU Press, 2011.

Garriott, William. “Methamphetamine and Precursor Laws in the United States.” In Dual Markets: Comparative Approaches to Regulation, edited by Ernesto U. Savona, Mark A.R. Kleiman, and Francesco Calderoni, 93–103. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017.

Gilbreath, Aaron H. “From Soda Bottles To Super Labs: An Analysis Of North America’s Dual Methamphetamine Production Networks.” Geographical Review 105, no. 4 (October 2015): 511–27.

Gilbreath, Aaron H. “West Coast Booms and East Coast Busts: Methamphetamine Commodity Chains of the 1970s and 1980s.” Historical Geography 42 (January 2014): 260–75.

Episode 3 Transcript

Ron Replogle: I became a state trooper in 1984. I’m kind of dating myself here. Young, 23, almost 24 year old, green as a gourd. Never been exposed to a lot young man, but at that time, of course, marijuana was still around. Of course, we now have recreational marijuana that’s legalized, but back in the day, that was probably the most prevalent drug that I saw as a road trooper was marijuana. There was always other drugs around, cocaine, some of the others, and really hadn’t heard a lot about methamphetamine at that point in time. And unknown to me at the time, would become very involved in fighting the meth problem in Missouri into the late 90s and early 2000s.

Olivia Weeks: That was Ron Replogle, a retired Missouri State Trooper and former director of the Highway Patrol’s Division of Drug and Crime Control. I’m Olivia Weeks and I’m a reporter for the Daily Yonder. On this episode of Home Cooked: A Fifty Year History of Meth in America, we’re gonna talk about the home meth lab surge that happened in the U.S. around the turn of the 21st century. In the first two episodes, we talked about how meth can be made in many different ways, and at many different scales. Today we’re talking about the period in meth’s history that really made it famous as an illicit drug, when all kinds of people learned how to make the stimulant at home. Mom and pop labs were especially common throughout the rural midwest, where there was a lot of demand for meth but relatively little access to the Mexican-made product that supplied the west coast. In states like Missouri where meth production really took off, policing the drug ran officers ragged, and fundamentally changed their jobs. After we hear a little more from Replogle about narcotics policing in this era, we’ll hear about its cultural impact, and then from a couple people who were using meth at this time. We’ll start the story with Replogle’s first meth lab. 

Weeks: What were the early signs of the meth problem to come?

Replogle: For Missouri, it was the mom and pop meth labs that started cropping up all across our country. And I was unknowingly involved back in the day when meth very first came out in Missouri. It was a very elaborate production process. Back in 1988 I worked a crash and unbeknownst to me at the time it was three people that had been cooking methamphetamine under the old very elaborate clandestine lab method. They had been in a very rural area of Southwest Missouri and McDonald County, and that’s what they liked to do at the time, find those very secluded areas, because it was such a process to cook meth at that time. I didn’t know that they had meth in a suitcase that they were transporting as I worked the crash. All this came out in later times. But the point with that is at that time, it was a very elaborate process. You saw very few labs, and when you did find a lab, it was a very large lab and very elaborate with a lot of glassware and chemicals and the different methods that they took to do that. That changed in the 90s, by these mom and pop labs. The Nazi method, as they used to call it, a very quick and easy method of producing meth that started springing up all across Missouri in the mid-90s into the late 90s to the point of Missouri led the nation in seizing those types of meth labs. And it was literally thousands that we would seize back in those days.

Weeks: In 2001, Missouri law enforcement seized more than 14 hundred meth labs. Law enforcement saw it as a serious crisis that demanded near-constant policing. This is partially because home production caused a new set of problems pretty unrelated to the actual effects of using meth. Back to my conversation with Replogle.

Weeks: I know it’s a little bit difficult to track this exactly because you were also sort of rising through the ranks at this time, but how did your job change, or how did the job of a trooper change throughout the 90s?

Replogle: Well, you know, it really changed for our road officers to keep a close eye out for signs of people hauling precursor chemicals or, you know, anhydrous ammonia became a huge issue for people stealing that. Of course, that was a very dangerous thing to steal and transport. We had some troopers that found some of those things during car stops. I recall sitting through the training myself, to look for certain indicators of somebody that might be involved in these mom and pop type meth labs, the chemicals, the odors, what to watch for during a car stop. And we uncovered many labs, even in vehicles, that they were cooking meth in the trunk of a car, or they were hauling, maybe they had just stolen something to help cook meth. So it really changed the job of our narcotics investigators most in that time frame.

Weeks: What kind of things could a narcotics officer expect to be investigating prior to the meth lab era? How did that change their role?

Replogle: We did a lot of purchasing of undercover drugs and we tried to infiltrate organizations starting out maybe with a low-level purchase and working our way up through, you know, an organization that was moving drugs into the state of Missouri. And that’s basically what they did at the time. That totally changed when we had to start responding to all these mom and pop meth labs. We didn’t have time to go out and do the traditional undercover narcotics work that we had done in the past. And I started noticing that when I was the captain. We had money that was earmarked toward purchasing undercover drugs, and we called that “buy money” that we managed and we tracked very closely, by the way. I started seeing in that timeframe that we weren’t using a lot of our “buy money” anymore. We were pretty much doing reactive type work responding to these mom and pop meth labs. So it really did changed the way that we did business back in the day. 

Weeks: I wanted to hear about home cooking from the other side, so I asked David Stoecker, a former meth user and current recovery counselor in Springfield, Missouri. He never fancied himself a master producer, but there were a number of years when making meth was necessarily a group effort, and a lot of users were involved in the process at low levels.

Stoecker: It can be insane. I don’t want to get into names or anything like that. Unfortunately, some of the people are dead now. Some of the people are doing fed time. But you know, I always remember there was this one guy’s house that we would go to in Springfield and literally there was no paranoia. It was being watched. You got pulled over almost every time you left the house and searched. But he had cameras set up all around. He had a house and then it was attached to a garage, and he would do burns in the garage. And while he was cooking, he would have people watching the cameras. I was there once when it got raided by the Comet Task Force. In fact, I was fortunate enough to have my own door kicked in a couple of times by them as well, which is really an uncomfortable feeling when you have people coming in through your doors and windows dressed up like ninjas.

Weeks: And was that when ephedrine or pseudoephedrine was pretty easy to get, or was it when you were popping pills out of blister packs?

Stoecker: I mean, we were still popping pills, but I mean, you could go and buy a case of pills. You know, I mean, it wasn’t hard to get pills. Anhydrous, it was still, it was mostly, most of the burns were either anhydrous or red and black at the time. 

Weeks: By “red and black” here he’s referring to red and black phosphorus, alternative ingredients to anhydrous ammonia. 

Weeks: If you don’t want to go into this, you don’t have to, but I’m just curious about whether you could describe sort of the process of gathering all the materials to cook meth when that was sort of at its peak in your life.

Stoecker: I mean, back then it was super easy. You know, I mean, literally there were places where you could get, where I’d get a phone call like, hey, we just got in some pseudo. So you’d go there and you could, you’d just buy a case of cold medicine. And I had friends in Southern Illinois whose families grew corn. So it wasn’t hard to go down there and get anhydrous for cost, what they were paying for it. And you know, I mean, you could go into the store and buy as many lithium batteries as you wanted to and acetones. I mean, everything was super easy to obtain So I kind of, I started pulling out after, before it became harder to get, So I stayed in my addiction, but I stopped hanging out with people. I just started getting enough for me to use. Because I really, I got to the point where everybody was going down and I didn’t want to go down too. And if I went down, I just wanted to go down for possession, not possession with intent.

Weeks: Replogle says policing that kind of small scale production presented new problems for law enforcement.

Replogle: it was not really a wide network, it was more people cooking individually for their own addictive habits. They might cook a little bit to sell, to make enough money, to buy the precursors to cook again, but it wasn’t really a criminal network, if you will. So we would take down one lab and another one would pop up. It was simply responding from one to the other to the other. And you might arrest someone for that, but they would be released and be right back out doing it again. I recall a case down in the Boothill area of our state when I was the captain over our criminal division at the time, that we arrested the same individual like 10 times for cooking meth. He’d be arrested, go in, bond out, come right back out and start it again. Well, he was trying to supply his own habit. So that became very frustrating because you really couldn’t shut that down. 

Weeks: And just so that I’m understanding the implications of that, can you contrast it with a different drug? Like what would the ideal bust mean for the distribution network of a drug that’s not meth?

Replogle: Yeah. Well, for cocaine, for example, you know, that is mainly produced in South America, other countries, different places. It comes across mainly our southern border, or did at the time. And it was an organization kind of bringing that into the United States, bringing that into Missouri. And as I mentioned earlier, you would start out with undercover drug buys and tried to build a case into that organization that might be bringing those drugs in. And to get higher up within that organization to make an arrest so that you could shut it down and stop it. And that’s what we weren’t able to do with these mom and pop meth labs because there was no organization to it. It was individuals simply cooking meth. And by the way, the other issue of that is the environmental hazards that it was causing for our state. You know, there were rental properties where people were going in and cooking meth that had to be declared unsafe because of meth lab being cooked there. There were kids being injured, you know, when meth was being cooked and the exposure to the chemicals and things that it took to do that. So the drug endangered children issue became a huge thing for us to deal with also.

Weeks: Just breaking in here to point out that this idealized form of drug policing, where you take down the little guy and then climb up the chain of command until you’re imprisoning the cartel boss, hasn’t exactly worked out in the case of synthetic drugs. More on that in episode 4. 

Weeks: And what were the dangers to officers when it came to cleaning up meth labs?

Replogle: The probably the biggest danger was the anhydrous ammonia, which if inhaled can damage your lungs. We didn’t know that initially how dangerous that was until we started getting involved in this. And then we had to stop and kind of back up, train all of our officers about how to do that, issue them protective, personal protective equipment and clothing to protect them. Gas masks. We had respirators that they, you know, if it was an active meth lab with the fumes and the chemicals being in the air that they would have to wear as they went in to take those down. And we would even, sometimes, if it was a large enough lab, have to call an environmental services company and to clean the lab up on the spot. So the cleanup issues became a huge thing environmentally and for the safety factor.

Weeks: All that public and private property damage, and the fact that cops had to spend so much time dealing with the meth problem, had a profound effect on public ideas about the drug. I spoke about that with Anthropologist Will Garriott.

Weeks: When it comes to the attention that domestic meth production got in the early 2000s. It seems like there are a few different sources of fear among the general public and part of that is the fear of drug users and people who are using meth. Part of it is the fear of the environmental damage done by methamphetamine production. And part of it is what some people might call a moral panic. And so I’m curious, how do you see the breakdown of those different sources of fear when meth was really getting a lot of national attention?

Garriott: Okay, so I think all of those fears were present in what I saw, for sure. So people were concerned about what meth would do to you. This was a big focus of the anti-meth campaigns, like Faces of Meth. They really said, hey, look what this drug will do to deteriorate you physically. And that was something that, while there had always been kind of an emphasis on the physical impact, thinking about, this is drugs, this is your brain on drugs, this really was something different. And I think it tried to scare people away from using meth by saying, essentially, look, if you take this drug, it will make you ugly. I think it was called the Not Even Once campaign that came out of the Montana Meth Project. That targeted kind of like, I would say, high school age folks, and it put a real emphasis on that. So I think there was a concern about what meth would do to people, and then what people would do on meth. So a focus on violence, a focus on the fact that you stayed awake for a really long time, that it made people paranoid. All of those things were real concerns. The environmental concern, that also I think was legitimate. The kinds of chemicals that people were using to make methamphetamine are very hazardous. And then the moral panic piece. My perspective on the moral panic component is that part of what made meth particularly concerning to people in rural communities is that it seemed to be telling them a larger story about themselves. Many rural communities think about themselves as somehow immune to problems like drugs, crime, those are seen as distinctly urban problems and simply being in a rural community, and I would say more specifically being in a rural white community, the emergence of methamphetamine as a serious problem really called that idea into question. And so I think it wasn’t just, oh, this is a problem because look what it’s doing to people and look how it’s degrading the environment. People saw it as a problem because it seemed to reveal that there was something really significantly wrong within these communities at a very deep level.

Weeks: I asked Geographer Aaron Gilbreath, too, what he thought about the term moral panic applied to the meth crisis of the turn of the century. He said that meth production truly did reach epic proportions in certain regions, especially in the rural midwest. But at the same time, the media was reckless with its use of the word “epidemic,” and overstated the risk of contagion. Also, I just want to say – in this segment you’re gonna hear me mention the Combat Meth Act of 2005. That’s a piece of federal legislation that regulated pseudoephedrine tablets. You know how if you want to buy the kind of decongestant that actually works, you have to go up to the pharmacy counter and show your ID? That’s because the pharmacy has to keep a log of everyone who purchases pseudoephedrine – a key ingredient for home meth cooks. The Combat Meth Act put that whole system into place, and started to put mom and pop labs out of business. Here’s Gilbreath.

Gilbreath: It’s just a kind of pockets here and there where it can become a real problem and can devastate whole communities for sure. But there was this kind of panic about methamphetamine that it was just gonna spread like wildfire.

Weeks: Well, and this is skipping ahead, but it seems like today…I don’t know, it seems like meth did spread, but not in the… It did spread, clearly, because there are more users than ever before, and they’re in different places, and there’s been this sort of eastward march of methamphetamine use. But this… 

Gilbreath: Right, it’s in Maine? Yeah.

Weeks: Yeah, it’s in Boston, it’s everywhere. But this lab production did not spread in the way that the sort of panic of the late 90s, early 2000s insisted that it might. And so then, I don’t know, I guess I’m curious about how you see the media coverage after say, like the Combat Meth Act, because it seems like there was this real frenzy and this real panic and then attention sort of dissipates, from my perspective, but maybe that’s inaccurate.

Gilbreath: No, I think that’s right. I think, well, you know, it was still, it was still like a way to drive clicks or hits or news stories in 2010. It also suddenly becomes, methamphetamine becomes like, it becomes shorthand for other things. Right? So for example, 30 Rock would have a ton of meth head jokes, even though methamphetamine was not really in New York City or not significant. I mean, it’s been a club drug in New York City since forever, but meth heads in the way that we think of meth heads were not necessarily a thing in New York City, but there was like a weekly joke.

“30 Rock” clip: “Your height, your weight, puts you in what we call the disgusting range. Fortunately, there are solutions. For example, crystal meth has been shown to be very effective. How important is tooth retention to you?”

Gilbreath: Kenneth on “30 Rock” talks about the mayor of his town and they cut to the mayor, Mayor Debbie, and she’s talking about how they need a new clock tower and she’s gaunt and she has dark eyes and she has bad teeth. So Mayor Debbie in his town in Kentucky is coded as a meth head, right? 

“30 Rock” clip: “Writing in favor is Mayor Debbie herself.” “I’m gonna take the clock apart myself then put it back together. I wanna see how it works! My friend JoJo did it with a toaster, and it’s still good.”

Gilbreath: And so meth becomes shorthand for poor rural whites. The classic redneck stereotypes become becomes attached to methamphetamine and methamphetamine becomes to them. And so when it stays salient, it’s because of that. So like the villain in the first “True Detective” is cooking meth in addition to being a pedophile and a murderer, right? 

“True Detective” clip: “The DB’s old boyfriend, Reginald Ledoux, 35, statuary rape charge against a 12-year-old, acquitted for lack of testimony. Did a bit for manufacturing meth and LSD, which fits the…”

Gilbreath: So it becomes coded in that. And then you also have Breaking Bad, which keeps it kind of in the public eye, you know, because it was such a popular and good show and well researched.

“Breaking Bad” clip: “Friggin’ meth, used to be legal. Used to sell it over every counter in every pharmacy across America. Glad they came to their senses on that one, huh?

Gilbreath: But the panic gets replaced. So meth is scary and then Crocodil comes out and people are panicked. The Crocodil is gonna spread everywhere and nobody in the US did Crocodil. And then it’s opioids for a while and now it’s fentanyl, which is an opioid too. But it’s just like the attention span for these things just moves around.

Weeks: In the 2000s, when public attention was still trained on meth, the media successfully scared the [BEEP] out of a lot of teens. Like Gilbreath said, TV portrayals and public health campaigns tried to convince kids that trying drugs – and especially trying meth – would cause irreparable damage. It was less successful at encouraging moderation. I talked with Chris Jones, a certified peer support specialist in Arkansas, about experimenting with drugs in the “just say no” era.

Jones: I started dabbling with alcohol, marijuana, 12, 13, 14 years old. It was probably, I was 16. when meth came into the picture. And so I used meth regularly. And then when I could, some prescriptions, if we could get our hands on them. Meth was pretty easily accessible. I didn’t finish school, hurried up, got my GED, got a little part-time job to kind of support the habit. And shortly after I turned 18, I had committed some felonies in Arkansas and Missouri. They were all theft charges that kind of geared back toward getting and using more drugs. And so when I was 18, I went to Varner in state of Arkansas in prison. So I did five years at Varner from 2004 to 2009. And so that was the beginning of my using, was a couple of years living with my parents, graduated to prison. 

Weeks: Mm-hmm. And still using in prison for the most part?

Jones: Yeah, yeah, it was, it was accessible. It was a thing. And so I used throughout the entire time that I was incarcerated. So I came home when I was 23. I had served just over five years, as a felon, multiple felonies, multiple states, on supervision. I put out zero effort to do the right thing. I’m a child of the 80s and 90s. I’d been taught that once you were a felon, your life was over and you couldn’t amount to anything. So I never put any effort forward. And I thought that from what I had seen in the past with other felons and people who had been in trouble, we were basically just, our time not in prison was earning more time in prison. and so that was the behavior I exhibited from 2009 until 2016. 

Weeks: Mm-hmm. And so, yeah, so you’re describing that you just kind of started to see it as inevitable?

Jones: Kind of, yeah. It was, it wasn’t, there was no shock factor. There was no, oh no, I don’t want to get in trouble. It was, I’m going to stay out as long as I can. The goal was never not get in trouble. The goal was, how long can I stay out before I get in trouble? And I think a lot of that I attribute to just the way we were raised back in the 80s and 90s. I was taught that it didn’t matter what I did, I still had that label of felon. I was also raised up, and it’s been very impactful in my life today, with this stupid campaign about an egg and a skillet, and they say this is your brain, and then they break the egg and the skillet and say this is your brain on drugs. 

PSA: “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”

Jones: There’s no way to get the yolk back in the shell. My first time getting high, I thought I was broken. There’s no fixing it. Like I was never taught or given an alternative once we broke the shell. And so my first time using drugs, I was all in because I had never been taught that there was hope. I had never been taught that there was another way. I remember they preach just say no, just say no, and I’m like, what if you’re in a situation and you can’t say no? And they said, but you can, because we’re telling me you can. I’m like, what if for some reason I use, now like we don’t worry about it because you’re not gonna use, you’re gonna say no, like there was never another option. So after I used that first time, I put out zero effort. And so it took, you know, another 16 years of in and out of prison, in and out of the dope house, in and out of the game, before I was like, wait, maybe there is another option. I don’t blame my teachers, I don’t blame my counselors or the DARE officers. They’re doing what they were taught. We thought that scare tactics would work, but I think now we’ve come to the realization that we can’t scare kids away from them.

Weeks: Yeah, that’s a really powerful way of framing it. It’s making me emotional a little bit just hearing you talk about it I think um Yeah, it reads so clearly as [BEEP] to kids immediately because it’s like well, I know my older brother smokes weed like…I know that he sometimes doesn’t smoke weed, like I know that he’s not immediately using crazier drugs. I don’t know. It’s just like kids see through that and then stop trusting the adults in their lives and yeah.

Jones: And now, yeah, and that’s the other thing that bothered me back then was I had the best parents ever growing up, but I was told by my parents, you know, you’re not going to use drugs. If you do, you’re not going to like it. They’re going to taste bad. They’re going to make you feel horrible. They’re going to ruin your life. And so that first time I got high, I did like it. And now my parents are liars. So now that they told me this is a horrible thing that’s gonna ruin my life. And I’m like, man, I made three new friends just by getting high. This is a wonderful thing. I stopped trusting a lot of their judgment. So whenever I got in trouble for missing school and they say, you know, if you miss too much school, you’re not gonna get an education. Well, you lied about the weed, you’re probably lying about the school too. It caused like a little bit of trust issues on whether or not my parents knew what they were talking about.

Weeks: Can you talk about your first experiences using methamphetamine and what it was like? 

Jones: Yeah, so my story is probably similar to a lot of people in Arkansas with meth. My first experience with meth was I enjoyed it. I really didn’t know what to do with my time. Back then, manufacturing was a little bit different, so I was definitely staying up for a few days, hiding it from my family. I would say those first few years, it wasn’t a daily activity for me, but it was definitely once or twice a week that I was using.

Weeks: That’s definitely another example of a way that you can lose trust in adults really fast, as if you’ve heard forever that if you use methamphetamine one time, you’re gonna be addicted for life, and yeah, your yolk’s gonna be cracked, but if you were able to use not daily for a very long time, that’s a different experience.

Jones: There was, and I remember when it changed for me, there was a time where my brother, I had a few friends that their parents were separated, so it was every other weekend we would get to hang out. We would kind of pool our money together because we’re gonna have fun this weekend. But during the week we were cool about it. Like we didn’t do it, we didn’t have to. And then I had went to prison and I came home and my brother said, you know, hey, I’ve got a little bit of money. Pitch in, we’ll get an eight ball and we’ll have fun this weekend. And I told him, you don’t understand, I’m not built that way. Like today, I can’t just get high on the weekend. Like today, I get high one time and it doesn’t stop until I’m in handcuffs.

Weeks: Yeah. Did you notice any ways in which like the product that you were using over the years changed?

Jones: Absolutely, yeah. When there used to be, oh whatever, the old red phosphorus, meth, dope, nan hydra stuff, we were all chewing on the insides of our lips and staying up for a week at a time and crawling around on the floor. That’s what I started out on was that cooked in a fake lab in a trailer somewhere in the woods and then it gradually went to the whole shake and bake where we could just get different ingredients over the counter at different stores we can make it real quick sometimes driving down the road. It tasted horrible and it smelled funny and it burned and messed up your pipes if that’s how you were smoking it. It definitely shifted toward a different kind of meth.

Weeks: I think Chris’s experiences really encapsulate the way law enforcement and other public institutions were handling the meth problem in the 90s and 2000s. To close out this episode, Will Garriott and I talked about the regulatory changes affecting users like Chris back then, and the beginning of the end of domestic meth lab production.

Garriott: So one of the opportunities, if you will, that domestic meth production presented was the ability to address it through regulation. 

Weeks: Garriott says that, because a lot of the ingredients in meth were legal, regulatory bodies had a lot of opportunities to impose new limits on their purchase. 

Garriott: Those tools were utilized, but always in tension with the manufacturers of those products. And I think the most notorious there would be the manufacturers of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. Those chemicals are not made in the United States. They’re made by a small number of pharmaceutical manufacturers in other parts of the world. From a regulatory standpoint, there is a real opportunity to put in new types of regulations that make it harder for people to access that. There was an effort by the DEA to do that in the 80s, but the pharmaceutical lobby was able to hold a lot of those regulations at bay, definitely the ones that had the sharpest teeth. 

Weeks: So what happens to the domestic methamphetamine manufacturing ecosystem after the Combat Meth Act of 2005?

Garriott: That really marks this point where there starts to be more of a serious crackdown on precursor chemicals that are used to make meth by local producers. That’s kind of the highest profile piece of legislation. That coincided with a lot of other efforts at different levels. So you’ve got individual stores like Tractor Supply introducing new protocols for their employees to monitor purchases of products known to be used in meth production. I talked to one employee at a Tractor Supply store who said that their protocol was If someone purchased something and it seemed suspicious, they were supposed to go ahead and sell it to them, then kind of subtly follow them out to the parking lot and make note of their license plate number and report that to the police. There were also community groups that were doing trash cleanups and training people. to really look out for meth waste and be aware that something that might look really benign could actually be dangerous. At all scales from the very local to the national and then eventually international, you have a really big focus on trying to make it harder to get the ingredients to produce meth locally. And so what has happened, which is often what happens, is that the meth production market has evolved in response to how the laws have changed. When there were individual limits placed on how much. Ephedrine or pseudoephedrine you could buy this practice emerged that got labeled “smurfing” where a cook would find a group of people and say, okay, all of you all go and get your maximum amount of Sudafed, bring it back to me, and then I will give you meth to compensate you for your work.

Weeks: Smurfing – which is a title I’ve never heard a satisfying explanation for – was a stopgap measure for meth users trying to get a fix in the face of very limited supply. Another practice that became common was called shake-n-bake, which Chris Jones mentioned earlier. That’s when you put very small amounts of meth ingredients into a soda bottle or some similar container, shake it up, and hope it doesn’t explode in your face. That method was known to produce pretty low quality meth. But users weren’t totally reliant on those haphazard processes. As we heard from journalist Sam Quinones in episode 2, Mexican drug traffickers were long producing a limited amount of meth to supply the western U.S. In episode 4 of Home Cooked you’ll hear more about how that source grew, and eventually rendered all the other cooks obsolete. And things have continued to evolve and change as there’s this back and forth between regulatory intervention and I’ll just say meth market innovation. We are now at a point where most of the meth that is consumed in the United States is actually produced outside of the United States. So it’s imported like cocaine, like heroin. And interestingly, that is the result of successful regulatory intervention. That’s unfortunately been one of the downsides of that success, is that there has been successful effort to stop homemade meth, local meth production, and there’s good reasons for doing that. But what it has done is it’s effectively handed that market over to larger scale producers of illicit drugs operating outside of the United States.

Weeks: From the early days of illicit meth production, it was associated with rural places because cooks needed a lot of space to make the drug. That fact led to a cultural stereotype that took on a life of its own, stigmatizing people who use drugs, and people from rural places. But, as Garriott just explained, American meth manufacturing was about to disappear. At this point, the idea of the American meth cook has outlived the reality. In next week’s episode of Home Cooked you’re gonna hear about the force that rendered all the small toxic meth labs discussed in this episode obsolete – high-purity meth imported from Mexico. Stay tuned. Home Cooked: A 50 year History of Meth in America is a production of Rural Remix. Original music was composed by Quincy Ponvert and Leo Posel. This series was written and produced by Olivia Weeks and edited by Susannah Broun. Assistant producers are Anya Slepyan and Bea Portela. The Executive Producer is Joel Cohen. Thank you to the staff of the Daily Yonder and the Rural Assembly.

Susannah Broun: You’ve been listening to Rural Remix. Check out our feed for more podcasts highlighting deeper, richer stories about life in rural places.