Meth A Memoir

by Wayne Huffman

  For months, I would get this same result every time I tried a cook. I became obsessed with trying to make the cook work. When I wasn’t at work, I spent all of my time in the basement attempting cook after cook. I experimented with different cook pots and set ups. Nothing made a difference, and the end result was always the same.

  After I had tried most of my recipes at least once each, and failed each time, I started taking the best process from each of the different methods and created a couple of my own recipes. At this point, I had spent so much time on my new hobby, and I had studied everything I could find on the chemistry of cooking meth, that I felt like an authority on the subject and more than qualified to create a new method of cooking. This also didn’t work, but at least I felt as if I were about to make a breakthrough.

  I began to think that maybe I wasn’t breaking my pills down in a way that made my pseudo pure enough to convert to meth. I experimented with other methods, but only managed to blow the door off my microwave oven. While that mishap didn’t cause a fire, it did teach me the importance of a thing called, “ventilation.”

  I somehow only managed to have one fire in those early days. That fire was the result of the same thing that causes most meth lab fires: Stupidity.

  When I was first trying to figure out how to extract the pseudo from my cold pills, I found a relatively new method on the underground website I had been visiting. This process was called, “The Tetra Trap.”

  I’m not going to go into all the details of the process, but it involves mixing several highly flammable liquids together and bringing them to a very high temperature. In a glass container.

  For some reason, the budding chemical genius I considered myself to be at the time, decided this would best be accomplished on my stove top. It also seemed more than reasonable to use a Pyrex pie dish as my cooking glassware. I mean, hey, you cook pies in it, right? (Ed. Disclaimer: Do NOT try this at home.)

  I had the whole concoction mixed and the flammables were boiling away, when I noticed fumes visibly rolling over the edge of the pie dish and onto the red-hot eye of the stove that I was boiling this liquid bomb. (Ed. Note: If you tried this, told ya so )

  Before I could come up with a plan of action the fumes ignited setting the whole dish on fire and sending flames all the way up to my nine foot high ceiling. I didn’t panic at that moment because I did prepare a little for just such an occasion. Before starting this experiment, I filled the kitchen sink with water and placed two large mason jars, also full of water, on the counter next to the stove.

  I immediately grabbed the two jars and threw the water on the fire. Little did I know that was my next mistake. The Pyrex shattered spilling the burning, oil-based liquid contents all over the stove, countertop, and floor. Now is when I started to panic.

  I ran to the bedroom and grabbed a blanket which I then soaked in the sink water. I used the wet blanket to smother the fire; disaster averted.

  The kitchen and dining room were full of a black smoke, so I closed all of the bedroom doors, and turned on the central air, to get fresh air into the house. I didn’t think about the smoke getting pulled in through the air return vent, then getting circulated throughout the house, but that’s what happened. I repainted the next day, every room of my house.

  As I continued to try to figure out why my cooks were not producing results, Lisa thought she knew what was wrong. Her theory was that I actually knew too much about cooking meth to ever be able to do it myself. To me, that was just about the dumbest thing I had ever heard, but it made sense to her.

  Lisa wanted me to give up. She even started refusing to help me do any of the prep work I needed done, but I didn’t care. The twins helped when they were at the house, and when they weren’t, I’d do everything by myself.

  In truth, I was getting pretty discouraged at this point, but I had the inescapable feeling that I was about to make a breakthrough. I just knew in my heart I was overlooking one tiny detail, and that that detail was right in front of my eyes. All I needed to do was see it. I tried explaining this feeling to Lisa, but she wasn’t buying it. She was done.

  I was watching the news one evening because I had heard there had been a meth lab bust in Johnson City. Suddenly, I had a great idea. I would bail the meth cook out of jail in exchange for him showing me what I was doing wrong with my cooks. This, dear reader, is a great example of a meth addict’s mind in action. Lisa, of course, said “Hell no,” to that idea and I was trying to talk her into it, when a buddy of mine stopped by for a visit.

  Joey was a parking lot security guard at The Sound, where Shane worked, and one of only a few people who knew I was trying to learn to cook meth. Joey also had a sideline job as the helper of a meth cook in Johnson City. I had asked Joey several times if he had any idea what I might be doing wrong. He always said the same thing, his cook doesn’t let him watch the actual cook process, that way, Joey couldn’t learn how to cook himself. Therefore, he couldn’t be of any help to me either.

  While we were talking about the trouble I was having with my cooks, Joey asked me something about what temperatures (or temps) I was cooking at. Temps? None of my recipes said anything about what temperature I was supposed to be cooking at. Everything I had, told you what to look for during the cook. When “this” happens, do “this.” When “that” happens, do “that.” Whenever this or that didn’t happen the way the recipes said it would, I would assume the cook was screwed up. Only now, I’m hearing about temps?

  When I questioned Joey about this, he said his cook always cooks at three specific temps for three specific periods of time. I knew about the three stages the cook goes through for certain amounts of time. It was the rest I didn’t know about, and luckily, Joey just happened to know what the temps were, and he passed that info on to me.

  After Joey left, Lisa and I started watching television. I couldn’t get the thought of the cook temperatures out of my mind, but I knew if I jumped up and went to go cook, instead of spending some time with Lisa, she would have a fit. I came to a decision.

  I told Lisa that, since I had everything ready anyway, I wanted to try a cook with the temperatures that Joey had given me. If it didn’t work this time, I quit. She agreed, and I went to the basement where I had set up my mad scientist starter kit lab and brought it all up to the kitchen. That way, I could just dump everything down the sink if it didn’t work, and I was pretty sure it wouldn’t.

  I took all the pseudo, Red P, and iodine crystals I had and just threw it all into the cook pot. Since this was likely to be my last cook, I wasn’t worried about weighing everything.

  I got the cook going on my first temp. It cooked perfectly for fifteen minutes, like it was supposed to. My next temp was set, and I sat back to let it cook for thirty minutes. After only about ten minutes, the cook reaction stopped. Just like always. I had failed again, and this time, I was done for good.

  I was getting ready to take the lab apart when I got to thinking; I had never, in this six month period of time I had been trying this, taken a cook all the way to the end just to see what would happen. Normally, when the cook stopped doing what it was supposed to be doing according to all of my recipes, I would just dump the shit out and start over. Since this was my last cook, I decided to take it all the way, just to see.

  Without being very careful about what I was doing for the next hour or so, I finished the cook as if everything had gone perfectly. I finally found myself standing there with the jar full of brake parts cleaner I was using as my puller, hoping, but not really expecting, something to be in it.

  A “puller” is an oil based solvent the meth will be dissolved in at this point in the cook. Meth is soluble in both water and oil. During a Red P cook, the meth is dissolved in water. There is a point in the cook where the water’s pH is raised from a neutral to a high level, using sodium hydroxide or lye. This same process is used in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

  Once the water’s pH is raised, the meth is no longer soluble in the water. Yo
u will have what appears to be cottage cheese in a jar of water. When you add the oil based puller to the water, the meth is pulled into the puller; hence the name puller. Then, you just drain the water layer off and throw it away. The meth then gets gassed out of the puller.

  I made my gassing bottle out of an old soda bottle and a length of aquarium air line that I epoxied into the cap. I poured a couple of inches of muriatic acid into the bottle, then dropped in a couple of aluminum foil balls. After a few seconds the acid began eating the foil. This released anhydrous hydrogen chloride gas through the airline.

  I put the end of the air line into my puller and watched as it bubbled. I knew that once the gas worked, I was supposed to see what looked like oatmeal swirling around in my jar. So far, I wasn’t seeing anything but bubbles.

  I was just about to pull the air line out of the jar and give up, when, faster than the blink of an eye, there was something like an oatmeal substance in my jar.

  I pulled the air line out of the jar, as the last of the foil was eaten away and the gas stopped being generated. My hands were shaking so much with excitement that I almost dropped the jar before I could set it down. Once the jar was safely on the counter, I just stared at it for a couple of minutes. I had just created something, although, I wasn’t sure what. Did I dare believe it was really meth?

  Chapter 13

  I placed a coffee filter in a plastic funnel and held the funnel over the drain in the sink. Without thinking that maybe I should save the puller to gas off again later, I poured the puller with the oatmeal substance into the coffee filter. The puller went down the drain, and I was left with what appeared to be a slightly iridescent slime in the filter.

  I set the filter on the oven rack inside my oven to dry as I cleaned a glass meth pipe, so I could try to smoke whatever the hell this was I had made. If whatever the hell this was, was even smokeable; I had to find out.

  The slime dried to a white powdery substance that had kind of a silky sheen to it. I put the dried filter on my digital scales, and minus the weight of the filter, I had less than two grams of powder. I turned and looked at the sink, because, if this was actually dope, I had just poured what I would estimate to be about twenty grams of the stuff down the drain. Damn it!

  I put some of the powder into my glass pipe and melted it by applying heat with a cigarette lighter. It melted, just like meth would, then dried to a crystallized form when I removed the heat. I melted it again and smelled the smoke. There was no smell at all. That was both good and bad, good because, if it had a bad smell, I didn’t make meth. Bad because, all the meth I had ever smoked up to this point, had at least some kind of smell to it.

  Finally, I gave it the taste test. I took a small hit off of the pipe, then blew it out without inhaling. I didn’t taste anything, and that too was good and bad for the same reasons as before. At last, I took a big hit and inhaled. I held the smoke in for a few seconds, then blew it out. Still no taste, so I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I had made.

  I stood in my kitchen, smoking for about twenty minutes. I’d guess I had loaded my pipe four or five times, and smoked a half gram of this stuff, but I still didn’t know if this was dope. I decided I’d need someone else to try it with me. It was about 3am, so I was going to have to wake Lisa up.

  Lisa had been fairly patient with me during all of my experimentation, but I knew her patience was nearly at an end. If this wasn’t meth I was waking her up to smoke, she was going to be pissed off; like, seriously pissed off. So, I had to come up with a plan.

  The plan was, I would wake Lisa up and say to her, “Hey honey, get up and get in the bed where you will be more comfortable.” She had been sleeping on the couch, where she had fallen asleep while watching TV. Once she got up, I would say, “While you’re up, try this stuff out, and tell me what you think it is.”

  With my plan of action in place, I sat on the edge of the couch, and gently woke her up. “Are you going to sleep on the couch all fucking night, or do you want to go to bed?!” Okay, so maybe I didn’t stick to the script I had planned out in my head, but she woke up.

  Lisa sat up and asked if I was finished in the kitchen. I said that I was, and I had cleaned everything up. I cleaned up before I woke her up so she wouldn’t be mad if I hadn’t made dope.

  Lisa sat there looking at me for a few minutes, (or maybe it was just seconds, I don’t know, I was pretty fucked up on the stuff I had just made,) while I jabbered on about the kitchen being clean, and everything being put up. Suddenly, she jumped up and headed toward the kitchen. “Where the hell is it?” she asked.

  “Where’s what?” I replied. “You’re fucked up out of your head! Where’s the fucking dope?!”

  I went to the kitchen as Lisa was using a razor blade to chop up some of the larger chunks the powder had formed into as it dried. I explained that I had made “something”, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

  Lisa picked up the pipe, which still had some in it, and took a hit. She looked at me and said, “It doesn’t have any taste.” I told her that I noticed that too, and that was one of the reasons I wasn’t sure if this was really dope.

  At this time, Lisa had been a meth user for more than 10 years. That’s why it blew my mind, when she informed me that not only did I make meth, it was some of the best meth she had ever smoked in her entire life. Needless to say, I was pretty proud of myself. It was the summer of 2004, and I was finally a meth cook.

  Now that Lisa had confirmed that what I made really was meth, I grabbed my phone and called Joey. I knew he would still be at work at The Sound. When he answered, I told him to stop by my house on his way home.

  Joey got to our place just before 4am, and I handed him the pipe the second he walked through the door. “I finally did it!” is all I said. Joey pulled out his lighter and started taking some hard, fast hits from the pipe, which was his style of smoking. After about the fourth hit, Joey stopped, looked at me funny, then sat down in a chair beside where he was standing.

  Joey was quiet for a minute. He just sat there, staring at the floor. Finally, he looks at me and asks, “You made this?”

  “Yep, what do you think?” I replied.

  He shook his head a little and then said, “I’ve been using meth for half my life, and I have never, ever gotten a rush from smoking it. Until now.” That, to me, was the most awesome compliment I had ever had, and I couldn’t wait for him to leave so I could have celebration sex with Lisa.

  I want to mention now, that one thing that is more widespread than the manufacture and use of meth are the rumors about the stuff. In fact, most of what many people think they know about the drug and the lifestyle is completely wrong.

  Many of these rumors involve the sexual habits of meth addicts. I read a statement once that said, “Meth addicts engage in orgies in front of their children, leaving them to themselves to scrounge for food.” This was presented as a fact, as if this was something all meth addicts did.

  That statement is just proof of the ignorance some “experts” like to spread. Not that things like that don’t happen, because they do. But, if you do a study of people that have orgies in front of their children, I would be willing to bet that meth users would come out at the bottom of the list, under alcoholics, crack heads, and non-drug using perverts for one simple reason; If you get together enough meth addicts to have an orgy, nobody will shut up long enough to get naked. In fact, you’d have a better chance of everyone going outside to mow the grass and trim the hedges at 3am, than you would of having sex together.

  Anyway, back on topic... In the meth world, there is a kind of unwritten rule that says, “Do not go around teaching people to cook.” More cooks mean more competition, not only for the person doing the teaching, but for the entire area. Also, the more cooks there are, the better the chances of someone getting busted. I should know. More people getting busted, means there are more chances someone will tell on everyone else. Teaching people to cook just brings too much heat on everyone, so, no on
e likes for anyone to teach.

  Since nobody taught me how to cook, I felt like my knowledge was my own to share with whomever I chose, and fuck anyone who didn’t like it. Before Joey left my house that morning, I told him to come back around noon. I told him I was going to do another cook, and that I was going to teach him what I knew, since his cook didn’t want to teach him. This really seemed to surprise Joey, but he said he would stop by later, and he left.

  I didn’t know it then, but I was about to be the one who got surprised.

  Chapter 14

  Once all of the stores opened, I headed out for more cook supplies. When I got home, Lisa helped me get all of the prep work done. She was back on board again as my partner. By the time Joey arrived, everything was set up in the kitchen and ready to go.

  When Joey walked into my kitchen, he was acting a little strange. He just stood by the stove, kind of leaning against the counter, looking at the way I had my cooking apparatus set up. Finally, Joey looked at me and asked if he could show me something. I said he could and, in a very serious tone, Joey said, “I’m only going to show you this once. Watch everything I do, and don’t say a word, or I’ll leave.” Okay, Mr. Mysterious, knock yourself out.

  Joey began taking my lab apart, and reassembling it into a completely different configuration. The new set up was one I recognized from some of the anti-meth websites I had spent so many hours studying. On the sites, I saw dozens of different set ups of labs and related components. With some set ups, it was easy to figure out how everything worked. Others, I wasn’t so sure of. This was one of the ones I wasn’t sure of at all. I really hoped Joey knew what he was doing.

  After Joey finished setting everything up the way he wanted it, he began mixing the ingredients and started the cook. Lisa and I just looked at each other. I could tell that she was just as confused as I was.

  I watched Joey closely, and noticed a few things he did differently than I did. Several times during the cook, Joey would point at what was going on in the cook pot, and show me the temperature he was cooking at.