Posted on 12/05/2014 6:29:27 AM PST by PJ-Comix
BEIJING — At the end of a lonely alley, the building had three rooms, no number and just one entrance. Only after midnight would the lights come on, and they’d stay on until dawn.
The work inside was smelly and dangerous. Three powerful fans whirred through the night. The floor was stacked with charcoal briquettes to absorb the odor.
But the men inside were settling down for a late-night snack — they hadn’t even put on their gas masks yet — when police came through the iron door.
The bust that ensued would give "Breaking Bad" a run for its mythic blue meth.
(Excerpt) Read more at globalpost.com ...
I remember how they stole a train shipment of that stuff on "Breaking Bad." Sheer genius how they pulled it off.
Late night snack? Los Pollos Hermanos?
In China, drugs are a sore point because foreigners used the opium trade in the 19th to humiliate China and deprive it of its national independence.
“Breaking Bad” may seem humorous to Westerners but for Chinese its a source of shame. Suppressing drugs isn’t easy work, I imagine for China’s narcotics squad.
Crystal Myth(ic)
Blaking Blad?................
Well played.
As I recall, the chemistry used by Walter White was based on methylamine, not ephedrine.
The hijacked tank car contained liquid methylamine. The theft was necessary after the normal supplies of the chemical were disrupted.
Chinese propaganda is a lot like its Russian variant - long on deceit-fueled rage blaming the other for imaginary slights and short on facts. Opium started being part of the Chinese milieu 1300 years ago, during the Tang dynasty, at a time when England existed as a collection of independent warring principalities (Kent, Northumbria, Wessex, East Anglia, et al) perennially under attack by Vikings and various Scottish and Irish principalities. The Anglo-Chinese Wars (which the Chinese have dubbed the Opium Wars) occurred 150 years ago at a time when opium was legal and widely-used in the West. The Chinese refused to allow imports of foreign opium, while continuing to tolerate the cultivation, distribution and consumption of its domestic variant.
In fact, outside of China, it was widely used throughout the areas where Chinese immigrants flocked, without any noticeable detrimental effect on the development of those areas. Until the Harrison Act in 1914, opium derivatives and just about any variety of narcotic drugs were widely available in the US, without having had any noticeable impact on the breakneck economic development of the US, which had become the largest economy in the world decades earlier.
What the opium trade provided to various feckless, corrupt or simply insane Chinese administrations was a foreign scapegoat for their inadequacies. In fact, it's a staple of Chinese language movies, whether from Hong Kong, Taiwan or China. The reality, however, is that Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore - ethnic Chinese majority territories - all became thriving economies despite the widespread availability of opium. The difference between these places and China was British and Japanese rule.
That episode where they're carrying that barrel while the security guard is in the can is classic.
And later the DEA guys were laughing like hell because they didn't ROLL the barrel which would have made moving it soooo much easier.
Either way, the chemical came from China and they set it up so the Chinese would be blamed for watering it down.
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