Why Breaking Bad is Bad, and Good

So, what have I spent my entire weekend doing?

Watching the first two seasons of Breaking Bad, the award winning television series starring the dad from Malcolm in the Middle, playing essentially the exact same character - a downtrodden do-gooder who, at middle-age, has little to show for his life except a shrill, nagging wife, an ungrateful child, and a job teaching chemistry to students who’d rather be elsewhere. Diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer despite never having smoked, he decides to fuck it all and start a crystal meth lab.

(Disturbingly, it’s actually medically possible to get lung cancer and not be a smoker. In fact, between 10 and 20% of people with lung cancer have never smoked, with most research linking early onset of the disease to genetic, not environmental, factors. Lung cancer remains the deadliest of all forms of cancer, and apparently no one is safe. Sleep tight.)

The show is well-acted, well-written, and all around pretty great. It’s always fun to see a downtrodden good guy become a kick-ass bad guy, and that’s what this show is all about.

The one thing that bothers me, half way through the second series, is that no one has once brought up the ethical implications of producing crystal meth. Obviously, the main character knows he’s breaking the law and producing a banned substance, and in dealing with the existing drug culture he brushes shoulders with some seriously sketchy characters and crosses some major ethical boundaries...but meth itself is treated, generally, like a microcosm of illegal drugs in general (like acid and pot), when really it’s not. Meth is seriously scary shit.

I’m generally a live-and-let live sort of person, so please take any advice I give with a large grain of salt and ultimately live your life however you feel is best, but that being said: do NOT do meth. Ever. Do not even think about doing meth. Do not partake in allowing others to do methamphetamine. Crystal meth seriously fucks up lives.

Remember back in the 1960s, when all the parents were freaking out about their teenagers embracing sunshine and smoking low-potency marijuana? How they assumed it was instantly addictive and would turn their children into psychopathic miscreants, when really all it did was make them chill out and give them the munchies?

Well, crystal meth actually IS addictive and turns children into psychopathic miscreants. It is one of the hardest drugs to kick and, at high doses, causes psychosis which is clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia. At low doses, it leads to seriously fucked up behaviour, teeth rotting, and skin picking, often leading to serious disfigurement, infection, and scarring. Many of the kids in their early twenties, now homeless and battling addiction, are the same kids who we diagnosed with ADD and fed amphetamines to some ten years back. I have met a lot of these kids, and they make me sad and scared...for them, for myself, and for society.

Because we can produce it on home ground, in meth labs, we have yet to curb the rampant supply of methamphetamine, and the numbers of fucked up young people continues to balloon.

Pot, acid and mushrooms should all probably be decriminalized, and I’m all in favor of doctor-prescribed heroin and other opiates to curb addiction, a la NAOMI project. Apparently that red bull I just drank has trace amounts of cocaine. So, whatever. But meth, producing meth, and allowing meth to exist...not cool.

Also, the way to solve meth?

Restrict ALL the ingredients, keeping tabs on customers who purchase any of the major ingredients used to cook. In fact, let's go back to making cough drops prescription only, please, or at the very least keep them behind the pharmaceutical counter. Nobody needs pseudoephederine, and there are just too many ways to abuse cough syrup, like using it to drug up your whiny kids (apparently a very common practice).

And those are my thoughts on Breaking Bad.