To think drug manufacturing like in Breaking Bad couldn't happen in the UK

[WakeUpFast]

I've recently started watching Breaking Bad (to fill in for The Walking Dead ) and have got to season 3 (so no spoilers please!).

I just don't think someone could manufacture drugs like that in the UK.
We have no open, unclaimed land. Every piece of land is accounted for. Every house and persons living in it are accounted for. We can't use fake names just like that.

There's loads of other reasons but am I being naive to think this? I've heard of weed factories in houses, but how common is this? If someone used a caravan as a drug lab, where would they park it without someone smelling the emissions?

I'm not planning on becoming a drug lord, I promise , just very intrigued by how drugs are manufactured and distributed in the UK.

You beat me to it mrsterry.

Meth is insane. I mean, the very idea that someone said to themselves, "I'm going to take some drain cleaner, and some camping fuel, and some pseudoephedrine, cook it all together, and then ingest whatever it becomes," just boggles my mind.

Hope the mouse is (humanely) removed quickly!

My brother was on jury service earlier this year -- when the case had finished (not before!) he told us that it had involved a cannabis farm where the criminal overlords had scarpered and left some poor illegal immigrant in charge as a fall guy who was then banged up. It was clear the guy didn't really know what was going on, but had to be prosecuted anyway because the courts don't want to go soft on large scale drug operations. There are more cannabis farms than you'd think.

Meth Mouse is like .

Have you checked for brothals in your area? I guarantee there will be one

I manage freehold blocks of flats for my job. At least once a year, someone in the office will have a brothel or a cannabis farm in one of their blocks. It's not as rare as you might think...

In my town which busy and reasonably affluent, a huge cannabis farm was found in a derelict nightclub.

The club is situated next to the main route through the town and less than a mile from the main police station .

There are more cannabis farms than you'd think

Given that it's trivial to actually set up a full commercial grow with no chance of being discovered, the continued discovery of "cannabis farms" (a well motivated 6th form project could do better than the pictures the press print) is either a well planted decoy, or a testament to the stupidity of criminals. (Or more likely a combination of the two).

There was a cannabis farm in the house diagonally opposite mine a few years back. I had no idea until the police turned up and spent an hour removing all the equipment and taking it away in their vans.

At one point in our town the police were knocking over a cannabis farm a week. The on-site gardener was always Vietnamese, and being paid about £250 per week.

I always assumed pills are made here; ecstasy and stuff like that.

A guy we knew vaguely down the pub once offered my ex (a chemist) money to do some drug manufacturing. He said "No". He was daft, but not that daft.

i have no idea how true to life the meth lab set up in breaking bad was..surely they employed a fair bit of artistic Licence?

I'm more worried about people manufacturing lethal viruses/biological weapons etc once we really get going with gene technology

There is more meth than you might think in the UK. All the people I know who've taken it have been gay men, so I think it's more associated with the gay scene over here. While I've experimented with drugs in the past I don't think I could ever try meth. Breaking Bad actually put me off for life.

I guess you could start a meth operation out in the countryside. Some parts of Wales or Scotland would be pretty good for making meth if you were inclined. I think it's harder to get the ingredients over here like ephedrine. It seems to be in fewer products, so you might struggle with that.

On a serious note, I do find the whole meth problem in the USA to be incredibly sad. I have some relatives who live in an area near a notorious meth town and people just take it to escape their lives. There's such shitty, grinding poverty in some of the US, it's hard to believe.

I never finished watching it. I hated him by the end of the series and when I had 2 episodes left to see, I said fuck it. Plus, his wife had annoyed the fuck out of me since episode 1. In fact, the only reasonable human being in the whole series was probably Mike. And the baby.
There. I said it. Rant over.

Oh, yes. Sorry. No, YADNBU

People that I know who have grown weed have done it:

In their basement
In their loft
In warehouses
In a specially constructed underground grow room with secret trap door
In fields (planted in the middle of bigger crops like maize)
...the possibilities are endless. Anyone who's been caught has done so because they've been grassed up (no pun intended). Filtration systems are good at eliminating smells, if done right.

To be fair, I don't know anyone who's made meth. Crack is very easy to make though. Can be done with ammonia or bicarb.

Well, there'd be no need anyway, would there? Given we have the NHS, Walter's problems wouldn't have existed!

Not seen breaking bad, plenty of un populated areas here in Scotland, also lots of unused ex military buildings/sites all over UK.

I come from the middle of rainy, boggy nowhere. When I was wee they found a house in the woods about a mile from the village that no one knew was there, the fire brigade found it when it was in the process of burning down Other than that there where no clues to its existence and this was in a village where the level of intelligence gathering about the comings and goings was only slightly less than that employed by M15.

That's not true furious, he needed treatment not available on his insurance so I doubt the NHS would have funded it if it were here. It would probably be the equivalent of a secondary school teacher needing extensive private treatment here.

I love Mike, he's the best character. His eye rolls are phenomenal.

Weed farms are definitely the thing here. A lot of people have them in their attics.

Where I live there are loads of unused office/commercial buildings, easy to set up something in one of those for probably quite a while before someone comes round to check.

On an industrial estate a mile from my house there's an old office block with a swingers club on one of the floors. That's legal though so they don't have to try to hide it - there are big "XXX" signs across the windows which might be a bit of a giveaway!

I know of about 7 different people who all have grows on at this moment. And about the same again who have done one or more in the past.

Whenever we go for a drive out and see a disused building I always wonder if there's a grow in it

I thought the thinking behind Walt starting to cook crystal meth in BB was to make money for his family to live on after he was gone and also that because he knew he had a terminal illness so even if he was caught he was likely to die before he could be put in prison or spend long there?

It was several seasons before I realised it wasn't in normal 'real time' of one season per year.

I remember thinking 'he's doing well, he's had lung cancer for 4/5 years and he's still alive' - a relative died of lung cancer just before BB started so I was well aware that most people only live a year or two at most after receiving a terminal diagnosis . But then I noticed that the baby they had in Season 1/2 was still a baby/toddler in Season 4/5? and it all slotted into place.

BTW, I think the OP needs to come back and tell us more about the mouse. I'm starting to worry that ot was some giant drug addled mouse that has 'got' her.

Although as a slave to several cats over the years, resident rodents isn't something that shocks or surprises me any more. I always give a wry smile to anyone who suggests 'get a cat' as a solution to a rodent problem, as they are obviously unaware of most cats liking to bringing in mice etc from outside and letting them go to sit terrified under the furniture while the cat carries on it's sick hunting game.

And I've just realised that my previous post may count as spoilers although I'm not sure - people would expect Walt to be in BB for all seasons? I can report for deletion if people think I should?

I live in a small northern market town where every week the police are busting a cannabis grow set up in a rented house. There was a farm owner on the tops who found herself in court after letting some local scrotes bury a shipping container on her land to get a grow on and I gather that is a popular method which works quite well in remote areas.

Before I moved here I was living in a flat near Old Street tube station. My neighbour was a crack dealer getting supply from locals who were cooking it in flats around the estate. It was pretty grim.

OP I agree it would be harder to buy a massive RV and flip off into the desert.

There are some pretty remote parts of the UK though - although probably the better option would be to hide in plain sight or near it - industrial estates etc.

Using a made up name is a piece of piss - celebs, authors and pop stars do it all the time.

As another poster observed the chemicals needed are regulated here - but they are in the US too - and without issuing any plot spoilers - that is a plot point in several episodes.

There is plenty of crime here, and many known criminals who are untouchable because of a mixture of intimidation and Police inability/unwillingness - that bloke in Manchester who killed the two Policewomen had a gun and a hand grenade FFS.

So overall - I am certain it is happening here now in some form.

Also don't forget it's a fictional series - we can't know how likely it is that anyone would actually be able to do that in the US either.