poured through a filter, and then simmered on low heat to take the solvent away. What remains is the pure pseudoephedrine, in a gluggy paste form.
Again on low heat, the pseudoephedrine is mixed with red phosphorus and acid. The gas output is vented out through a pipe attached to the bubbling mixture.
At this stage the chemist has pure methamphetamine, but the remaining acidic component in the mix is still too powerful, so the red phosphorus residue is filtered out by pouring the liquid through a hessian sheet and then caustic soda is added to the methamphetamine in barrels with ice packed around them to keep the heat under control.
Next, freon is added to the methamphetamine base and decanted out of the barrel to be mixed with hydrogen chloride. What the hydrogen chloride does is draw the acidic hydrogen atoms away from the methamphetamine, leaving the drug as a wet precipitate, or âsaltâ.
Finally, the methamphetamine is dried on a filter cloth, measured out, probably cut with additives to enhance the weight of the product, and packaged up for sale.
In Australia, events moved slowly, lagging behind the United States, but in the same direction. Australia lagged because there was not the same historical saturation in stimulants as there had been in the United States. Australia was remote from the efficient Latin American trafficking businesses. And, it could be speculated, Australian bikies didnât have the same degree of competitive enterprise as their American cousins.
Up to the mid-1990s, only one major Australian police bust for ice manufacture had made it through the courts to result in convictions, when a syndicate led by chemicals importer John Barrie Oldfield, from Winston Hills in western Sydney, was broken open back in 1989. Over three years, beginning in 1986, Oldfield and a group of associates including âmaster cookâ and police informant John Michael Gazzard had manufactured 76 kilograms of ice in five different locations from Sydney to northern Queensland, with Oldfield supplying the active ingredient, pseudoephedrine, and Gazzard using his knowledge of chemistry to make the methamphetamineâthough he wasnât expert enough to avoid harm. In Gazzardâs own version, one ten-day cook-up in Como, in southern Sydney, produced fumes so strong that his eyes puffed up as if heâd âgone 15 rounds with Muhammad Aliâ.
They sold the ice to the Black Ulans bikie gang before being caught by Gosford police. The syndicate had done very nicely, Gazzard admitting that heâd spent $684 000 of his income from the drug deals on jewellery, entertainment, bribes to police, travel (including a $70 000 round-the-world trip), an apartment in Oxford Street and a property at Swansea, near Newcastle.
Nevertheless, ice figured so meagrely in the public consciousness that the Oldfield/Gazzard bust attracted more attention for subsequent charges of police receiving bribes than it did for the fact of ice being made.
In 1996, Australian police broke open 58 clandestine amphetamine labs across the country. Few were producing crystal meth, which accounted for only 100 grams in seizures. The vast majority were making old-fashioned amphetamine sulphate.
The unleashing of the ice genie in Australia happened in a disconcertingly similar manner to the American experience. Again, it was inadvertently caused by legislators.
In the last year of the Keating Labor government, the federal health minister Graham Richardson announced that a concerted federal and state police crackdown on the supply of amphetamineâs precursor chemicals would end the amphetamine problem. For about a year, it promised to do so. In 1996, NDARC researchers had noted a decline in the purity of street amphetamine. While its price remained stable at around $100 a gram, users were saying amphetamine was growing weaker and weaker, cut more and more with caffeine and other dilutants. Traditional amphetamine was on the way
Again on low heat, the pseudoephedrine is mixed with red phosphorus and acid. The gas output is vented out through a pipe attached to the bubbling mixture.
At this stage the chemist has pure methamphetamine, but the remaining acidic component in the mix is still too powerful, so the red phosphorus residue is filtered out by pouring the liquid through a hessian sheet and then caustic soda is added to the methamphetamine in barrels with ice packed around them to keep the heat under control.
Next, freon is added to the methamphetamine base and decanted out of the barrel to be mixed with hydrogen chloride. What the hydrogen chloride does is draw the acidic hydrogen atoms away from the methamphetamine, leaving the drug as a wet precipitate, or âsaltâ.
Finally, the methamphetamine is dried on a filter cloth, measured out, probably cut with additives to enhance the weight of the product, and packaged up for sale.
In Australia, events moved slowly, lagging behind the United States, but in the same direction. Australia lagged because there was not the same historical saturation in stimulants as there had been in the United States. Australia was remote from the efficient Latin American trafficking businesses. And, it could be speculated, Australian bikies didnât have the same degree of competitive enterprise as their American cousins.
Up to the mid-1990s, only one major Australian police bust for ice manufacture had made it through the courts to result in convictions, when a syndicate led by chemicals importer John Barrie Oldfield, from Winston Hills in western Sydney, was broken open back in 1989. Over three years, beginning in 1986, Oldfield and a group of associates including âmaster cookâ and police informant John Michael Gazzard had manufactured 76 kilograms of ice in five different locations from Sydney to northern Queensland, with Oldfield supplying the active ingredient, pseudoephedrine, and Gazzard using his knowledge of chemistry to make the methamphetamineâthough he wasnât expert enough to avoid harm. In Gazzardâs own version, one ten-day cook-up in Como, in southern Sydney, produced fumes so strong that his eyes puffed up as if heâd âgone 15 rounds with Muhammad Aliâ.
They sold the ice to the Black Ulans bikie gang before being caught by Gosford police. The syndicate had done very nicely, Gazzard admitting that heâd spent $684 000 of his income from the drug deals on jewellery, entertainment, bribes to police, travel (including a $70 000 round-the-world trip), an apartment in Oxford Street and a property at Swansea, near Newcastle.
Nevertheless, ice figured so meagrely in the public consciousness that the Oldfield/Gazzard bust attracted more attention for subsequent charges of police receiving bribes than it did for the fact of ice being made.
In 1996, Australian police broke open 58 clandestine amphetamine labs across the country. Few were producing crystal meth, which accounted for only 100 grams in seizures. The vast majority were making old-fashioned amphetamine sulphate.
The unleashing of the ice genie in Australia happened in a disconcertingly similar manner to the American experience. Again, it was inadvertently caused by legislators.
In the last year of the Keating Labor government, the federal health minister Graham Richardson announced that a concerted federal and state police crackdown on the supply of amphetamineâs precursor chemicals would end the amphetamine problem. For about a year, it promised to do so. In 1996, NDARC researchers had noted a decline in the purity of street amphetamine. While its price remained stable at around $100 a gram, users were saying amphetamine was growing weaker and weaker, cut more and more with caffeine and other dilutants. Traditional amphetamine was on the way
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