Cooking meth dangers

[KnobodyImportant]

In actuality how dangerous is cooking meth?

Is it known to explode randomly for no apparent reason, or is it usually the person who cooked its fault?

[HorseBucket]

I dont know much about it but I think the only risk of explosion is when people carelessly heat up solvents without adequate ventilation and after enough flammable fumes have accumulated something like the electrical spark of a fridge ignites the fumes. Imagine the damage they're doing to their lungs breathing all those fumes in.

In my opinion its dangerous and its dirty shit because you work with toxic and corrosive chemicals but thats chemistry for you.

Yeah of course its the cooks fault. Things dont just magically blow up for no reason at all. Its science. Cause and effect. If you fill your house up with gasoline fumes and the place blows up whos fault is it? The place didn't magically blow up its cuz you filled it with flammable fumes and something like a pilot light or fridge ignited the fumes. There are ways to work with solvents where no fumes escape. Its called a reflux setup. Think about when people in a lab distill volatile flammable substances. They don't get everyone in the lab to turn off their open flames and put on gas masks to stop the place blowing up and people inhaling the fumes. The distillation setup is sealed so no vapor escapes.

[givemeliberty]

SWIM's girlfriend was watching some kind of "I'm going to scare the shit out of Americal and make them want to kill all cooks" TV show while SWIM was out in the garage finishing up a nice little batch. She comes running out asking if SWIM is turning the house into the next Love Canal.
She wanted to know why SWIM wasn't wearing a full Hazmat suit.
So SWIM walks her through the whole procedure and shows her all of the dangerous shit he uses. She tells SWIM that most of that stuff, she already had so what were the DEA talking about?
SWIM is pretty careful with his set up. He never has everything out at once. If you see a can of acetone, it's near the paints and thinners. If you see Coleman fuel, it's with the camp stove and lanterns.
SWIM has actually had people standing right next to him and they never knew they were in a meth lab.
Cooking alcohol or acetone over an open flame is never a good idea. My guess is after someone has been up for 4 or 5 days, it starts to seem like a good idea.

[cnsns2ccl2]

Originally Posted by HorseBucket

There are ways to work with solvents where no fumes escape. Its called a reflux setup. Think about when people in a lab distill volatile flammable substances. They don't get everyone in the lab to turn off their open flames and put on gas masks to stop the place blowing up and people inhaling the fumes. The distillation setup is sealed so no vapor escapes.

That's not entirely true. Sealing off a reflux set-up would be asking for an explosion since you (and by you I mean any random person doing any type of reflux reaction) are working with solvents that have a relatively high vapor pressure. The pressure would build up in a sealed apparatus and blow. A reflux set-up is one which uses cold water flowing around the outside to cool the evaporated solvents. They either drip back into the solution or some have them condensing into a separate container. Not sure how meth is made exactly so not sure the best way to do this. This is effective in preventing solvent vapors from being released into the air.

The problem with a lot of solvents is that once they evaporate into the air they actually travel along the ground and "flash" with any source of ignition. Ventillation is crucial for safety. If the best one could come up with is a high powered fan blowing out the window near a small set-up, although not great, would be much better than no ventillation at all.

[Dexyfiend]

SWIM's no authority on the subject but from the research he's done it would appear that the solvents are the issue hear.
The thing is I don't think the plethora of solvents involved are actually used in the reaction, they seemed to be used in extracting the pseudoephedrine from the cold and flu pills so you could argue that explding meth labs are indirectly the governments fault for gakking the pills so badly.

[Panthers007]

One can place a stopper with a hole on the end of the condenser in a reflux rig. From this hole is a glass tube attached to rubber-tubing. This leads to a well-ventilated area such as outdoors. Heating done slowly by small increments so as not to overwhelm the rig with sudden high pressures.

Same thing for the drip-back (Soxhlet) extraction method.