My name is Doctor Adi Jaffe and I'm an ex
meth distributor who sold hundreds of pounds of meth.
This is how crime works.
Being a meth dealer sleeping in bed with the meth
pipe next to you and a gun right to your
right and with hundreds of thousands of drugs in your
closet is an insane endpoint.
It's not normal. It was like my life got a
hard reset.
I mean, I had to go right to the beginning.
I started selling meth because clients of mine wanted access
to meth and so I started out buying very small
amounts from street dealers that I knew personally.
So an 8 ball which is 3 1/2 grams at
a time.
The labs I saw in Southern California were a joke
compared to even the makeshift labs that Walter had in
the RV and Breaking Bad.
They were using pots and pans.
They were using cups and glasses.
It looked like a more typical idea of a messy
kitchen that you would see in somebody who was addicted
to meth than an actual lab.
They rarely had glass beakers or flasks or anything of
the sort.
The easiest way to describe the smell of a
meth lab is an incredibly strong ammonia smell that will
literally feel like it can burn the hairs inside of
your nose.
Right. So you could tell the moment you walked into
a room where somebody was making meth,
sometimes you would cough right away if you didn't have
a mask on you or you know it would make
your eyes water.
Even the smaller labs really took care to put these
small kind of hoods or fans right above their main
reactions in order to port out the gases and you'd
have the cook and then the one or two people
were helping and make sure that this was done.
So Airbnb's and short term rentals
are incredibly easy places to set this stuff up because
really all we need is a day or two of
set up manufacturing and breakdown and you can leave.
You wouldn't really leave much of A mark as long
as somebody had enough time to air out the space
and the smell wasn't there anymore.
The other thing that is incredible about using things like
Airbnb's is you get to move from place to place,
which is then really hard to detect.
Because even if a neighbor does notice that there's a
pipe out of a window or something like that,
you know, if it's only there for a day or
two and then it leaves,
nobody would know. All the labs that I saw were
locally here in Los Angeles for a very long time.
But when drug busts started happening in earnest in the
late 90s and early 2000s of drug labs everywhere in
Southern California,
people started moving them outside of the city and they
gradually moved closer and closer to some of the supply
sources they had for some of the ingredients,
Right. And so it was well known in farming communities
for a while that you had to guard your nitrogen
rich fertilizer supplies because meth dealers and manufacturers would go
and steal kilos and kilos,
if not, you know, truck fulls worth of the stuff
and then bring it back in order to be able
to go manufacture their meth.
The people that I knew that manufactured had at least
one,
I'll call the lab. Or what it really was was
either a van that was hollowed out in the back
or a full RV.
The idea in a way being that if you drive
that nobody can detect the fumes.
The only thing that a lot of them forgot was
that when you're driving,
nothing is stable. A handful of them actually had to
experience flare ups.
And one actual explosion that I know
everybody that I saw manufacturing meth was using the ephedrine
method.
One of the first things you have to do is
you have to get the ephedrine out of the Sudafed
pills,
right? And so then that ephedrine is put progressively into
additional
chemical interactions. In the end,
what you end up with is essentially a large pot
in most of these of a clear liquid that has
the solvents in it.
And then the next step is really drying that product
in order to get the end powder that is what
everybody consumes.
These were highly detailed, very protected recipes that were guarded
by this cook with the same sort of zeal you
hear about Coca-Cola guarding their original recipe,
right? Because this was their leverage.
The secrets were in limiting people's knowledge about how to
do what was otherwise
replicable in a world of drug addiction and crime and
sort of the underbelly of society
these cooks had standing. A Smurf was the name given
essentially to a meth manufacturing runner.
The most small time dealers that I knew would employ
1015, even 20 Smurfs. So they would go out to
the stores and buy the Lye.
They would go steal whatever it is that was required
for the manufacturing,
especially going to pharmacy after pharmacy after pharmacy to secure
individual packages of Sudafed.
The idea of being able to go run around,
get some ingredients, work for a couple of days and
make 10 or
$15,000 was highly attractive. And so
everybody was always trying to get their hand on a
good recipe.
There's absolutely a connection between the method of cooking the
meth itself,
the impurities that exist in it after,
and actually the quality of the meth itself.
So when I was starting out in the
meth game in the late 1990s,
there was this lore about P2P meth at the time
that was the stuff everybody wanted.
That meth had a blue tint to it,
so everybody was always looking for blue meth,
which was what was so ironic about Breaking Bad when
they started,
you know, introducing this story of blue meth
supposedly created by Walter. That was what I knew as
the best meth you could get from the stories in
my dealing days.
The demand among my customers grew.
My dealer couldn't really supply me anymore.
So what ended up happening is we would go on
together on deals and we ended up going together to
meet his dealer,
a woman named who lived in
downtown LA in a massive warehouse with about 12 other
people.
You know, at the time,
a pound went for about
$10,000 or so. So they were pretty expensive pounds.
I would come in to buy as much product as
they could.
I would leave there with,
you know, a pound, a pound and a half if
they had really done a great job of manufacturing.
And so they would be left with about
$15,000. For me, there was a hierarchy.
He always got paid in money,
and it was always cash.
Once got paid, you could tell that there were a
couple of other people who actually got money,
and the rest of people literally relied on free meth
supplies
to do the work. You know,
the labs that I knew didn't get robbed.
The drugs came in quickly and they left quickly because
there was the need to distribute them,
as in the moment that they were made.
What did happen much more often was when drug dealers
would actually get robbed,
so after the drugs would get delivered
because they're going to have a supply on them.
So the risk of being robbed actually happened much more
often.
Obviously the dark web is a huge part of this
to make it
so much more difficult to identify,
track, let alone apprehend and stop at the source any
of this manufacturing or distribution.
The supply was really, really unreliable.
And what that would mean is one month that would
be all the meth I wanted,
and then other times it would either be incredibly dirty
and impure or they just wouldn't have any.
Back in the day where they were making this with
ephedrine pills when they were starting to crack down on
ephedrine pills in the US as restrictions started coming up
about being able to buy 8 packs and then 4
packs and then two packs,
eventually one pack of Sudafed at a time,
which really choked the supply.
And so like any good
salesperson trying to sell any product,
you know, legal or otherwise,
I started looking for other suppliers.
And through a person who was selling me cocaine at
the time,
I got introduced to another contact.
So I had to drive down to Orange County to
go to a strip club.
And then somebody walks up to you,
make sure that you are who you say you are,
check your ID. He gives me an address and he
tells me to get back in my car.
And eventually we find ourselves on a Dirt Rd.
This was my first meeting with the actual cartel people,
and it was the classic meeting you've seen in every
single movie in your life,
which was I got out with the money,
they got out on the other side,
but they they had three guys
obviously with weapons on them,
and we walked into the middle.
I gave them the bag of money,
they gave me the bag of drugs.
One of the big things about
dealing with the cartels directly is they were really reliable.
Every single time that I contacted them,
letting them know that I needed product,
it wasn't a problem. I never needed another one because
they could always supply what I needed.
At this point, over 90%
of the methamphetamine sold and used in the United States
has been manufactured in Mexican super labs.
I believe that given the incredible proliferation of these super
labs South of the border,
it's become almost redundant to have local labs.
The manufacturing is easier, it's more reliable,
the product is cheaper at scale.
They can absolutely employ real talent,
so they can hire real chemists and people who really
know what to do at the higher levels.
But as you go downstream,
they're offering sometimes pretty well paying jobs given what else
is available in the surroundings.
You need a lot more money in the US to
buy your way out of law enforcement regulation.
We all know it's doable.
It's just a lot more expensive
in Mexico. It's much, much cheaper
to buy enough police power in your pockets.
So these meth super labs,
they're relative super labs, right?
They're making thousands or maybe 10s of thousands of pounds
a year.
So there's been a huge shift back to P2P meth
in the United States and in Mexico.
P2P meth actually ends up being stronger than ephedrine based
meth,
creating massive problems, mental health issues,
larger incidents of things like psychosis from meth,
etcetera. And that's creating a bigger crisis around meth use
right now than we've seen in a long time.
The honest answer as to why I stopped selling drugs
is
I didn't see a way where I could keep doing
it
and still live a life that was outside of Gates.
Everybody that I knew who sold drugs ended up either
dead
or in prison at some point.
I never saw anybody get out of that world intact.
I got in my motorcycle accident in 2001 and
I got found with it was cocaine.
But I got found with a half a pound of
cocaine on me
and police knew that somebody with a half a pound
of cocaine in their
jacket knows somebody who sells drugs.
The quantity. They obviously searched the entire place,
right, And started looking through the walls,
looking through the ducts, the AC ducts,
and they found toxic chemicals because one of my friends
who was manufacturing meth actually left some of the chemicals
in my house.
I had a lock pick kit and that was illegal
to carry.
I had a gun that was loaded by my bed,
and you get a violation for every single substance you
have.
And actually even on top of that picked up two
charges for the manufacturing of methamphetamine and MDMA.
We had a pill press
at my place where we were pressing MDMA pills.
So initially I was looking about 15 to 18 years,
and my lawyer immediately that day told me one thing.
It's clear you're addicted to these drugs,
right? Everybody can see it on you.
If this judge doesn't see that you're serious about changing
the direction your life is going in,
you're going to get the full thing.
You're going to get 15 to 18 years in prison.
I think that was the only way to sell me
on treatment,
honestly, at the time. And so I listened to the
judge,
and I went to a rehab in Pasadena here in
Southern California.
So we did something called an open plea,
which actually meant I had to plead guilty to all
nine felonies.
But if I pled guilty to the 9 felonies that
were still on my record,
the judge could make whatever decision he felt like was
right given my situation.
And he came out and he gave me this very
creative sentence in my opinion.
And the sentence was 364 days,
one day less than a year.
If when you get out,
you start selling drugs again or I see you here
again,
whatever you do next is going to have seven years
added to it.
And in a way, I felt there's this biblical story
about a
king with a a sword sort of hanging over his
head just right above his head.
And it felt like I had this hanging sword that
actually was kind of my guardian for a couple of
years while I was trying to figure out how to
get my life on track.
I just want to say publicly,
I also recognize mass privilege in who I am,
right? And so I may be from the Middle East
and I may be actually a first generation immigrant to
the United States,
but nobody can tell that when I speak.
So standing in front of that court,
I was a relatively young adult white male.
And so I think there was a lot of privilege
afforded me by that reality
in that moment as well as when I got out
of jail.
I tried to get a job.
I couldn't get hired for anything.
I tried for mall jobs.
I tried. I tried to become a pizza delivery man
and I couldn't get hired.
The only next thing I had available other than a
job was to go back to school.
So I got to get into Cal State Long Beach,
which was the 1st place I got my master's in.
Then I went back to UCLA to get my PhD,
where I ended up teaching,
and so I ended up taking this route that seems
blessed at the end of the road,
but it was in no way,
shape or form guaranteed. And there were many,
many times along the way
that the idea of going back and having that access
to money and power was really,
really charming.
The $1,000,000 question is how to stop
meth production and meth use from occurring.
The problem is that the government
has been known to try to use prohibition
and interdiction right ways that stop the supply or make
it illegal to use
when it comes to every drug,
including methamphetamine. What we've seen over and over is that
these methods don't work.
And so they became this very deeply ingrained
public campaign to make kids,
young adults, etcetera, aware of the meth problems.
So you would see the faces of meth pictures and
what meth does to you and all that kind of
stuff.
That's when we started seeing the opioid problem explode in
this country.
And it was as if we looked in One Direction
and then all of a sudden,
you know, a whack, A mole game occurred and everybody
had to turn their attention to opioids for a while.
But in the interim, while everybody was focusing on opioids,
the supply and demand for meth started increasing again and
again and again.
And over the last decade,
we've seen a massive resurgence once again in the use
of methamphetamine.
They are going to meet
the need, They're going to meet the supply that is
required,
and they're going to find any way to do it.
You know, I think they're focusing on ways to stop.
The supply of chemicals is just the wrong approach,
and it's not something we need to think too hard
about.
And the real game is to ask ourselves a question
of why is methamphetamine use going up?
About 85% of the incarcerated population in the United States
he either have an active drug addiction problem or were
arrested for drug crimes.
Add to the cost of interdiction,
prohibition, etcetera, which is in the trillions of dollars.
Add to that the cost of lives and on top
of that the cost of incarceration that we don't consider
part of the war on drugs because it's actually part
of our overall crime fighting measures.
When you Add all of those statistics together,
I think it's pretty safe to say that the War
on Drugs
can be considered one of the most
dismal failures of the law enforcement community here in the
United States.
10% of the population in the US struggles with addiction
as diagnosed by the
DSM. Even that number has gone up.
So the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration SAMSA
has just raised its own estimate of the people who
struggle with addiction in the US from 24 to about
40 million. So this is a problem that affects all
of us.
And yet somehow we've bought into the narrative
that those people are addicts and Alcoholics.
But we're here. We're normal and we're safe.
Addiction, as we all know,
does not discriminate based on socioeconomic status.
And we need to get it out of our heads
that the people who struggle are other than us,
because they are all of us.
And so the war on drugs has been a war
on those people,
and that is us.
I was selling to my friends when it started out,
so the idea of having to be secretive,
A, then dawn on me and B was relatively impossible
because they all knew me.
I was a student at UCLA.
They were all my friends.
They lived around me. Everybody in the drug game goes
by monikers.
So I would meet people like Bullet and Murder and
Termite.
Just you come up with a name and that becomes
kind of the moniker that you go by when you're
selling.
I used to drive when I started out.
I would drive 250 or 300 miles a day in
Los Angeles,
delivering. But really the moment I moved out of that,
everybody came to me and everybody was screened.
And so even though it was never my intention
tend to being a guy with a gun walking into
a cartel deal outside of San Diego,
there were these incremental small progressions that got me there.
And what it taught me
is that if I put my attention and my efforts
on the right things and I just give it enough
time,
5678 years, just like my drug dealing career grew,
I could actually achieve some pretty incredible things.
But now doing them on the right side,
I was really scared of telling people that I'd been
to jail,
that I used to be a drug dealer,
that I used to be addicted to meth.
It felt big. And so some of my friends knew
my really,
really close friends. But what I did instead is this
is
2008. I started blogging about it
and I started speaking publicly.
But the people I didn't know right.
Blogging is kind of safe.
It's people out there. I then ended up running groups
and seeing clients in a treatment center here locally in
Los Angeles.
Eventually I opened up my own treatment center,
and I've pretty much dedicated my life now
to helping people with addiction problems.
And so in Ignited, which is what I do now,
which is an online addiction help platform.
I've also written a book called The Abstinence Myth,
relying on the fact that
you don't have to be ready to quit in order
to get your life in order.
If you're ready to do something,
you should start acting now,
even if you're not ready to quit.
This is my life's purpose.
This is what I do now,
and I'm incredibly motivated and grateful and humbled that I
get to help people every day.