MCLC: Real-life Breaking Bad

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Real-life Breaking Bad
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (7/7/15)
China Finds Another Real-Life Spinoff of ‘Breaking Bad’
By Edward Wong
Walter White lives, at least in the eyes of the police in Wuhan.
Law enforcement officials in the central Chinese city have arrested a chemistry professor who is suspected of producing and selling hundreds of pounds of a psychoactive drug to overseas buyers, according to a report on Tuesday by Xinhua, the state news agency.
The report said the police had announced the man’s surname, Zhang, and the fact that he worked at a “famous” university in Wuhan. Xinhua called him “China’s real-life Walter White,” a reference to the protagonist of “Breaking Bad,” the popular American television series that ended in 2013. In the show, Mr. White, played by Bryan Cranston, is a high school chemistry teacher in New Mexico who, after a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer, begins producing high-grade methamphetamine to earn money for his family and conducts his criminal activities under the alias Heisenberg.
Mr. Zhang hit on the idea of producing a psychoactive drug during a stint as a visiting scholar in Australia, Xinhua reported. At that time, he found that some psychoactive drugs were in high demand there but hard to get. He then decided to make those drugs on his return to China, the report said, citing the police.
Mr. Zhang is suspected of selling at least 193 kilograms, or 425 pounds, of drugs from March to November 2014 to buyers in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, which earned him millions of dollars, Xinhua reported.
Mr. Zhang founded a company in 2005 to produce medical coating and solvent, but that was a front for drug production, the report said. He recruited people to help him make the drugs and sell them by mail, it also said.
The police first stumbled onto the drug operation last November, when local customs agents checking packages bound for overseas addresses found white powder in at least nine parcels from one mailer, Xinhua reported. The powder was methylone, a heavily restricted psychoactive drug. Customs officials and police officers then raided Mr. Zhang’s lab in the Jiangxia district of Wuhan, a provincial capital on the Yangtze River. The raid was on June 17, and it resulted in the arrests of eight people and the seizure of about 45 pounds of drugs, Xinhua reported.
Mr. Zhang is not the first person to be labeled a Chinese Walter White by news organizations and commentators here. In May, a former chemistry teacher, Lu Yong, was arrested in Shaanxi Province for working with a gang leader to produce and sell methcathinone, which is similar to methamphetamine, according to Chinese news reports. One publication, The Paper, said that Mr. Lu had lost his sight in a chemical experiment explosion in 2007.
Last October, police officers in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province,arrested a man with the surname of Xu after raids on two homes that were used to produce methamphetamine. The man was a laid-off chemical factory worker who was nicknamed Professor Xu after traveling around the country teaching drug gangs how to make methamphetamine and selling the raw materials for its production.
In December 2013, police officers raided the village of Boshe, also in Guangdong, to crack down on what they called a “fortress” of methamphetamine manufacturing. The police detained 182 people suspected of being members of drug rings and shut down 77 methamphetamine labs, officials said at the time. The police said that more than a fifth of the 1,700 households in the village made methamphetamine and other drugs for a living. The village’s Communist Party chief was a former drug maker who had become a protector of the drug gangs, the police said.
International law enforcement officials say that China is a leading producer and exporter of synthetic drugs, including methamphetamine, as well as the materials used to make them. Those materials can easily be ordered online in China. Most of the materials that Mexican drug traffickers use to make methamphetamine come from China, according to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. Officials from several nations say the Chinese authorities generally tolerate the presence of those drug businesses in their country.
Follow Edward Wong on Twitter at @comradewong.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on July 7, 2015
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