Denise Martin talks to Breaking Bad‘s scientific advisor, Dr. Donna Nelson, who explains how the Drug Enforcement Administration is involved in portraying the show’s meth production:
[Nelson] says they’ve been crafty in how they’ve made the process faulty while keeping it realistic. “It’s a valid synthesis, the way they’re using methylamine,” she says. “That process was patented in Germany in 1957. It’s a very old method. They aren’t revealing anything new. What they are doing is leaving out steps. Or sometimes they show some steps from one synthesis and subsequent steps from another synthesis, which prevents Breaking Bad from becoming an illegal meth cookbook.”
And the blue meth is too blue to be true.
