Zhejiang man busted for cooking meth that he planned to give out to wedding guests

By Ryan Kilpatrick, February 2, 2015

A 29-year-old man was arrested in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province last week for producing methamphetamine in a home-made drug lab.

Police first noticed last month that a suspected dealer surnamed Zhou, based in Chengdu had purchased huge quantities of "illegal medicines" online - all them ingredients for cooking up crystal meth. Their suspicions aroused, police soon realized that he had also bought glass beakers, laboratory flasks, measuring cups, and other chemical apparatus.

When they tracked down his carefully selected lab, they found it in a four-story building near an industrial farm with thousands of chickens and ducks, the smell of manure effectively masking the smell of the meth-making process.

Zhou's lab was also on the top floor, where fumes could also be easily carried away by the wind, and two floors below a workshop with machinery thundering all day drowned out the noise from what he was doing.

Kicking down the door down on his ten-meter-square space on January 26, police found Zhou was hard at work with a mask over his face.

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Zhou, a junior middle school drop-out, told police that although he never took the drug personally, many other residents in his home village did. Zhou started out dealing but could see that the real fortune was to be made in manufacturing: searching online, he found not only the materials he needed and a step-by-step guide, but also a master to apprentice himself to. In December last year, he produced his first shoddy shards of the drug.

Zhou's plan was to sell RMB120,000 of meth in Jinhua and then return to his home village a rich man, just in time to celebrate the new year in style. In the main lab, police found close to a kilogram of glass that Zhou planned on selling in order to make this sum; but tucked away in his bedroom, they also unearthed a smaller stash put aside specially to bring home.

With his wedding day planned for soon after the new year, Zhou explained that he also intended to bring back 300 grams of crystal to hand out to his guests as party favors.

Needless to say, Zhou's big fat tweaked wedding is no longer on the cards - much to the disappointment, one imagines, of many of his townsfolk.

[Images via iFeng]