“Oh, hi! I’m Sergeant Jim Wingo of the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Today we thought we’d make a scrumptious dish called d-methamphetamine. Now, we’re gonna use a variation of the ephedrine reduction method called the Nazi synthesis method. Hopefully, we’ll come up with some great dope.”
And thus begins the oddest video you will watch all week.
Over the course of around six and a half minutes, it demonstrates, in startling step-by-step detail, how someone would go about cooking up a big ol’ batch of tasty, tooth-rotting meth using the method favored by Hitler’s goose-stepping goons during WWII. It lists the ingredients. It shows where to find them and how to extract them. It warns about the dangers—but only of making meth, not of using it. It is literally a how-to video about making one of the most addictive drugs known to man.
And as far as we can tell, yes, this video was actually made by the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Jim Wingo is very much an actual officer in the Missouri State Highway Patrol, and he very much looks like the man in the first scene of the video. The MSHP does indeed have a Multimedia Unit. It has that lo-fi, early-’90s educational-video feel we’d expect from a video made by a Missouri state agency in 2002. Based on the closing title card stating the video is a product of the Law Enforcement Academy, an educated guess says this was meant as a slightly-tongue-in-cheek training tool for the department’s officers—one made in an era when people still thought you could create ridiculous videos and they wouldn’t wind up on the Internet.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol’s Multimedia Unit had not responded to a request for comment as of this article’s publication. Should they get back to us, though, you can bet we’ll update this post with their response.
