If you judged by TV and movies alone, you'd think "pure" drugs were seeping out of American society's every pore, along with hot doctors and secret agents gone rogue. Even if suburban 15-year-olds don't ask their dealers for THC percentages after seeing Oliver Stone's Savages — and smart money says some of them are — craft beer isn't the only boutique intoxicant buzzing around the nation's subconscious. In the shadow of the high-fructose-corn-syrup backlash, everyone from the Olive Garden to the proverbial Brooklyn popsicle startup is trying to cash in on craftsmanship. Meanwhile, screenwriters (clever advertisers in their own right) have found that the easiest way to hook viewers on drug-dealer protagonists is to sell crack as small-batch artisanal rock cocaine.

Would AMC's Breaking Bad be as popular if high school chemist turned meth cook Walter White made an average product instead of his "99 percent pure" blue glass? From the pilot on, the quality of White's output has driven the show's narrative arc. As a careful midgrade cook with DEA connections, he could have flown under the radar in a community overrun with the stuff and taken care of his chemo costs and family just fine. But what makes White more attractive than your garden-variety tweaker to both international cartels and viewers alike is his craftsmanship and attention to detail. He brings class to the New Mexico meth scene.

For a show set in the dirty world of methamphetamine, Breaking Bad is obsessive about cleanliness. Hardly an episode goes by without a discussion of potential impurities. The equipment always seals perfectly, the vats stainless steel. But that's how you make meth! No, it's not. That's how Walter White makes meth on Breaking Bad.

TV meth lab vs. meth lab

White isn't some junkie cook; he's a scientist. The exurbs are going crazy for the special meth that only he can make because it's pure and a scientist made it with stainless steel and it's blue. That's how a timid high school teacher became a regional drug kingpin over the course of a year. The point isn't that the show is unrealistic or hard to believe, but the narrative function of the ways in which it is: Which disbeliefs are viewers asked to suspend, and which ideologies are they encouraged to retain?

As far as Breaking Bad is concerned, Walter's meth is bought and used in unadulterated form, whereas in any believable scenario distributors would dilute ("step on") the product for sale. Finally, toward the end of the fifth season, Walter is forced to explain to a new organization that customers will pay more for his product than, say, one that was 85 percent pure. The other manufacturer seems to accept Walter's logic even though, as an ostensibly experienced dealer, he should know it doesn't make any sense. America isn't flooded with pure meth, and it's not because our chemists are too ethical. The illegal drug market simply doesn't reward peerless expertise in the same way celebrity cooking shows do.

The idea that people will always pay more for purer or small-batch products makes a lot of sense to demographics used to paying more for quality gimmicks — conveniently, the same demos advertisers pay a premium for. But it doesn't make sense for the consumers Breaking Bad so sparingly depicts. When we do see White's ultimate customers, they're zombies: all scabs and eroded teeth. We're not talking about impulse buyers or comparison shoppers here; it's a textbook case of what freshman economics students call inelastic demand. As Stringer Bell told D'Angelo Barksdale in another show about drugs, in direct contrast to what Walter claims, "When it's good, they buy. When it's bad, they buy twice as much. The worse we do, the more money we make."

Demographically, the viewers AMC wants are more likely to do a lot of pills than unscrew a light bulb to smoke some ice, even if the substances are chemically similar. There are plenty of expert scientists making tons of money cooking up and selling amphetamines, but they're not robbing trains or toting guns. Big Pharma brings in a $250 billion annually in the U.S. alone, much of it from the same chemical compounds in White's lab. When it's 89 percent pure, it's illegal meth; when it's 99 percent pure, methamphetamine is sold by Lundbeck Inc. under the trademark name Desoxyn, for "the short-term management of exogenous obesity." Walter isn't making crank; he is manufacturing black-market pharmaceuticals.

TV meth lab vs. pharmaceutical-production lab

A Breaking Bad in which the street dealers were diluting the product would have had Walter and his partner Jesse Pinkman competing with every local operation, struggling to set up a larger distribution network without costly middlemen and, well, interacting with meth users