It's All About The Branding

Some people have scoffed on the Internet recently about the idea presented on "Breaking Bad" that addicts would pay more money for a better-quality drug. Yglesias responds by pointing out that effective product branding would do the trick. The only question, of course, is whether such branding is chemically possible. I can just imagine Walter White mentioning the magic of chirality:

But what if your ultra-pure, locally sourced meth was manufactured by a special process that lends it a distinctive blue color? Well, that’s a game-changer. Instant branding. And even though the brand isn’t super-flashy, it’s got something more important than that: credibility. The hue of the product derives directly from the method of synthesizing it, so the only way to copy it completely would be to actually master the production process.