Breaking Bad (Netflix/screengrab)

It turns out Breaking Bad’s Walter White was wasting a whole lot of time trying to get his hands on all that methylamine to make his beautiful blue crystal meth. He could’ve just asked a bunch of people who had taken meth to wee into jars.

Yep – sometimes people drink their wee in order to get high on the drugs they took and passed through their own system – because sometimes the drug is still in it.

Some drink the drug-infused urine straight up, while others extract the drug from pee.

Also known as ‘tinkle tweaking,’ meth users can store their own wee and try to recover un-metabolised methamphetamine from it to fuel another high.

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A quick search on Reddit for advice and it turns out the niche culture of re-dosing through urine isn’t only common in communities of meth users. This quote below references the use of MDMA

Like us, the above Redditor wanted to know if drinking wee after taking drugs is an actual thing that people do.

One user replied: “I’ve… done this, but not with ecstasy; I did it with fly agaric mushrooms. I learned that pee tastes kind of like chicken broth, if you were to replace the savoriness of chicken with the bitterness of urea (it was nearly as salty, though).

“I don’t think it noticeably intensified the trip, and it was not exactly a pleasant experience to say the least. All in all, it was something that I am embarrassed to have tried and now rarely talk about.”

Another chimed in: “When you’ve been guzzling water all night, your urine can be very light and have a very subtle flavor.

“I’ve exchanged it with my girlfriend before, and it’s actually a very lovely intimate thing. Snicker all you want now, but the next time you’re off your face, you might find it appealing.”

“I don’t drink my own piss and I feel like the minority,” another joked.

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If you’re not convinced by anonymous people on Reddit, we also did a bit of scientific digging, and learned that certain drugs – including aspirin, caffeine, cocaine and methamphetamine – find their way into the urine, and sometimes they get there unchanged.

Elsewhere, there are reports that police in New Mexico have found meth users running ‘urine extraction’ labs.

Way back in 2007, police happened upon a rented storage locker in the US state, where they found 50 1-gallon jugs or urine. Narcotics Sgt Becky Howell, who received the report on the incident, explained: “I said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is a meth lab. This is a urine extraction lab.'”

Howell added: “I’m not 100 percent sure what this guy was doing. Five years ago, I probably would have been surprised at that. But now, knowing and understanding methamphetamine and an addict’s addiction to it, it doesn’t surprise me.”

It’s hardly surprising, considering drugs are making their way into the UK’s water systems via urine. Indeed, a report from 2014 found that cocaine use in the UK is now so common that traces of the drug have contaminated drinking water.

Experts from the Drinking Water Inspectorate found supplies contained benzoylecgonine, the metabolised form of the drug that appears once it has gone through the body. It’s the same compound that’s looked for in urine-based drug tests for cocaine.

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“Intakes of the compounds detected in drinking water are many orders of magnitude lower than levels of therapeutic doses,” the report said.

“Estimated exposures for most of the detected compounds are at least thousands of times below doses seen to produce adverse effects in animals and hundreds of thousands below human therapeutic doses.

“Thus, the detected pharmaceuticals are unlikely to present a risk to health.”