The real life Walter White has been released from jail.

George Marquardt is an old man. He’s 69, balding, with a grey moustache. He kind of looks like a less well-kept version of Dr Phil.

He was a science whizz as a child at school in Milwaukee. He was also fascinated by an anti-drug video involving a mouse on LSD chasing a cat. Newsweek reported that when he was 19 he stole lab equipment from the University of Wisconsin and that he tricked a Milwaukee College into believing he was a lecturer in physics.

A scientist told a Milwaukee paper in 1965 that he should go to college but “he seems to be convinced he is too smart for that”. A school mate described him as someone who was going to either win the Nobel Prize or “end up in jail”.

Marquardt did end up in jail. The second time for manufacturing fentanyl, which requires an extremely laborious, risky and skilled chemical procedure. Fentanyl is used in operations as a powerful anaesthetic and the U.S. is currently in the grips of an epidemic. Last year in New Hampshire alone, 28 people died from overdosing on pure heroin yet 253 overdosed and died on fentanyl or fentanyl laced heroin according to Fusion.

Watch the full video on George Marquardt from Fusion below. Post continues after video.

On the street, often the drug is mixed with other opiates, sometimes it is sold on its own, but just a few grains of it can kill a person and in the 1990s it is estimated around 300 died from overdosing on Marquardt’s various batches. The Hartford Chronicle reported that DEA administrator Robert C. Bonner dubbed the batch of Marquardt’s fentanyl “the serial killer” of the drug world.

The self taught chemist who called himself a “clandestine” drug manufacturer for hire, Newsweek reported he also made AZT for the HIV infected who couldn’t afford the drug and for a fee provided the components of nerve gas to survivalists.

Marquandt was caught after a dealer accidentally gave details of his drug lab to an undercover policeman, he pleased guilty (as he always has when caught) and was jailed for 25 years in 1993, served 22 and last year was released.

This month, as a free man, he gave an interview to Fusion where he made it clear that the “capital” from drug manufacturing suited his lifestyle and allowed him to pursue his passions of listening to classical symphonies and watching concerts.

He was never into the drug scene, he was into the money drug manufacturing gave him and the challenge of the chemical manufacturing itself.

The visuals of a highly intelligent middle aged man, illegally cooking a synthetic drug in a sophisticated home operation may conjure up comparisons of Walter White, the chemistry teacher in the TV series Breaking Bad who turns to meth manufacturing to pay off his mortgage when he discovers he has cancer, but Kansas police scoff at the comparison.

“Above [Walter White] you’ve got Marquardt, who can manufacture the precursors and analyze them with a machine that he built himself, and installed in his laboratory,” retired Narcotics agent John Madinger told Fusion. “Nobody’s ever done that before in the United States or since. He’s the only one.”

He studied police manuals, science literature and anything he could get his hands on to stay ahead of drug kingpins and police (he made sure that his batches had different “fingerprints”).

The 100s of drug deaths and the decades in jail don’t seem to concern Marquandt.

“[Drug users] court these risks,” he told Fusion. “I put this to a fellow one time: “If we could make this risk-free, would you be interested in it?” And he says, “No, I like to live on the edge.” And so it’s, if you will, a kind of a partnership forged in hell, right? And everybody basically knows we’re on the same page in that regard. So I don’t feel like I’m supplying a product to an innocent or naïve population.”

What is a concern is his mobile phone. He had to ask the reporter at Fusion to turn it off before his interview, and back on when the interview had finished.

Maybe technology will be the next scientific frontier Marquandt will have to conquer.

*Feature image via Youtube/FusionTV.