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The new meth: Different chemically than it was a decade ago, the drug is creating a wave of severe mental illness and worsening America’s homelessness problem
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- Title
- 'I Don't Know That I Would Even Call It Meth Anymore'
- Authors
- Sam Quinones
- Published
- Oct 18 2021
- Word count
- 7934 words
It makes me sad that we can have so many stories like this and yet people insist that the solution is to continue to penalize, criminalize, and stigmatize drugs. People want drugs. People want money. These two problems resolve each other, 100% of the time. When we criminalize it, we end up with people coming up with ideas that we don't have safeguards against. What broken processes are being used to create this p2p meth? What shortcuts or dangerous chemicals are utilized to make it cheaper and easier to produce? It needs to be fully legalized and controlled by the government so we can at least ensure the product itself isn't destroying lives. We can tax it and use those taxes to provide shelter and resources to people who have been affected by the drug. We can provide education to people about the drug and stop judging them for using it.
How much longer and how many more drug crises are we going to have to go through to learn this lesson?
I think the new synthetic drug wave is a very different beast than the beasts that the alcohol and marijuana prohibitions tried to fight against, and it's different from the older heroin crisis. I wonder if lessons from the past are still applicable.
I think there are intractable problems:
Legalization or tolerance (gedoogbeleid) could help with safer distribution and dosage. I think there should be legal, state-assisted exits from addiction — but I am highly skeptical that there should be legal entryways as the descent into synthetic addiction and crisis seems to be more a straight drop than a slide.
I am also becoming skeptical of moving our culture toward drug destigmatization.
I just got home from a long weekend in LA spent with a group of gay ravers doing coke, ketamine, and ecstasy day in and day out. But I was sober as the DD. (But I was tempted to do some ecstasy one night, but figured that I couldn't sober quickly enough by the end of the night.)
I became the DD after an alarming incident where we rode at night with a Lyft driver who was tired, admitted he was going through shit in life, and dropped that he took meth and Adderall so he could keep driving and then meet up with his buddy later that night. It was terrifying ride: he missed several highway exits and changes and made swerves when he couldn't recognize the curving road.
I wrote a detailed report to Lyft afterward. One very... ahem, 'woke' LA hipster-artist type in the group chastized me out for "snitching", saying that I shouldn't have reported the driver because "he was going through shit".
I was adamant that I did the ethical and right thing. This driver seemed fresh, and it seemed very likely he'd eventually cause serious injury or death to someone or himself. But I was appalled that this group member somehow thought it wasn't as big of a deal as the driver's personal struggles.
I think we do need better ways to rehabilitate and heal people. But I'm really, really not liking a taste of this drug-destigmatized culture I'm getting a taste of in ultraliberal California.
Nothing excuses that behavior, period. Operating a vehicle while under the influence of drugs is not safe, full stop. Whether drugs are legal or not wouldn't change whether this person would make this decision, except that drug legalization might help to educate more people as to why they shouldn't do this. Drug legalization might help this person get the kind of help they need to avoid turning to drugs in this manner because they'd have a support structure which doesn't stigmatize them for doing drugs, and instead points them towards harm reduction.
I'm sorry you had this experience, but you shouldn't draw any conclusions about 'destigmatized culture' that you got a taste of in 'ultraliberal California' based on a single weekend with a group of 'gay ravers doing coke, ketamine, and ecstasy day in and day out.'
If you haven't read about the Rat Park study, I recommend Googling. Or here's a handy comic.
Destigmatizing drugs and addiction is a key component in trying to solve the problem. Isolation and criminalization of vulnerable people helps no one.
Where legalization is concerned, we know that prohibition doesn't work. The meth problem is a perfect example of this. We've watched meth use explode in the last 20 years. It just keeps going up. Clearly we need to try something else. And we can look at the results of decriminalization in various places for evidence that it is a dramatic net positive.
In the example of the Lyft driver... meth being illegal, and highly stigmatized wasn't stopping him.
I think the culture you’re naming is more like the “microdose shrooms with your friends in the park” type of drug use. Every city has self destructive drug users. If California has a monopoly on anything it’s that it’s a bit more common to do psychedelics and if you mention them at your white collar job the response will be like “oh cool yeah I do that sometimes too”.
It seems so obvious, and yet here we are. Progress is happening though, it's still hard to believe that possession of all drugs has been decriminalized in a US state (Oregon). We may actually get there.
I do substance abuse counseling here in Hawaii and unfortunately meth is our number one choice of drug in the islands. A team here has been testing any street drugs they can find, looking for what else might be in the drugs and they have found fentanyl in every drug they have tested, crack, heroin, meth. It’s a serious problem that we don’t even fully understand and may not for several more decades.
I could go on quite a bit about this but I’ll just post the local news video for you guys to see >>> https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2021/10/06/drug-counselors-outreach-workers-struggle-address-hawaiis-evolving-drug-problem/
BONUS: If you want to know more about the meth situation in Hawaii specifically check out this recent report done by PBS Hawaii >>> https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6vEmK6RvY4A
The scientist in me found this particular article to be... Enlightening, oddly. Granted, the human consequences are and continue to be devastating. But the fact this drug can be derived in a number of novel ways, and can induce psychosis much more quickly than in the past (though precisely why this is the case hasn't been investigated) makes me very curious. There's so much that's unknown about how this "new" meth interacts with other drugs in the body, why it's having such a dramatic effect on the mind, how social conditions among users might exacerbate it's effects...
I don't mean to be callous- I find this topic to be fascinating in much the same way seemingly bottomless holes are fascinating- terrified of being swallowed by the void, but wondering just what exactly is down there...
I don't believe this is actually about a "new meth", as in a pharmacologically different drug. The author doesn't point to any indications of that, just the potential for contaminants. The effects they describe can be explained more simply as it being much, much cheaper, and people using high quantities as a result. Meth has always had these potential side effects, and this article feels rather sensationalized to be implying otherwise.
I found it rather offputting and the way it was worded sounded naive at best, purposefully misleading at worst. I think contaminants are likely a bigger problem than the author bothered to explain here, but as you said quantity may be the driving force.
I definitely didn't mean to downplay the contaminant angle there, but between shake and bake and P2P, I would be mildly surprised if there were a major difference in the degree of contamination. Maybe the contaminants from a poorly made P2P batch are more toxic than those from a pseudoephedrine derived one though.
To be clear I was chastising the author, not you, for downplaying it.
Knowing the quality level of most street level drugs I've seen combined with what is pointed out in the article - namely the DEA agent being surprised at some of the chemicals they were using and people working in the plants falling sick and dying, I suspect it may play a pretty large role. Meth and some of the harder drugs are often quite dirty and cut down, often to 70% or less purity by the time they reach the hands of a user and its quite possible some of the industrial chemicals used in this process aren't properly removed or controlled. When the end goal is just making a bunch of meth to sell and you don't really care if people have long term damage, it's easy to cut corners in malicious ways.
Oh, I didn't think you were. I just realized my comment may have been doing so.
A ton of the toxicity of street drugs is definitely a matter of contaminants. My only meaning was that it's not likely someone crushing up a bunch of oral tablets and then using toxic chemicals like toluene and phosphorus to turn it into meth is going to result in a 'cleaner' end product than the more-involved P2P methods. Like I said though, those specific contaminants could be more dangerous.
Well... Yes and no. Undeniably, this is still meth we're talking about- and yes, the quantity available to be cheaply consumed is a factor to consider. However, assuming ingesting greater quantities of meth alone leads to the outcomes seen among users is just that, an assumption. It limits the kind of questions whose answers could ultimately better inform policy (optimistic I know, but bear with me). Like earlier in the article, the author mentions an instance where a DEA chemist investigating a sample from a drug lab found much high concentrations of the "preferred" stereoisomer d-methanphetamine, something that previously he hadn't seen in illegal labs making meth through the P2P pathway. When stereoisomers exist elsewhere in chemistry, they tend to be notable for their very different interactions in the body. My question is (among plenty of others), how does consuming meth with a higher purity of the compound that makes a person (d-methanphetamine) high affect that person, when previous preparations available on the market were likely less concentrated? That's an open, legitamite line of inquiry as far as I'm concerned.
As for this article being sensationalistic, I can see that. I'm saying what I picked up out of it was questions about the technical details, which is maybe not what the writer primarily intended the reader to come away with.
To be clear, pseudoephedrine based meth 'cooking' methods yield 100% d-isomer. The reason P2P was not preferred and was abandoned for some time was because it yielded a racemic mixture, among other issues.
Ahh. I did not know that. I had thought the preference for pseudoephedrine based methods in the past was due to the relative convenience/availability of the precursor, not the chemical product itself. The whole chemical contamination angle seems more likely with that in mind.
Well, for one, pseudoephedrine-derived methamphetamine is by default 100% d-methamphetamine. A P2P method results in a racemic mixture, but a PE synthesis results in an isomerically pure product.
I'm sure it's possible for a botched production to result in relatively novel compounds, but there's been a very, very large amount of research done on amphetamines and phenethylamines in general. Perhaps some newly-popular method out there is accidentally resulting in some sort of supermeth, but I would really hope that a DEA chemical analyst would test for and be able to identify any significant quantities of those byproducts. Talk about optimistic, I suppose.
I enjoyed reading this article, but midway through it I thought to myself that this writing style really reminds me of Dreamland. I scrolled back up to the top and sure enough it was the same author. If you haven't read Dreamland it's good. The chapters are all very short and like this article it kind of revisits the same points over and over (which some people might not be crazy about). I'll check out his new book too for sure. Meth has done a real number here. I live in a small city about an hour west of Atlanta, GA and the number of homeless people here has increased over the last eight years or so. There are multiple intersections and shopping centers where you'll see panhandlers, which was something I was only accustomed to when living in Atlanta and Philadelphia.
There is also a crazy article that this article is linked too..
Police Are Taking to the Air Courtesy of Drug Dealer
Someone was inspired by Desperado...