Atlantic Magazine November, 2021: A New, Cheaper Form of Meth is Wreaking Havoc across the nation
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relaxing after shooting up in a San Francisco “supervised injection facility” - the authorities don’t care that these people are injecting poison in their veins, but do require the wearing of Covid masks. Some would find that ironic.
My daughter Kate mentioned this article in our conversation today, and it’s quite a read. Different chemically than it was a decade ago, the drug is creating a wave of severe mental illness and worsening America’s homeless problem
It’s a very long article, much of it devoted to the switch from making crystal methamphetamine out of relatively rare and expensive ephedrine, 5 lbs at a time, retailing at $15,000 a pound, to using a combination of cheap, albeit toxic, chemicals collectively referred to as P2P, so abundant that Mexican gangs were soon selling tons of it around the country for as little as $1,200 a pound. (remember when they first locked up Contact behind glass cases at the supermarket? I believe those ephedrine medicines are still locked away, uselessly; they were made obsolete a decade ago).
I’d recommend reading the entire article just because it gives a fascinating insight into the current drug market and its players, but here’s the part that Kate mentioned, and that’s relevant to what’s happening in our cities and country: P2P meth causes almost immediate, permanent brain damage, creating the paranoid schizophrenics we’re now encountering on our streets.
‘I DON’T KNOW THAT I WOULD EVEN CALL IT METH ANYMORE’
Methamphetamine was having a cultural moment in the U.S.—“meth mouth” had become an object of can’t-look-away fascination on the internet, and Breaking Bad was big. The switch from ephedrine-based labs to ones using the P2P method was even a plot point in the series. But few people outside the DEA really understood the consequences of this shift. Soon, tons of P2P meth were moving north, without any letup, and the price of meth collapsed. But there was more to the story than higher volume. Ephedrine meth tended to damage people gradually, over years. With the switchover to P2P meth, that damage seemed to accelerate, especially damage to the brain.
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Over the past year and a half, I’ve talked with meth addicts, counselors, and cops around the country. The people I spoke with told me stories nearly identical to Eric Barrera’s: P2P-meth use was quickly causing steep deterioration in mental health. The symptoms were always similar: violent paranoia, hallucinations, conspiracy theories, isolation, massive memory loss, jumbled speech. Methamphetamine is a neurotoxin—it damages the brain no matter how it is derived. But P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe. “I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore,” Ken Vick, the director of a drug-treatment center in Kansas City, Missouri, told me. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are afflictions that begin in the young. Now people in their 30s and 40s with no prior history of mental illness seemed to be going mad
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At the MORE Center, a Louisville clinic set up to treat pain-pill and heroin addicts, patients started coming in on meth. Before the Prieto-Greenhill connection, only two of counselor Jennifer Grzesik’s patients were using meth. Within three years, almost 90 percent of new patients coming to the clinic had meth in their drug screen. “I don’t remember having any homeless people in my caseload before 2016,” she told me. But 20 percent of her clients now are homeless.
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And going full circle, back to Kate in Portland,
‘Portland, Oregon, began seeing the flood of meth around 2013. By January 2020, the city had to close its downtown sobering station. The station had opened in 1985 as a place for alcoholics to sober up for six to eight hours, but it was unequipped to handle people addicted to P2P meth. “The degree of mental-health disturbance; the wave of psychosis; the profound, profound disorganization [is something] I’ve never seen before,” Rachel Solotaroff, the CEO of Central City Concern, the social-service nonprofit that ran the station, told me. Solotaroff was among the first people I spoke with. She sounded overwhelmed. “If they’re not raging and agitated, they can be completely noncommunicative. Treating addiction [relies] on your ability to have a connection with someone. But I’ve never experienced something like this—where there’s no way in to that person.”
As noted above, there’s much, much more in the full article, but these excerpts help explain why so many more truly mentally-ill addicts are on the street, and why they’re so much more violent than the dozing heroin junkies of yore. Now, what to do with them? Maybe move out and stay out of the cities, and leave the lunatics with the dwindling number of taxpaying citizens who still welcome their presence.
Amber said she gets nervous at night or in neighborhoods perceived as more dangerous. She said she has been yelled at and followed by strangers and makes sure to stay alert.
"It is the people who have mental health issues because you don't really know how they're going to react," she said. "I don't listen to anything in my headphones. I always have my pepper spray on my keychain.
She added that she constantly looks over her shoulder, "so I'm not oblivious to my surroundings."
Concerns about interacting with people experiencing mental health crises or drug intoxication are front and center on many Portlanders’ minds, according to the survey and residents Fox News spoke with.
Another doorman, Mike Lombardi, said the elderly victim is a cancer survivor “who was coming back from rehab” when she was slugged.
“She managed to get up and make it over here,” Lombardi said.
Meanwhile, [13-month-old] Leona’s dad said similar violent encounters with the city homeless have become all too common in the Big Apple.
“It’s wild,” Fitch said. “Every since they started pushing them out of the subway we have seen more and more homeless guys in this area. Up until a year ago we really didn’t see that many.”
