What sorts of chemicals are they using?
All sorts of industrial, toxic chemicals, like lye and hydrochloric acid. There’s a long, long list of things that can be used. But none of these are chemicals you want to put into your body. They’re used for tanning, perfumes, racing fuels.
How did this new formulation of meth change the effects of the drug?
First of all, the reformulation allows the mass distribution of methamphetamine unlike we’ve ever seen before. So it’s now all across the country, from LA to Vermont, including regions like New England where it never existed really before in large quantities.
Along the way though, what I found is that it is accompanied by rapid onset of severe symptoms of schizophrenia, particularly hallucinations. There is incoherent babbling. There’s an extraordinary degree of paranoia. It’s very intense, so you think everybody’s out to get you. No longer is it a party drug. It’s more of a sinister drug, where you kind of turn inward.
How does that affect people’s lives? You believe this changed version of meth is connected to homelessness, right?
What happens is people very quickly become homeless. As this form of meth has marched across the country, we have also seen an enormous increase in mental illness and in homelessness, particularly the encampments that we now have in so many towns across the country. I believe the tent encampments are connected intimately with this kind of methamphetamine. Certainly nobody on this form of meth wants to be in a homeless shelter. Because they’re kind of paranoid and scared of everybody. And so people feel a tent is a little pod where you can be alone away from this nasty world. And I believe it’s all connected.
Have other experts confirmed this?
There have been no neuroscientific studies on this. So what exactly is happening? I don’t know. Is it because the meth has some new formulation or some new kind of chemical in it? Or, on the other hand, is it simply the fact that it’s so much more potent and so cheap and people are using lots of it? I don’t know. What I’m giving you is the street reporting, from talking to people who have worked in this world most of their professional lives, people who have been addicted to it and people now in recovery.
Can you tell me about Eric Barrera, the former meth addict you met who first highlighted these changes for you?
He had been using methamphetamines since the early 2000s, when Mexican traffickers were almost entirely producing meth using ephedrine. He said he would party all night long and would want to jabber away with everyone. Then, he said, in 2009, everything changed. There was no more of that party euphoria. One night he used methamphetamines and he became scarily paranoid. At his girlfriend’s house, he began stabbing the walls with a butcher knife thinking she was keeping a man inside the walls. He then very quickly became homeless. Up to that point, he had held a job, he had a car and an apartment. Then all of a sudden everything just kind of disintegrates and he ends up on the street.
When I met him, he had been sober for years and was a homeless outreach coordinator for vets. He said, “I don’t know what’s causing this, but I can tell you that every encampment I go through, I see people in the same condition of mental degradation that I went through.”
2009 is exactly the year when the Mexican trafficking world began to switch away from ephedrine meth and toward P2P meth. So I began asking people who worked in the world of methamphetamines what they were seeing. The story is always the same. This stuff arrives and, very quickly, people begin to lose all bearings and the homeless population expands.
Have you gotten any pushback on this theory from those who work with the homeless?
Sure. People want to blame high housing costs for homelessness. They feel that, if you say drugs are the reason for homelessness, then that stigmatizes people who are homeless. I’m not sure I buy that at all. But I found the increases in homelessness happening in areas where housing costs are very high, like Los Angeles, but also in areas where there are no rising costs and where they’ve never had any homelessness, like, for example, the town of Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/22/fentanyl-methamphetamine-drugs-epidemic-us
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