Today, Explained - The new meth

Episode Date: December 10, 2021

While the nation’s attention has been focused on the opioid crisis, a new, more dangerous form of methamphetamine has swept across the country. Today’s show was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Cristian Ayala, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from I don't think at least in the past few years, anyone would really argue that the United States isn't taking the opioid crisis more seriously than it used to. It gets attention from the White House. There have been these game changing lawsuits. Just this week, the Met Museum in New York City scratched off the Sackler name from seven

exhibition spaces because of the family's role in pushing opioids on Americans. Sam Quinones has been reporting on opioids for years. He's a crime reporter who spent 10 years with the Los Angeles Times. Back in 2015, he wrote a groundbreaking book about the opioid crisis called Dreamland. And he's just written another book. He covers opioids again, but this, it's only half the story. The other half is about meth.

Because I believe the meth that's out there now, produced in Mexico, is of a new kind, creating horrifying damage, really, mentally for people across the country, creating mental illness, schizophrenia, and along with it, our homeless problem that we're seeing all across the country living creating mental illness, schizophrenia, and along with it, our homeless problem that we're seeing all across the country living in tent encampments. It's a brand new problem associated with meth that we really haven't seen before. And it's really all across the country because the meth down in Mexico is produced in such staggering quantities that it too is all across the United States. Okay, well, I want to get to the new meth with you, but let's start with the old meth.

What is the origin story of methamphetamines in the United States? Well, really, the drug goes back to the World War I time period. A Japanese researcher invented it. It was then used in Nazi Germany to fire the troops, to keep the troops marching. They called it panza chocolata or tank chocolate. It was also known as stuka tablets from the dive bombers. It was given to the pilots. In the United States, we also gave this drug to soldiers. Pregnant women used it. It was really one example of where you have a drug that's legal and is now part of the culture.

And so I went back to the doctor and he gave me amphetamines, prescribing two tablets a day for depression when necessary. Well, I started and it did help, but then I started having trouble sleeping because it was... It then reemerges towards the end of the 1960s, produced mostly by biker gangs in California. The biker gangs aren't very good at it, but they're the only ones making it, and they develop kind of a culture of speed, of methamphetamine crank, and you see kind of this first public display of this at the Altamont concert. Get on down. Get on down. The free concert that the Rolling Stones gave,

in which they, for some unexplicable reason, hired the Hells Angels as their security, and it was just bedlam and a man was killed. People, I mean, who's fighting what for? Who's fighting and what for? Why are we fighting? The bikers controlled the dope for a good 20 plus years, I would say up until the late 1980s. Towards the end of the 80s in San Diego, the Mexican trafficking world discovers methamphetamine

at the same time that they discover a much more efficient way of making methamphetamine. The way really it was made by the japanese researcher decades before it's using a chemical called ephedrine the ephedrine is decongestant you find in pseudofed pills but it's a very close to molecularly to methamphetamine so it doesn't take much to transform ephedrine into methamphetamine it's a very efficient way you don't need a lot of different chemicals nor much know-how and so it democratizes to a certain degree the meth trade. You begin to see it being made in motel rooms now and in kitchens and so on. What if we rented one of those self-storage places? You

know, those little orange garages worked out of there. They're on to that. They got dogs that sniff around. RV. That's what you want. And so you begin to see it showing up and it moving beyond biker's hands so much. The main people, though, who take it up are Mexican traffickers, and they begin to industrialize it. They begin to make it in quantities the bikers

can never achieve and are not competent to achieve. They begin to produce it in what are then known at the time as super labs which is a 50 to 100 pounds at a time sometimes and very well organized and this takes place in the central valley of California. San Diego is an enormous meth central kind of place. But it also begins to emerge during these years down in Mexico. And that is where the story remains for another 20 years. And if I'm not mistaken, you are so far describing what we would think of as like the old meth. How does this new meth enter the story? The Mexican authorities had gradually been learning about the damages of methamphetamine, all based on the use of ephedrine. And so in 2008, they took the draconian step of

making ephedrine illegal. When they did that, the trafficking world went through a brief spasm of wondering, where are we going with this? This was our ticket to unbelievable profits and so on. But that lasted only a short period of time. They had chemists who they paid, who were helping them, and the chemist told them, well, there's this other way of making methamphetamine. You don't need to make it with a veteran. This other way is very messy, stinky. It has a lot of byproducts and so on, but you can make it. And this is the way the bikers used to make it. There is really only one benefit to the trafficking world in Mexico from this new method, and it proves crucial. That benefit of this new way of making it is that you can make it with a whole bunch of combinations of different, very easily available chemicals. These are legal chemicals, industrial chemicals,

toxic chemicals, but you don't really need to worry anymore about just one chemical being regulated the way ephedrine was. So there's all these chemical hacks, basically, in this one method that allow you to get to the same result. And that means if they have control of shipping ports, then they can get all the chemicals that they want, and that this will allow them to make this stuff in quantities that they never, ever imagined possible with ephedrine. It's a revelation, I think, to a lot of people, and that all you now need is access to world chemical markets because there's no way any government can control these precursor chemicals because they are used in all kinds of very common industries. Photography, tanning, racing fuel, perfume.

They're very toxic chemicals. They're hydrochloric acid, there's sulfuric acid, there's cyanide, live, many, many others. A whole bunch of other chemicals that they use in this and that they combine, and eventually you combine and you can make methamphetamine. And what is this new meth called? Does it have a name? It's generally called P2P meth. So it allows them, for the first time, to make just staggering quantities of this drug. And beginning in about 2013 is when they really get to a point where they can make these kind of quantities.

That's when you begin to see this methamphetamine coming out of Mexico, begin to almost like march across the United States. 41 suspects, dozens of guns, hundreds of pounds of meth, heroin, and cocaine. In 2013-14, it's in L.A. and Seattle, Portland, various places like that on the West. Oregon's highest federal attorney says it was all part of a multi-million dollar operation that brought drugs from Mexico right here to the Portland metro area. Then by 2016-17, for sure, it's in the Midwest, Ohio, Kentucky, places that never had Mexican methamphetamine.

All of a sudden, it's showing up. And it's doing to the small-time, little neo-moonshine-type meth makers what Walmart did to Main Street. It's just basically moving them out and out-competing them incredibly. And then by 2019, that same methamphetamine is up into New England. Commander Scott Pelletier says his undercover agents and uniformed officers are seeing more and more crystal meth in Maine. They're making so much that the price across the country drops by 80 to 90 percent. In Nashville, an ounce of methamphetamine used to go for $12.50.

Now it goes for $250. That's the kind of price drop that you're seeing, even as they cover the entire country, which is something they never, ever could do with ephedrine methamphetamine. Thank you. in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month.

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. So, Sam, you've explained that there's this new kind of meth flooding America. It's called P2P. It's cheap, it's widely available,

and it's incredibly popular. What effect does this meth have on the people who use it? According to my reporting, this P2P meth is accompanied by very quick onset, very severe symptoms of schizophrenia. This stuff is very quick. You begin to have severe paranoia, very florid hallucinations. You begin to fear everything. The world becomes this constant threat. You really begin to retreat indoors. The ephedrine meth was a party drug. It was euphoric. It was big in the gay community. You want to party. You want to be around other people. This meth coming out of Mexico now, it turns people inward. They're

all alone in their brain. They don't want to be around people. They want to be all alone. They're seeing spectacular hallucinations. They're afraid of everybody. They're taking pictures of every license plate on their block just to make sure that person isn't following me. They're thinking of all... They're sometimes speaking in what's known in psychology as word salad. There's also an enormous focus on hoarding, just scavenging stuff from the street. I believe that this methamphetamine is a major driving force behind our mental illness and homelessness problems,

particularly tent encampment homelessness, that we're seeing now, not just on the West Coast, you know. This is all across the country in varying levels of intensity. And I know in your reporting, you spoke to people who use this P2P meth. Tell me the story of Eric Barrera. Eric is a former Marine, lives in Los Angeles, and works as a homeless outreach coordinator. His story tells me is that when I got out of the Marines, I was still kind of not pleased with my time in the Marines. got out of the Marines, I was still kind of not pleased with my time in the Marines. And so kind of depressed, I began to use methamphetamine in 2001. And nobody knew that I was high. It was very euphoric. You would feel very focused,

but not weirded out. He used meth fairly regularly, but he still had a life. He had a job, a wife, a girlfriend, actually, and a house and all this. And then he said in 2009 is when the meth changed. Now I stopped him right there. And I said, what do you mean the meth changed? He said, yeah, I used it in 2009 and it drove me mad. I remember getting high and hearing voices clearly, like I could hear my friend's voice in my backyard. All of a sudden I was paranoid. My girlfriend had a man in the house. So I grabbed a giant knife and I just started stabbing in the mattress where I thought it

was hiding. Then it was stabbing the walls with his big butcher knife, trying just started stabbing in the mattress where I thought it was hiding. Then it was stabbing the walls with his big butcher knife, trying to get him out of the wall. It seemed like a really bad acid trip. It just wasn't like that clean and focused feeling. It was anything but being, I couldn't focus on anything other than trying not to die. And when he was telling me this story, I said, are you sure this is 2009 you're talking about? Because that meant a lot to me. That year meant a lot.

That was one year after the Mexican government had made ephedrine illegal, essentially, to possess. And that was when the meth began to change, too. I began to think, damn, if this guy felt this in 2009, these horrible symptoms of schizophrenia, paranoia, and hallucination and all this, and this meth is now all across the country, then it's worth checking to see if these symptoms are now all across the country. And so that begins the last part of my meth investigation in which I set out to talk to as many people who were working with this at the most ground floor level that I could find.

This is addiction counselors, recovering addicts, police officers in Skid Row, neuropsychologists. And what's amazing to me as I talk to people all across the country, they all report the same story. Yes, we're seeing people, we know that these folks are not mentally ill. They don't have schizophrenia, yet they're displaying those symptoms. And I'm hearing the same story in West Virginia, in Albuquerque, in Portland, in rural Indiana, in Virginia, as I'm hearing from Eric Barrera, who now is telling me, the thing is, I don't know what's going on. But I can tell you this, when I go through the homeless encampments that it is my job to do now, I'm seeing people all

over every place I go who are in the same state of mental decomposition that I was in for several years. What is it about this, you know, paranoia-inducing drug that keeps people hooked, though? Because it sounds like compared to the old meth, the way you describe Eric's story, it's no fun. No, it's an excellent question, and I'm not sure I know the answer to it, but it is absolutely addictive, and you become kind of content in your own little world. But why is it addictive? I don't know. I want to say too that this is street reporting I'm giving you. There is no neuroscience on this. There is no mouse studies or rat studies. There's no peer reviewed journal reports on why this might be creating these problems all across the country.

I'm not capable of doing those studies, obviously. I'm a crime reporter. How do you treat addiction to this P2P meth? If there's no science on what it's really doing to people, is there at least treatment procedure? No. There's no real treatment for methamphetamine addiction other than separation from the drug,

which is the key thing, right? Detoxing, separation, keeping it away, which is very difficult because it's so prevalent now, and sleeping for a long time, and then time, waiting for the brain to heal. Time is essential in all this. But it basically requires the person must be removed from the environment in which he or she is using this god-awful stuff. So with opioid addiction, there are medical treatments. There are methadone is one, suboxone is another, Vivitrol, you may have heard of these. To treat medically, primarily, it's the cravings for more. And they do very effective work,

but there's no such thing yet, really, for methamphetamine. It's just simply separation and then time away and sleeping and letting the brain heal again. So with no real science yet, no really effective drug treatments, and assuming we don't just want to throw every meth user in this country in prison for a year or two to get them off the drug. Is anyone at least trying to reduce how much of this P2P stuff is on the streets? You know, the way they were able to regulate the Sudafed era of meth, the Ephedrine era of meth? Can we do that with P2P? Well, this involves an engagement with Mexico that neither the United States nor Mexico seems willing to do, but absolutely has to be part of the mix. We cannot continue to allow this stuff to come up in this way.

It reminds me, as much as a drug addiction problem, it reminds me of like a national poisoning. That's really kind of what's going on. We absolutely need to engage with that country. They need to stand up, deal with the corruption, deal with these massive supplies of chemicals coming in through their ports that are fueling all this horrid dope that's coming into our country. We, on the other hand, need to focus on all these guns that are bought here in the United States and then smuggled south that ensure the impunity of those guys to make that dope in such staggering horrid quantities. And there is a definite role, absolutely central role, for law enforcement at all levels to be

played in helping to reduce the supply of this stuff. There are other things that need to happen on the prevention end for first and foremost really is prevention. It seems to me treatment is good, but you cannot treat your way out of this any more than you can arrest your way out of this. The supply is the thing. If this wasn't in such vast supply, it wouldn't be the big issue that it is today, but it's all over the country.

Sam Quinones is the author of The Least of Us, True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. Our episode today was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matthew Collette, engineered by Christian Ayala, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. It's Today Explained. you