Is Methamphetamine More Destructive Than Previously Realized?

Beyond the Headlines: Methamphetamine’s Devastating Impact on Health, Families, and Society

While it’s opioids that have occupied the headlines for the last several years, methamphetamine wreaks havoc on millions of American lives, day after day and year after year. It’s true that meth does not kill nearly as many people as its cousin from a criminal lab, fentanyl, but it does damage in so many other ways. It may not kill people outright, but it may wrest them from their homes, jobs, and families and ruin their lives and their health in every way possible. That’s methamphetamine.

A Short History of Methamphetamine

This very strong stimulant drug was first synthesized in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century and then began to be produced in Japan. In the early 1900s, it was sold as a decongestant medication. During the Second World War, the drug found widespread use as a stimulant to keep pilots and soldiers awake during long flights and marches.

In the 1950s, forms of this drug were abused by artists, writers, students, and long-distance truck drivers. In every case, whether used by civilians, artists, or drivers, prolonged use of the drug was accompanied by a deterioration of judgment.¹

In the 1970s, West Coast biker gangs discovered that the production of methamphetamine and PCP (angel dust) was a lucrative business. Methamphetamine quickly became a West Coast problem.² Throughout the 1980s, law enforcement agencies fought methamphetamine production and trafficking without managing to crush this industry. By 1990, motorcycle gangs were responsible for 40% of all the illicit drug trafficking in the country and 75% of the methamphetamine trade.³

Drug cartels then took over production of this drug, setting up large laboratories to produce many pounds of the drug in each production cycle. Then, small labs in rural areas of the U.S. began to show up by the dozen once drug traffickers discovered that cold medication with pseudoephedrine provided them with the precursor chemicals they needed. In Missouri alone in 2012, more than 2,000 of these labs were dismantled. Stricter controls of these cold medications curbed this small-scale production.⁴

By 2016, cartels were in control of 90% of the methamphetamine supply in America. Their precursor chemicals didn’t come from packets of cold medication but rather in bulk from Chinese, Central and South American, and South African labs.⁵,⁶ Between 2015 and 2019, overdose deaths from stimulants other than cocaine (which would primarily be methamphetamine) almost tripled.⁷

Methamphetamine Use in the Present Day

By 2023, 2.6 million Americans were current users of methamphetamine. While some pharmaceutical methamphetamine is abused, most of the abuse involves illicitly manufactured meth.⁸

Users of Methamphetamine

• Ages 12 to 17: 40,000
• Ages 18 to 25: 108,000
• Ages 26 and above: 2.5 million

One of methamphetamine’s defining characteristics is its rapid addictiveness. For some people, brief use is all it takes to set them on the path to full addiction with all the damage created by that habit. Methamphetamine use causes a person to feel euphoric as well as energetic. The user’s focus is enhanced and they may feel invulnerable. There’s a rush for 5 to 30 minutes.

But once a person’s body gets used to the drug, they need more of it to get the same high. This gradually developing tolerance compels them to use larger and larger doses, speeding them ever faster toward addiction.

Once addiction claims them, the compulsion to get more meth motivates the person far more than caring for themselves, their children or spouse, job, friends, or anything else they care about. And then there is the crime and violence associated with methamphetamine use. The distribution and use of this drug correlates with violence and criminal behaviors, whether that behavior is to help a person get the drugs they need or defend their distribution network.

The Arrival of P2P Methamphetamine Speeds the Decline

As the supply of precursor chemicals changed, so did the chemical composition of this addictive substance. The methamphetamine problem in America was severe enough, but the new P2P meth, as it was nicknamed, was worse. (It’s called P2P because it utilizes the chemical phenyl-2-propanone.) This new form of methamphetamine began to cause unprecedented damage to a person’s health and life.

Author Sam Quinones, a reporter on prescription opioid abuse for many years, described the effects of this new type of methamphetamine: “Mentally, the P2P meth is destroying the brain, creating mental illness very quickly. It’s a drug where you live in your brain. You isolate.”⁹

“The supplies of meth begin to explode, the same as with fentanyl. You begin to see it marching across the country. It’s a dangerous situation where we have more of these extraordinarily damaging, deadly, dangerous drugs than we’ve ever seen before.”

Not only that, but the supply was high and the price was low. Quinones continued, “The supplies of meth begin to explode, the same as with fentanyl. You begin to see it marching across the country. It’s a dangerous situation where we have more of these extraordinarily damaging, deadly, dangerous drugs than we’ve ever seen before.” In an interview with Oregon Public Broadcasting, Quinones went on to describe the effects of this new meth as creating severe schizophrenia, paranoia, derangement, and hallucinations.

This new methamphetamine began to fuel the homelessness situation on the West Coast. As evidence of the interaction between methamphetamine and homelessness, from 2014 through 2019, methamphetamine was the top drug used by homeless people in Los Angeles County.¹⁰

Oregon’s Acute Problem with This New Methamphetamine

According to an Oregon Public Broadcasting report of 2022, Oregon had the highest reported rate of methamphetamine use in the country. An Associated Press report from Portland, Oregon, noted that methamphetamine contributed to 81% of overdose deaths among the homeless in that city, a higher statistic than fentanyl.¹¹

Oregon’s meth problem severely aggravated the state’s mental health problems. The facilities for the mentally ill began to be overrun by those patients whose mental illness was linked to their methamphetamine use.¹² As doctors discovered, it was very difficult to tell the difference between mental illness and the damage created by methamphetamine. The number of people unable to be charged with crimes because of their mental impairment nearly tripled. It can take weeks, months, or even years to recover from this psychosis, if it ever resolves.

Damaging Effects of Methamphetamine

You’ve got to ask yourself who would ever want to use a drug with devastating effects like those below? When the first rush of a methamphetamine high hits, the user isn’t thinking about what could happen to them in a few months or years.

• Anxiety
• Confusion
• Insomnia
• Mood disturbances
• Violent behavior
• Paranoia
• Visual and auditory hallucinations
• Delusions
• Apathy
• Malnutrition
• Depression
• Memory loss
• Dental problems including loss of all teeth
• Heart disease
• Seizures
• Strokes
• High blood pressure
• Arrhythmias
• Rhabdomyolysis
• Liver or kidney failure
• Preterm births
• Placental separation
• Fetal death
• Brain damage and abnormalities
• Death
• Suicide
• And, of course, addiction, homelessness, criminal activity, and loss of family, self-respect, and hope.

The Last Thing America Needs

The majority of Americans realize that fentanyl is taking far the lives of too many family members, friends, and neighbors. Add to this devastation the less-obvious destruction occurring due to methamphetamine. Every year, 25% of Americans use an illicit drug. Considering that methamphetamine accounts for a small portion of this group, the drug creates outsized effects.⁸

Methamphetamine’s devastation doesn’t show up at the top of lists of drug-related overdoses. Only around 6,000 people die from overdoses of methamphetamine each year, compared to 74,000 dying from fentanyl overdoses. The problem is that the effects of methamphetamine extend much further than overdoses to wrecked homes, destroyed health, overloaded mental health facilities, and law enforcement agencies stressed by violence, crime, and psychosis.¹³

The America we dream of does not include these devastating effects. Anyone you care about must be discouraged from ever using methamphetamine or other drugs.

Sources:

Karen

After a few years working at the Narconon center in Oklahoma, Karen has been researching drug trends around the world and writing reports and articles on addiction and recovery for nine years.
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