The article mentions the ban in 2006 of over-the-counter sales of Sudafed (pseudoephedrine). One of my favorite satirical articles is "A simple and convenient synthesis of pseudoephedrine from N-methylamphetamine". (The joke being that Sudafed is now hard to purchase while meth is readily available.)
In the below podcast an author of a book about recent meth developments talks about the ban of Sudafed entirely in Mexico lead to a change in the market toward fentanyl.
Author and journalist Sam Quinones talks about his book, The Least of Us, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Quinones focuses on the devastation caused by methamphetamine and fentanyl, the latest evolution of innovation in the supply of mind-altering drugs in the United States. The latest versions of meth, he argues, are more emotionally damaging than before and have played a central role in the expansion of the homeless in tent encampments in American cities. The conversation includes an exploration of the rising number of overdose deaths in the United States and what role community and other institutions might play in reducing the death toll.
The ironic thing is the sheer drop in price is probably due in part to the P2P route taking over. It's a more involved process than Sudafed meth, but it's easier to scale, since you aren't bottlenecked by the pharmaceutical supply.
Once you establish the facility and pipeline, you can crank out industrial amounts of crank. The precursors are cheap and used in huge quantities by legitimate labs.
The theory is that new meth is based on a synthesis using a chemical called P2P rather than the old synthesis that used ephedrine. There are claims that this new form of meth is chemically different in some what that started creating schizophrenia around 2017.
However, when I looked into it, there doesn't seem to be much support for this idea. Current meth is more pure than ever before. Some people suggest that the use of lead could be responsible, but not all P2P syntheses use that, and it wasn't common in 2017. Instead, it seems like the explanation is just the obvious one: P2P synthesis has resulted in people doing much, much more meth than ever before.
Much of the effects of any intoxicant are culturally constructed. Alcohol is widely known for causing aggression, but this effect doesn’t seem to exist in cultures without that association. Nor does it exist in double-blind studies, yet the placebo group becomes more aggressive.
You can start with two chemically identical intoxicants, and either by marketing or random path dependencies one gains a reputation in the subculture for making people go crazy. You can bet that large number of people are going to act wild on it.
This is no different than the reputation different types of alcohol have garnered. Gin makes people mean. Whisky makes people emotional. Tequila makes people party like crazy. It’s all ethanol, but those cultural preconceptions become self-fulfilling prophecies.
In many ways that makes these rumor filled, science light, unsubstantiated media stories about “this is the most dangerous drug ever” incredibly irresponsible. The stories themselves create the cultural preconditions around encouraging more self-destructive behavior among users. This isn’t even just drugs. Look at the moral panic over Four Loko. The same cocktail of ethanol and caffeine has been consumed as amaro and coffee by rich women since time immemorial. Yet it never caused moral panic until the “wrong type of people” started consuming it.
I saw a similar post that claimed the new meth caused psychosis and hallucinations, etc. I don’t know much about meth itself but I do know about Adderall. When you take the normal dose (10-30mg) it can cause some euphoria but for the most part it helps you focus, gives energy (makes you more happy, talkative.) But when it is abused (60+mg) it can cause serious psychosis with all kinds of mental side effects. I image than the new meth is just extremely strong and so for people who are used to doing (or seeing others do) a weaker type it would seem to be a completely different drug. At least this is my theory, since as you said there isn’t any evidence there is a new type of meth, just a stronger type.
It's even more silly a claim because P2P based syntheses have been in common use for many decades. They were especially popular amongst the Hells Angels' chemists. I'm not sure what their final reductive amination step was, but I'd guess Al-Hg amalgam & methylamine.
From what I've read of schizophrenia[1] it is highly inherited and unlikely that any drug would cause it. A sufficient amount of stress is known to trigger or quicken the emergence of schizophrenia in people already predisposed to it.
When it comes to studying this, you have to separate out:
* The high rates of drug abuse by people with mental illness.
* The correlation drug use with other sources of stress. Drug use may not be the source, but a result of the source. (But I think we can all agree drugs probably aren't happening matters.)
* Misdiagnosis of temporary drug-induced psychosis as a permanent, incurable mental health illness.
* Race, sex, age, and location, since this all affect the normal rates of schizophrenia for each population group.
OR:
* Show a significant increases in rates that can't be explained by the above. (If this rate tripled, it's pretty clear something bad is happening.)
Very few studies do this, because it is very difficult and there is little incentive to do high quality research.
1: I'm bipolar which is sometimes considered to be on the same spectrum
Really interesting read. Thank you for sharing. For some reason this sort of information about street drugs and science/culture surround it fascinates me.
The author does bring up l-meth. I'm taking them at their word that l-meth is an isomer of d-meth and is created in P2P synthesis, but that seems at least plausible.
It doesn't seem to be common in the legal markets, and especially not at the kind of doses addicts would be exposed to.
From Wikipedia on Levomethamphetamine:
> In larger doses (more than 20 mg/day), it loses its specificity for MAO-B and also inhibits MAO-A, which increases serotonin and norepinephrine levels in the brain.
So there is a difference in response at higher doses. I would expect that addicts could be exposed to much more than 20mg/day, which begs the question of whether we even know what several hundred milligrams a day could do.
That's without getting into method of consumption. I'm not a chemist, but would we expect both isomers to break down under heat the same way? Or is the l-meth potentially being converted to something different than d-meth when smoked?
If the issue is the quantity, I would have expected schizophrenia to be constantly present. There's a fixed upper limit on how much people can do in a day, and overdoses have always existed, so there have always been people teetering on the edge. The amount heavy users use hasn't changed, there's just more heavy users and more users in general.
There doesn't seem to be debate that P2P processes create l-meth and d-meth, and that l-meth was less common in earlier versions.
I also don't think there's a debate that l-meth and d-meth have different effects. They're both used in prescription drugs, and those drugs are not interchangeable. You can't treat ADHD with l-meth, and you can't use d-meth in segiline.
None of that is conclusive. It could still be the quantity, or even something we haven't though of like an interaction between meth and fentanyl (which started its rise around 2015). I just don't think the evidence is so weak that we can discard the potential that l-meth is involved.
It’s also possible that the impurities themselves were making it easier on the body(for whatever reason they could signal liver to produce more enzymes that were the ones to break down meth or clear it’s harmful metabolites etc)
P2P synthesis was the standard until it became hard to get (controlled) and that's when ephedrine and pseudoephedrine reduction became popular, despite much higher precursor cost. The reduction pathway is also easier, but because it's so much easier, It's likely much dirtier, since so little care is needed to "succeed." Now that Sudafed and ephedrine Diet pills are controlled, and can't be bought retail by the 1,000 lot, the balance has tilted back to the original precursor.
The reason Meth use is going up is not due to Meth itself. It counter balances the effects of Fentanyl. I regularly go to Fentanyl overdoses where the bystanders tell me they ran out of "G" or "Glass" and simply overdid it with the "M30's"... Its a fucking nightmare.
It used to be "meth" users would say..."At least I am not a dope junky using H." Heroin users would say... "At least I am not a tweaker." Now they are one in the same when I see them, which is generally cyanotic, apneic, and have been down for a while. We don't have enough Narcan to counter a bad batch of "M30" pills. Talk to your kids and tell them not to use any pills, not even once.
while I genuinely agree with your intent, I don't think abstinence has been very good at achieving the outcome we're hoping for.
Education, not fear is what allows people to decide for themselves if they want to try/use something and it seems more likely that if/when they try these substances they'll at least be prepared for the consequences and be more likely to be responsible with their use.
Anecdotally I have many friends who were taught abstinence. Once they got into weed they realized just how much of a lie abstinence teaching was, they then graduated to trying other drugs, but not responsibly, because they had no idea how these other drugs worked. They had no idea what an OD might look like or what the risk of getting poor quality drugs might do. e.g. look at cocaine - how many people have any clue what that is cut with? I'd imagine almost every single one of my friends couldn't tell you what north american cocaine is predominantly cut with and they couldn't tell you what to do in the event of an OD, or what the exact symptoms of a cocaine OD even are! The lack of education is terrifying, really.
Sorry, for someone who knows next to nothing about drugs can you clarify? I’m assuming “glass” is the meth and the “M30” pills are fentanyl? Or maybe the other way around? And, if you don’t mind, can you explain what you mean by “counterbalance”? I’m assuming it’s like drinking a red bull with vodka? Does it actually “counterbalance” chemically so someone could “safely” (for lack of a better word) take more fentanyl without overdosing if they took meth along side it? Or does it create the sensation of counterbalancing to make users take less fentanyl in the first place?
I guess what I’m asking is, is taking meth + fentanyl marginally safer than taking just fentanyl? I know neither is safe. I’m just curious how the two interact and what you mean by counterbalance.
I’m also curious if, somewhat counter-intuitively, fentanyl addicts could be “treated“ with adderall to make their drug use safer? At the very least adderall has to be safer than street meth?
The entirety of my knowledge of street drugs came from D.A.R.E. and Breaking Bad so apologies if these are ridiculous questions.
This all sounds like high octane speed-ball (used to be just mixing some basic speed with something like Vicodin, or an Adderral/Ritalin + Vicodin/Percocet), but mixing Meth/Fentanly sounds beyond risky.
We don't have enough Narcan to counter a bad batch of "M30" pills. Talk to your kids and tell them not to use any pills, not even once.
Because kids do what their parents say? I mean, it might be the cynic in me from the years of DARE lies, but I don't think this is enough. Most parents won't have an honest conversation about it: You know, talk about the effects and the good parts alongside the risks you take when you get it.
They won't drive you to safer things.
And an amount of them are going to try it nonetheless: An amount aren't going to be kids, either.
And this is the real reason I support full legalisation and controlled production - even of a lot of drugs that I wouldn't do. We can more reasonably assure there aren't bad batches of pills. We can more easily realize when folks are using regularly and offer (free) help. We can more easily try to sway folks to things that harm less. And we can research ways to do this more easily. It isn't perfect, but the war on drugs definitely isn't either.
Bit of a tangential rant: meth is actually truly really bad, and I wish our drug education growing up hadn’t painted this nebulous concept of “drugs”, because there’s gradations of harm.
I’m approaching 40. (Ugh, I hate to admit that.) I grew up during the D.A.R.E. era. Just Say No. Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. “Drugs” were this boogeyman, and whatever they were, they would turn you into a junkie instantly.
I have no idea how you’d study this, as I think this was a pretty much cross-cultural message, but I wonder what would have happened if we could have educated teenagers that, well, “we know you’re going to do drugs, they all have side effects, but some are not that bad, and some will absolutely ruin you.”
Because: I have done a lot drugs in my 30s. Pretty much the full club drug buffet, with the exception of meth and opiates. (Also never smoked a cigarette yet.) And you know what? There are varying degrees of bad. There’s this jaded sense that you build up, that you’re a bit bitter that you wasted quite a lot of your childhood education in D.A.R.E. I wonder if we could have possibly successfully pulled off harm reduction education in drugs, and given people a better set of mental tools to understand what drugs are truly bad, namely meth and opiates, and which drugs are quite honestly far less deleterious than vodka. (You cannot tell me, with a straight face, that weed is physically and socially more harmful than drinking.)
This article seems to be fundamentally mistaken/misrepresenting Sam Quinones's Theory. P2P Meth started after Ephedrine was banned in Mexico in 2008 not 2017.
> He suggests that new meth might be chemically different in a way that caused people to go crazy, starting around 2017
2017 is not a significant year, it's just the year of one of his anecdotes. A small town in West Virginia didn't have a meth problem and then in 2017 it had a meth problem and a mental health problem.
"Southwest Virginia hadn’t seen much meth for almost a decade when suddenly, in about 2017, “we started to see people go into the state mental-hospital system who were just grossly psychotic” [1]
He has other anecdotes from much earlier.
"Susan Partovi has been a physician for homeless people in Los Angeles since 2003. She noticed increasing mental illness—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder—at her clinics around the city starting in about 2012" [1]
The Mental Health Parity and a Addiction Equity Act increased access to this kind of treatment. The first interim rules under the Act went into effect for new plan years starting on or after July 2010. Many insurance plans (particularly Medicare and Medicaid plans in certain states) dragged their feet in implementing the required changes. This was problematic because, despite being a federal law, state insurance regulators are the primary enforcers.
In 2016 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid finally started to crack down with their investigations and enforcement and issued compliance guidance and toolkits to help states fully implement the required coverage.
Is it possible the upticks don’t represent a new group of addicts so much as they represent a new group of people who are eligible for affordable treatment? It doesn’t seem terribly far-fetched to me that CA would have implemented the required coverage in their Medicare & Medicaid plans fairly quickly while West Virginia’s plans would have waited as long as possible to comply.
RE: Quantity section. I wonder if the pharmaceutical amphetamines and/or novel 'research chemical' amphetamines metabolize into the same compounds that are being quantified in sewage. Are they detecting 'meth' specifically or amphetamines generally?
> only $1k per pound now.
Wow that's crazy. An equivalent quantity of generic adderall would cost ~$20k. Meth is effectively at commodity-level prices, if true - the drug war premium seems gone.
I'm skeptical about overdose rates being attributed to meth. Meth is fairly hard to OD on - it'll ruin your life and brain, but rarely kills acutely. I suspect meth being used as an adulterant mixed with other drugs (esp opioids), or novel non-meth psychostimulants, play a significant role in the increase of psychostimulant ODs by ~9x over the last 10 years.
I think a lot of this data is getting mixed up with the (at the time quasi-legal) pyrovalerones and cathinones that were widely available through the clearnet over the past 5 years. Those have much greater acute risks and were highly accessible to people without drug connections.
---
However, I'm skeptical of the initial premise of the article:
> Ephedrine meth was like a party drug. […] You could normally kind of more or less hang onto your life. You had a house, you had a job. […] P2P meth was nothing like that. It was a very sinister drug.
Tweakers have been around for decades, I suspect this is just misleading anecdata.
Can anyone comment on how producers could be isolating the the 'd' enantiomer? Are they using enzymes?
Steve Mould has a great video [1] on homochirality in nature and says, "Why are all the sugar molecules that you buy from the shops right-handed? ... If you were to make some sugar for yourself in a chemistry lab by mixing some chemicals together, you would get a 50/50 mix of left-handed sugar and right-handed sugar." He goes on to describe how enzymes in nature exclusively make homochiral molecules, and since all our sugar is made by enzymes, all our sugar is homochiral.
Later in the video he describes how you can filter enantiomers by finding an enzyme in nature that 'eats' the undesired enantiomer, finding the DNA for it, and coercing bacteria into producing that enzyme. This seems quite complicated and potentially out of reach for a clandestine drug-making operation. Is there another way?
They are most likely using resolution via the Pope–Peachey Method. There was supporting evidence found in a laboratory in Guadalajara[0].
It is possible to do asymmetric reductive amination using enzymes but this is out of the scope of clandestine producers. Likewise a chemical and not enzymatic asymmetric reductive amination would be easy in a bench lab, probably to expensive and impractical in a clandestine setting.
[0] Joseph S. Bozenko, "Clandestine Enantiomeric Enrichment of d–Methamphetamine via Tartaric Acid Resolution", JCLIC, 2008, vol.3 (not publicly accessible but you can find this if you know where to look)
I do not believe this practice is in use in illicit drug manufacture. There's no economic incentive and it requires some braincells.
From "Selective Crystallization of Methamphetamine with d-Tartaric Acid:"
Phenylisopropylmethylamine was resolved by treatment with 0.4-6 moles of dextro tartaric acid in water or aqueous ethanol containing 0.4-6 moles hydrogen chloride.
A mixture of phenylisopropylmethylamine 150, d-tartaric acid 82.5, and H2O 330 g was treated with HCl to pH 4 to deposit 120 g L-phenylisopropylmethylamine-d-tartrate salt, which gave 88 g L-phenylisopropylmethylamine. The D-enantiomer (58 g as the HCl salt) was isolated from the filtrate.
Aside from the often amateurish reduction of (pseudo)ephedrine to methamphetamine, the most popular precursor to amphetamine and methamphetamine is phenyl-2-propanone (also called P2P, BMK, Benzyl Methyl Ketone or Phenylacetone). There is an astounding array of synthetic routes to this compound, both due to the relative simple structure of the compound, and also because of its popularity. [...] Here is a collection of some of the possible methods of synthesizing phenyl-2-propanone, ranging from simple one-step methods to elaborate multi-step variants, and from the very easy to the very complicated. Welcome to the world of P2P.
Once you've got P2P, the end product isn't too far behind:
One very strong reason to doubt that heavy metals, such as lead or mercury, play a large role in the meth crisis, is that heavy metal poisoning has telltale signs and symptoms that would not go unnoticed. Furthermore, we have excellent methods for the determination of Pb and Hg in the bloodstream, and there simply isn't any corresponding epidemic of heavy metal poisoning.
Also, a nitpick: the author refers to the condensation product of benzaldehyde and nitroethane, which is phenyl-2-nitropropene, abbreviated P2NP, incorrectly. He calls it "nitrostyrene (NTS)", which is the one-carbon-shorter homolog.
The other thing to keep in mind is that higher production volumes mean longer supply chains, and with illegal drugs longer supply chains mean more cuts (usually sugars, rarely toxic per se), and more cuts means an increased variance in the potency of the retail product, and variance in potency leads to users accidentally taking more than they intended to. The toxic effects of most drugs have a supralinear dose-response relationship, so these unexpectedly high doses can lead to problems that don't "average out". Often we over-focus on toxic fillers, but forget the risks created even by nontoxic fillers.
I know Vince Gilligan did his research prior to Breaking Bad but st strikes me how on the nose it was. BB came out in 2008 and must have been in production a few years earlier but the increase in actual purity pretty much matches the show coming out.
I also recall the show depicting meth users having all those problems - Jesse is paranoid the missionaries are bikers, there's that guy digging a hole in his front yard, Spooe and his head, etc
Seems like the drug was fucking people up way prior to the last few years in fiction.
Oh wow. I saw the title and was ready to explain how the cartels had perfected p2p synths such that they yield almost exclusively pure d-methamphetamine, but before explaining that I was going to need to explain the general concept of chirality and enantiomers, and the fact that for amphetamines (especially meth) the d-entantiomer is always the "one you want" and the l-entantiomer is always the less desirable, less powerful form that causes peripheral stimulation but no cerebral effects, and as an anecdote I was going to mention that vics vapo inhaler (commonly used at raves, although people don't actually know what they're inhaling) is levomethamphetamine, and I was even going to mention the humorous fact that they label it "levmetamfetamine" to make the spelling as distinct as possible.
Then imagine my surprise when I open the article and it literally covers every one of those points, section by section. Brilliant.
I guess the only minor thing I'd add is that the way the cartels (and others) are getting pure d-meth is by bubbling through d-tartaric acid or the like at the end of the process, which separates the racemic meth into its l and d enantiomers respectively.
I'm glad this article debunked the fallacious "new meth" article that cropped up here the other day.
---
EDIT:
Oh and one more thing. There's a common myth among tweakers about "n-iso", which is structurally very similar to methamphetamine - similar enough that it will join the crystal lattice - but it is at best inert, but might actually cause undesirable side effects. The fact that n-iso exists is real, but if you look online you'll see tons of tweakers convinced that they've been smoking n-iso and that it's why they smoke meth and just get a headache and other bad physical side effects but don't get the stimulation or the pleasurable rush. What's actually happening is that they've spiked their tolerance so high that they're getting almost exclusively the bad effects. It's analogous to how if someone takes MDMA for 4 days straight, by the end of it they're not going to "roll" at all because they've acutely downregulated their serotonin (and dopamine) receptors, and furthermore that they've literally (almost) exhausted their current pool of neurotransmitters, which need to be re-synthesized by the body.
When looking at the DEA seizure data it's clear that meth is one of the most pure and potent (wrt methamphetamine, the dea defines purity as what % of the compound is meth, meaning either levo or dextro methamphetamine, whereas potency only factors in the d-meth content, since d-meth is the enantiomer that actually gets you cerebrally high) street drugs out there. By comparison, cocaine is one of the most disgusting, cut at the source level with stuff like levamisole (which is thought to be disastrous to health, ie it's not just inert), and then further cut every step down the chain, albeit usually with inert cuts (baby powder, baking soda, glucose, creatine, that kinda stuff) the lower down the chain you get. Seriously kids, don't do cocaine. It's overhyped and a waste of money.
So anyway, as I said two paragraphs above, n-iso is real but the idea that there's tons of n-iso crystal floating around is just an urban legend promulgated by tweakers who spiked their tolerance the moon and refuse to see that fact.
From what I read, the P2P method isn't new.
"Preisler, who works at an electroplating factory and has been arrested twice in the U.S. for his work with methamphetamine, says he isn't surprised traffickers have turned to P2P.
"P2P is old school," he said. "Hell, I used to cook by that route circa 1980."
The fight has come full circle. In the 1980s, the U.S. government severely restricted access to P2P seeking to curtail methamphetamine production. Meth makers shifted to ephedrine, which could be found in common cold remedies. When authorities cracked down on ephedrine, they switched to pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed and other decongestants."
https://www.cleveland.com/world/2009/12/old_school_meth_meth...
Priesler goes by "Uncle Fester", and wrote "Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture" - he's effectively the expert on clandestine meth manufacturing. He writes some interesting, and kind of terrifying, books.
I've looked into the logistics of "cooking" meth and it is a complex process that, were I not an expert, wouldn't create something I would be comfortable putting into my body.
How is meth "industrially" produced? Is it Walter White-esque clandestine factories? Is it clever people in their garages? Is it done over the border?
> The chemist, a burly man with a master’s degree in
biochemical engineering described the industry’s transformation, as the pair worked at an outside table.
The thing with cooking meth is that you don't have to be comfortable putting it in your body. You just have to be comfortable selling it to someone else who will put it in their body! Unfortunately, for many meth producers/dealers that bar is not very high.
LSD is probably even more naughty. As far as I'm aware it's not a trivial synthesis by any means, so exactly where the supply comes from is probably a fascinating story never to be fully told. Buddhist Walter White's around the world, perhaps.
"How is meth "industrially" produced? Is it Walter White-esque clandestine factories?"
I've never produced it and as you'd be aware it'd be stupid of me to offer advice based on chemical knowledge as it's manufacture is illegal - despite the fact that the various methods are widely known.
From time to time, I've seen busts of clandestine labs on TV and it's easily doable in a garage or shed. Seems the smell of volatiles often gives them away (e.g.: propan-2-one or similar reagents), or they catch fire (seeming a common occurrence) which burns the place down thus attracts attention.
As an expert, you'd know that a racemic mixture results. As backyard-ers don't have the means to separate the enantiomers, law enforcement uses the fact to determine whether stuff they've collected originated in a backyard lab of from a pharmaceutical complex. Nevertheless, I gather from the article that's narrowed. It seems, that when one's made enough money manufacturing gets reasonably sophisticated.
So the meth is cheaper, more abundant, more physically dangerous, and more socially destructive than it was before they banned ephedrine. Can we get our good decongestants back now please?
A curious footnote: Sam Quinones argues that P2P meth is part of the explanation for the proliferation of tents in homeless encampments, because it causes users withdraw socially in ways that earlier meth didn't. This is what he means by it "brought you inside". Users want to be alone (i.e. in a tent) with their paranoid schizophrenic hallucinations.
From a societal POV, we need a Government-regulated drug harder than Alcohol or Tobacco. Similar in function to Soma. Maybe marijuana can fit the bill.
It doesn't make sense to 'outsource' production of narcotics to antagonistic nations or criminal enterprises.
[+] [-] kens|4 years ago|reply
https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume19/v19i3...
[+] [-] adolph|4 years ago|reply
Author and journalist Sam Quinones talks about his book, The Least of Us, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Quinones focuses on the devastation caused by methamphetamine and fentanyl, the latest evolution of innovation in the supply of mind-altering drugs in the United States. The latest versions of meth, he argues, are more emotionally damaging than before and have played a central role in the expansion of the homeless in tent encampments in American cities. The conversation includes an exploration of the rising number of overdose deaths in the United States and what role community and other institutions might play in reducing the death toll.
https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-t...
[+] [-] kortex|4 years ago|reply
Once you establish the facility and pipeline, you can crank out industrial amounts of crank. The precursors are cheap and used in huge quantities by legitimate labs.
[+] [-] mjevans|4 years ago|reply
We could get our real cold symptom treatments back as true OTCs and stop wasting so much time chasing petty criminals.
It would also help identify drug addicts and get them help before problems become bad.
[+] [-] dynm|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28938888
The theory is that new meth is based on a synthesis using a chemical called P2P rather than the old synthesis that used ephedrine. There are claims that this new form of meth is chemically different in some what that started creating schizophrenia around 2017.
However, when I looked into it, there doesn't seem to be much support for this idea. Current meth is more pure than ever before. Some people suggest that the use of lead could be responsible, but not all P2P syntheses use that, and it wasn't common in 2017. Instead, it seems like the explanation is just the obvious one: P2P synthesis has resulted in people doing much, much more meth than ever before.
[+] [-] dcolkitt|4 years ago|reply
You can start with two chemically identical intoxicants, and either by marketing or random path dependencies one gains a reputation in the subculture for making people go crazy. You can bet that large number of people are going to act wild on it.
This is no different than the reputation different types of alcohol have garnered. Gin makes people mean. Whisky makes people emotional. Tequila makes people party like crazy. It’s all ethanol, but those cultural preconceptions become self-fulfilling prophecies.
In many ways that makes these rumor filled, science light, unsubstantiated media stories about “this is the most dangerous drug ever” incredibly irresponsible. The stories themselves create the cultural preconditions around encouraging more self-destructive behavior among users. This isn’t even just drugs. Look at the moral panic over Four Loko. The same cocktail of ethanol and caffeine has been consumed as amaro and coffee by rich women since time immemorial. Yet it never caused moral panic until the “wrong type of people” started consuming it.
[+] [-] edgyquant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Enginerrrd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kayodelycaon|4 years ago|reply
When it comes to studying this, you have to separate out:
* The high rates of drug abuse by people with mental illness.
* The correlation drug use with other sources of stress. Drug use may not be the source, but a result of the source. (But I think we can all agree drugs probably aren't happening matters.)
* Misdiagnosis of temporary drug-induced psychosis as a permanent, incurable mental health illness.
* Race, sex, age, and location, since this all affect the normal rates of schizophrenia for each population group.
OR:
* Show a significant increases in rates that can't be explained by the above. (If this rate tripled, it's pretty clear something bad is happening.)
Very few studies do this, because it is very difficult and there is little incentive to do high quality research.
1: I'm bipolar which is sometimes considered to be on the same spectrum
[+] [-] seattle_spring|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curryst|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't seem to be common in the legal markets, and especially not at the kind of doses addicts would be exposed to.
From Wikipedia on Levomethamphetamine:
> In larger doses (more than 20 mg/day), it loses its specificity for MAO-B and also inhibits MAO-A, which increases serotonin and norepinephrine levels in the brain.
So there is a difference in response at higher doses. I would expect that addicts could be exposed to much more than 20mg/day, which begs the question of whether we even know what several hundred milligrams a day could do.
That's without getting into method of consumption. I'm not a chemist, but would we expect both isomers to break down under heat the same way? Or is the l-meth potentially being converted to something different than d-meth when smoked?
If the issue is the quantity, I would have expected schizophrenia to be constantly present. There's a fixed upper limit on how much people can do in a day, and overdoses have always existed, so there have always been people teetering on the edge. The amount heavy users use hasn't changed, there's just more heavy users and more users in general.
There doesn't seem to be debate that P2P processes create l-meth and d-meth, and that l-meth was less common in earlier versions.
I also don't think there's a debate that l-meth and d-meth have different effects. They're both used in prescription drugs, and those drugs are not interchangeable. You can't treat ADHD with l-meth, and you can't use d-meth in segiline.
None of that is conclusive. It could still be the quantity, or even something we haven't though of like an interaction between meth and fentanyl (which started its rise around 2015). I just don't think the evidence is so weak that we can discard the potential that l-meth is involved.
[+] [-] rkk3|4 years ago|reply
You are off by 8+ years ... P2P made meth became mainstream after 2008 because that is when Ephedrine was banned in Mexico [1].
[1.]https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs31/31379/meth.htm#:....
[+] [-] 55555|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cleansingfire|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] i_am_proteus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monkmartinez|4 years ago|reply
It used to be "meth" users would say..."At least I am not a dope junky using H." Heroin users would say... "At least I am not a tweaker." Now they are one in the same when I see them, which is generally cyanotic, apneic, and have been down for a while. We don't have enough Narcan to counter a bad batch of "M30" pills. Talk to your kids and tell them not to use any pills, not even once.
[+] [-] toolz|4 years ago|reply
Education, not fear is what allows people to decide for themselves if they want to try/use something and it seems more likely that if/when they try these substances they'll at least be prepared for the consequences and be more likely to be responsible with their use.
Anecdotally I have many friends who were taught abstinence. Once they got into weed they realized just how much of a lie abstinence teaching was, they then graduated to trying other drugs, but not responsibly, because they had no idea how these other drugs worked. They had no idea what an OD might look like or what the risk of getting poor quality drugs might do. e.g. look at cocaine - how many people have any clue what that is cut with? I'd imagine almost every single one of my friends couldn't tell you what north american cocaine is predominantly cut with and they couldn't tell you what to do in the event of an OD, or what the exact symptoms of a cocaine OD even are! The lack of education is terrifying, really.
[+] [-] elliekelly|4 years ago|reply
I guess what I’m asking is, is taking meth + fentanyl marginally safer than taking just fentanyl? I know neither is safe. I’m just curious how the two interact and what you mean by counterbalance.
I’m also curious if, somewhat counter-intuitively, fentanyl addicts could be “treated“ with adderall to make their drug use safer? At the very least adderall has to be safer than street meth?
The entirety of my knowledge of street drugs came from D.A.R.E. and Breaking Bad so apologies if these are ridiculous questions.
[+] [-] crate_barre|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|4 years ago|reply
Because kids do what their parents say? I mean, it might be the cynic in me from the years of DARE lies, but I don't think this is enough. Most parents won't have an honest conversation about it: You know, talk about the effects and the good parts alongside the risks you take when you get it.
They won't drive you to safer things.
And an amount of them are going to try it nonetheless: An amount aren't going to be kids, either.
And this is the real reason I support full legalisation and controlled production - even of a lot of drugs that I wouldn't do. We can more reasonably assure there aren't bad batches of pills. We can more easily realize when folks are using regularly and offer (free) help. We can more easily try to sway folks to things that harm less. And we can research ways to do this more easily. It isn't perfect, but the war on drugs definitely isn't either.
[+] [-] e40|4 years ago|reply
Can you elaborate? I have no idea what this is about. I thought meth was smoked.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|4 years ago|reply
Could this explain the falling prices described in the article? Fentanyl is the money maker. Meth is being priced to encourage more opioid use?
[+] [-] perardi|4 years ago|reply
I’m approaching 40. (Ugh, I hate to admit that.) I grew up during the D.A.R.E. era. Just Say No. Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. “Drugs” were this boogeyman, and whatever they were, they would turn you into a junkie instantly.
I have no idea how you’d study this, as I think this was a pretty much cross-cultural message, but I wonder what would have happened if we could have educated teenagers that, well, “we know you’re going to do drugs, they all have side effects, but some are not that bad, and some will absolutely ruin you.”
Because: I have done a lot drugs in my 30s. Pretty much the full club drug buffet, with the exception of meth and opiates. (Also never smoked a cigarette yet.) And you know what? There are varying degrees of bad. There’s this jaded sense that you build up, that you’re a bit bitter that you wasted quite a lot of your childhood education in D.A.R.E. I wonder if we could have possibly successfully pulled off harm reduction education in drugs, and given people a better set of mental tools to understand what drugs are truly bad, namely meth and opiates, and which drugs are quite honestly far less deleterious than vodka. (You cannot tell me, with a straight face, that weed is physically and socially more harmful than drinking.)
[+] [-] rkk3|4 years ago|reply
> He suggests that new meth might be chemically different in a way that caused people to go crazy, starting around 2017
2017 is not a significant year, it's just the year of one of his anecdotes. A small town in West Virginia didn't have a meth problem and then in 2017 it had a meth problem and a mental health problem.
He has other anecdotes from much earlier. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...[+] [-] elliekelly|4 years ago|reply
In 2016 the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid finally started to crack down with their investigations and enforcement and issued compliance guidance and toolkits to help states fully implement the required coverage.
Is it possible the upticks don’t represent a new group of addicts so much as they represent a new group of people who are eligible for affordable treatment? It doesn’t seem terribly far-fetched to me that CA would have implemented the required coverage in their Medicare & Medicaid plans fairly quickly while West Virginia’s plans would have waited as long as possible to comply.
[+] [-] cwkoss|4 years ago|reply
> only $1k per pound now.
Wow that's crazy. An equivalent quantity of generic adderall would cost ~$20k. Meth is effectively at commodity-level prices, if true - the drug war premium seems gone.
I'm skeptical about overdose rates being attributed to meth. Meth is fairly hard to OD on - it'll ruin your life and brain, but rarely kills acutely. I suspect meth being used as an adulterant mixed with other drugs (esp opioids), or novel non-meth psychostimulants, play a significant role in the increase of psychostimulant ODs by ~9x over the last 10 years.
I think a lot of this data is getting mixed up with the (at the time quasi-legal) pyrovalerones and cathinones that were widely available through the clearnet over the past 5 years. Those have much greater acute risks and were highly accessible to people without drug connections.
---
However, I'm skeptical of the initial premise of the article:
> Ephedrine meth was like a party drug. […] You could normally kind of more or less hang onto your life. You had a house, you had a job. […] P2P meth was nothing like that. It was a very sinister drug.
Tweakers have been around for decades, I suspect this is just misleading anecdata.
[+] [-] cyounkins|4 years ago|reply
Steve Mould has a great video [1] on homochirality in nature and says, "Why are all the sugar molecules that you buy from the shops right-handed? ... If you were to make some sugar for yourself in a chemistry lab by mixing some chemicals together, you would get a 50/50 mix of left-handed sugar and right-handed sugar." He goes on to describe how enzymes in nature exclusively make homochiral molecules, and since all our sugar is made by enzymes, all our sugar is homochiral.
Later in the video he describes how you can filter enantiomers by finding an enzyme in nature that 'eats' the undesired enantiomer, finding the DNA for it, and coercing bacteria into producing that enzyme. This seems quite complicated and potentially out of reach for a clandestine drug-making operation. Is there another way?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKhcan8pk2w
[+] [-] gpcr1949|4 years ago|reply
It is possible to do asymmetric reductive amination using enzymes but this is out of the scope of clandestine producers. Likewise a chemical and not enzymatic asymmetric reductive amination would be easy in a bench lab, probably to expensive and impractical in a clandestine setting.
[0] Joseph S. Bozenko, "Clandestine Enantiomeric Enrichment of d–Methamphetamine via Tartaric Acid Resolution", JCLIC, 2008, vol.3 (not publicly accessible but you can find this if you know where to look)
[+] [-] gavinray|4 years ago|reply
Phenylacetone synthesis yields racemic methamphetamine.
You can actually use a laptop screen, and polarized sunglass lenses to check the optical rotation at home, cheap polarimeter.
As far as purifying enantiomer with amphetamine and methamphetamine goes:
It can be done relatively easily with just D-tartaric Acid.
Look up "Procedures for the Resolution of Racemic Amphetamines"
https://erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/amphetamine.res...
I do not believe this practice is in use in illicit drug manufacture. There's no economic incentive and it requires some braincells.
From "Selective Crystallization of Methamphetamine with d-Tartaric Acid:"
[+] [-] throwaway103954|4 years ago|reply
If you're curious, read up on some of the synthesis methods for P2P. Chemists are continually honing their craft to provide superior purity and price:
https://erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/phenylacetone.h...
Aside from the often amateurish reduction of (pseudo)ephedrine to methamphetamine, the most popular precursor to amphetamine and methamphetamine is phenyl-2-propanone (also called P2P, BMK, Benzyl Methyl Ketone or Phenylacetone). There is an astounding array of synthetic routes to this compound, both due to the relative simple structure of the compound, and also because of its popularity. [...] Here is a collection of some of the possible methods of synthesizing phenyl-2-propanone, ranging from simple one-step methods to elaborate multi-step variants, and from the very easy to the very complicated. Welcome to the world of P2P.
Once you've got P2P, the end product isn't too far behind:
https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/p2p-meth.ht...
[+] [-] scythe|4 years ago|reply
Also, a nitpick: the author refers to the condensation product of benzaldehyde and nitroethane, which is phenyl-2-nitropropene, abbreviated P2NP, incorrectly. He calls it "nitrostyrene (NTS)", which is the one-carbon-shorter homolog.
The other thing to keep in mind is that higher production volumes mean longer supply chains, and with illegal drugs longer supply chains mean more cuts (usually sugars, rarely toxic per se), and more cuts means an increased variance in the potency of the retail product, and variance in potency leads to users accidentally taking more than they intended to. The toxic effects of most drugs have a supralinear dose-response relationship, so these unexpectedly high doses can lead to problems that don't "average out". Often we over-focus on toxic fillers, but forget the risks created even by nontoxic fillers.
[+] [-] crazy_horse|4 years ago|reply
I also recall the show depicting meth users having all those problems - Jesse is paranoid the missionaries are bikers, there's that guy digging a hole in his front yard, Spooe and his head, etc
Seems like the drug was fucking people up way prior to the last few years in fiction.
[+] [-] __blockcipher__|4 years ago|reply
Then imagine my surprise when I open the article and it literally covers every one of those points, section by section. Brilliant.
I guess the only minor thing I'd add is that the way the cartels (and others) are getting pure d-meth is by bubbling through d-tartaric acid or the like at the end of the process, which separates the racemic meth into its l and d enantiomers respectively.
I'm glad this article debunked the fallacious "new meth" article that cropped up here the other day.
---
EDIT:
Oh and one more thing. There's a common myth among tweakers about "n-iso", which is structurally very similar to methamphetamine - similar enough that it will join the crystal lattice - but it is at best inert, but might actually cause undesirable side effects. The fact that n-iso exists is real, but if you look online you'll see tons of tweakers convinced that they've been smoking n-iso and that it's why they smoke meth and just get a headache and other bad physical side effects but don't get the stimulation or the pleasurable rush. What's actually happening is that they've spiked their tolerance so high that they're getting almost exclusively the bad effects. It's analogous to how if someone takes MDMA for 4 days straight, by the end of it they're not going to "roll" at all because they've acutely downregulated their serotonin (and dopamine) receptors, and furthermore that they've literally (almost) exhausted their current pool of neurotransmitters, which need to be re-synthesized by the body.
When looking at the DEA seizure data it's clear that meth is one of the most pure and potent (wrt methamphetamine, the dea defines purity as what % of the compound is meth, meaning either levo or dextro methamphetamine, whereas potency only factors in the d-meth content, since d-meth is the enantiomer that actually gets you cerebrally high) street drugs out there. By comparison, cocaine is one of the most disgusting, cut at the source level with stuff like levamisole (which is thought to be disastrous to health, ie it's not just inert), and then further cut every step down the chain, albeit usually with inert cuts (baby powder, baking soda, glucose, creatine, that kinda stuff) the lower down the chain you get. Seriously kids, don't do cocaine. It's overhyped and a waste of money.
So anyway, as I said two paragraphs above, n-iso is real but the idea that there's tons of n-iso crystal floating around is just an urban legend promulgated by tweakers who spiked their tolerance the moon and refuse to see that fact.
[+] [-] Synaesthesia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JudasGoat|4 years ago|reply
"P2P is old school," he said. "Hell, I used to cook by that route circa 1980."
The fight has come full circle. In the 1980s, the U.S. government severely restricted access to P2P seeking to curtail methamphetamine production. Meth makers shifted to ephedrine, which could be found in common cold remedies. When authorities cracked down on ephedrine, they switched to pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in Sudafed and other decongestants." https://www.cleveland.com/world/2009/12/old_school_meth_meth...
[+] [-] cwkoss|4 years ago|reply
https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/attach/130/130179_Secrets_of_M...
[+] [-] debacle|4 years ago|reply
How is meth "industrially" produced? Is it Walter White-esque clandestine factories? Is it clever people in their garages? Is it done over the border?
[+] [-] 323|4 years ago|reply
> The chemist, a burly man with a master’s degree in biochemical engineering described the industry’s transformation, as the pair worked at an outside table.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/08/mexico-cartel-...
[+] [-] eoinbmorg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhh__|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hilbert42|4 years ago|reply
I've never produced it and as you'd be aware it'd be stupid of me to offer advice based on chemical knowledge as it's manufacture is illegal - despite the fact that the various methods are widely known.
From time to time, I've seen busts of clandestine labs on TV and it's easily doable in a garage or shed. Seems the smell of volatiles often gives them away (e.g.: propan-2-one or similar reagents), or they catch fire (seeming a common occurrence) which burns the place down thus attracts attention.
As an expert, you'd know that a racemic mixture results. As backyard-ers don't have the means to separate the enantiomers, law enforcement uses the fact to determine whether stuff they've collected originated in a backyard lab of from a pharmaceutical complex. Nevertheless, I gather from the article that's narrowed. It seems, that when one's made enough money manufacturing gets reasonably sophisticated.
[+] [-] perardi|4 years ago|reply
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
[+] [-] 1MachineElf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caymanjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bteitelb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notJim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Factorium|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't make sense to 'outsource' production of narcotics to antagonistic nations or criminal enterprises.
[+] [-] fitzn|4 years ago|reply
There's actually a US company doing this as well: https://biobot.io/
[+] [-] oceanghost|4 years ago|reply
An "acquaintance" of mine who is a well seasoned meth user did ~1.5g and didn't die.
She certainly wasn't better off for it.