How the “New Meth” took over North America’s streets

Jordan If you ask the people who use them or the people who work with people who do, they’ll tell you, there are some really bad drugs on the streets of North America right now. Overdoses have consistently risen and while the opioid crisis is a killer and fentanyl can be impossibly deadly, what sometimes gets forgotten in that discussion is methamphetamine. Perhaps that’s because meth has been around for some time, for decades. But something appears to be changing. Over the past decade, across the continent, the supply of meth has increased and the price of it has dropped, making it more widely available to more people than ever before. And obviously that’s not great. But that’s not the mystery. The mystery is what our guest today calls the new meth.

It is made with different chemicals that are easier to get a hold of, hence the supply increase and the price drop. But it also seems to impact its users differently. In particular, and this evidence is so far anecdotal but seems to be everywhere. The new meth seems to change their brains. Is that true? Why is it happening? Who is studying this? How do we know if this new method is really more dangerous or more deadly? And since it does seem to be, what is actually being done about it? Or is this one of those things that is brushed off as the consequences of using without any real help from those in power?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Sam Quinones is a journalist and a storyteller, he wrote about the new meth in the Atlantic , and more importantly, in his new book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth . Hey, Sam.

Sam How are you doing, Jordan?

Jordan I’m doing really well. Thanks. How are you?

Sam Not bad. Thanks for having me on the show.

Jordan Of course. Why don’t we start the story where your Atlantic piece starts? Because you introduce us to a fascinating character. Tell me a little bit about Joe Bozenko, who is he?

Sam Joe Bozenko is a very dedicated chemist for the Drug Enforcement Agency in DC area. I wrote about him because the focus of this next book that I’ve written, but also, I think the focus now of the drug world has really shifted towards synthetic drugs. Those are drugs not made from any plants made from chemicals. Now we’ve had synthetic drugs around for many, many years, but never in the quantities, the threat and the prevalence and the low price, frankly, that we’re seeing now with the two main staples coming out of Mexico, which are fentanyl and methamphetamine.

And that means that the job of the chemist in drug enforcement and law enforcement in general is more important than ever. And Joe; very dedicated guy enthralled with organic chemistry, you could say. It’s pretty much what he thinks about most of the time. A fascinating guy who’s spent really most of his 20 plus years career going to clandestine synthetic drug labs all across the world. But I wrote about him because he told me this one story about the moment when he saw the meth change out of Mexico, which turns out to be a very important part of this story.

The meth now coming out of Mexico is very different in effect than it was, say, ten years ago. It used to be the Mexican trafficking world had kind of industrialized, dominated the production of meth in the 90s, with a precursor essential to the production of it called ephedrine, which is an antihistamine. You find it in Sudafed pills, and it’s very easy to turn into methamphetamine is ephedrine. And so for many, many years, that’s all you saw. It was a very easy way to do it. You wouldn’t really want to make meth out of anything else, honestly, if you had enough ephedrine. They had enough ephedrine to cover significant parts of the Western United States, I think, up into Canada as well, on the Western side, never really crossed the Mississippi River, though.

And then in 2008, the world changed for them. When the Mexican government finally made ephedrine essentially illegal for any but a few Pharma companiesto possess. With that, the trafficking world had to shift away to another kind of way of making methamphetamine, which involves a precursor known as P2P.

Jordan Tell me about the moment then, when Joe Bozenko realized that shift was underway, and what that shift looked like.

Sam Sure, one day he tells me he found a sample that he was supposed to analyze. That was his job analyzing samples of drugs seized by DEA agents. And he gets a sample on his desk. And it comes from the southwest border, from the border of Mexico. And he begins to analyze it. Immediately, he realizes that it’s a very different kind of method that it’s not made with the same precursor chemical ephedrine that meth had been made with up to then.

And this to him, signals an alarming shift because the Mexican trafficking world had never made meth any other way, except for with ephedrine, very easy to make it. And he begins to try to figure out how they might have made it. Turns out they made it with a process and a precursor known as P2P, phenyl-2-propanone. And what’s more, they’ve been able to kind of do chemical processes that make it even purer than that form of meth would naturally be. And so all this really represents to Joe Bozenko a major shift. This one sample that he sees on his desk in 2006 really represents to him this major shift in what they’re going to be seeing. And sure enough, within a few years, virtually all of the meth coming out of Mexico is made with this precursor known as P2P, and the ephedrine meth eventually fades away.

Jordan Can you explain maybe without getting too deep into the chemistry, how P2P is different from previous forms of meth?

Sam P2P is different from the ephedrine form of meth in that you can make P2P with many different ways, a whole bunch of different chemical hacks, all of them using a variety of different chemicals. All these chemicals are industrial chemicals, legal, easy to come by, and very toxic. What this method allows you to do if you can get your hands on these chemicals is to make more methamphetamine than the Mexican drug world has ever imagined. Because you can make P2P with a variety of different ways, and that’s what begins to happen. They have access to world chemical markets through two ports on the Western Coast of Mexico, and they control those ports to a certain degree. And they are able to bring in huge quantities over the next ten years of chemicals that are then used to make this P2P meth.

And so what we begin to see in the United States, and I suspect also in Canada is an enormous flood of methamphetamine, and it kind of marches across from west to east. First you see it in LA and Portland and Seattle and places like Vancouver, that’s about 2013 or 14. It hits the Midwest in about 2016 or 17. Hits the East Coast, in 2018/19. Up into New England, which never had any meth at all in about 2019. What also happens stunningly is that as it’s covering the country, this meth also drops significantly in price. In many areas, a pound of meth would be $10,000 to $15,000. Now it’s going for $2-3,000. It’s a remarkable, stunning, frankly, amount of capacity of production that eventually is taking place down in Mexico.

But the drug has another effect that I think is even more important to note. And that is that this P2P meth is very different. It’s not a party drug as the ephedrine meth was. It’s not a drug with a lot of euphoria. What it really does, it addicts you very quickly, but it turns people very quickly, mentally ill. Very quickly, people begin demonstrating the symptoms of schizophrenia, horrible paranoia. ‘Police are after me. There’s monsters in the basement.’ and then horrible, very scary hallucinations as well. You begin to see all of this coming as this method marches across the country.

And so my contention is that the massive increase in mental illness and homelessness are really due to this P2P meth coming out of Mexico. The homeless problem is just a natural outgrowth of people being very quickly, mentally ill. No one can live with them. They can’t follow rules. They can’t keep a job. They’re screaming at demons no one else sees, then very quickly, they’re homeless. So you see this, of course, obviously in LA and Portland and Seattle, you see all this. But you also see it now in areas that never had any homelessness, in rural Indiana, parts of West Virginia, rural areas, all of a sudden, and suburban areas, all of a sudden have people wandering around mad, crazed and homeless that never had this problem before. And I contend, a very big part of what’s going on in the country when it comes to this is this meth coming out of Mexico, known as P2P meth.

Jordan Now you spoke to a number of drug users and people who work with them, both for the Atlantic and for the book. Can you tell us how they described the change in the meth that they were taking? And it’s one thing for us to sit here and say, ‘well, it had this effect, that effect and the other thing’. How do they describe it changing them?

Sam Well, what struck me first of all was that everybody I talked to pretty much had the same story to tell. You could talk to someone in Eastern Tennessee and in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and in Portland, Oregon, and you would hear pretty much the same story. The story they tell is of people very quickly rendered mentally ill, screaming, constantly afraid of people after them, the police after them. The government has a chip in their brain, a horrible paranoia like that. Then, of course, the hallucinations, cheetahs coming out of the wall was one thing I heard of, but it was always kind of the same stuff. Then you also heard that after a while, people took on the look of zombies. There was like twitching. They’re unable to control their limbs, a kind of a flat affect after a while, too, kind of a stripping away of the personality. All meth seems to do a real number on your teeth, but this seems to melt the teeth very quickly and then also serious problems with cardiac disease, cardiomyopathy and endocarditis at times as well. So you begin to see these stories repeating themselves wherever I called, wherever I talked to, these stories were the same.

Jordan You mentioned how hard it can be to get someone who’s battling mental illness into a place where they can get treatment. Even if that is possible, what do we know about available treatments for this kind of illness? I’m certainly far from an expert, but you do mention in the article that there is no Suboxone or methadone treatment for meth. Is there anything that workers have tried that seems effective?

Sam Not really. I don’t think so. As you mentioned, when you’re addicted to an opioid, pills or heroin or what have you, you have medical medicine that can help you through that, subdue the cravings, that kind of thing. Methadone buprenorphine are very effective in that way and used widely and probably should be used more widely in a lot of ways. But with meth, there is no medical treatment for it. It’s really a question of you staying away from the dope, being separate from the dope. Detoxing, getting it out of your system and sleeping and letting your brain begin to heal.

What I have found, though, many people said this as well as I talk to people all across the country, and that is that even when people are off the dope, this meth still has done such damage that it does take them a lot of time, not days, maybe weeks before they kind of recover their personality. That was a very ominous thing to hear. I heard it several times where it just didn’t immediately come back. On ephedrine meth you would sleep. You’re up for four or five days, you sleep for two days and you’re coherent, you’re lucid, you’re more or less the way you were before.

Frequently, that is not the case with this P2P meth, which sticks with you, apparently. The effects of it, the damage to your brain apparently stick with you for some time. Could be weeks, could be even months sometimes.

Jordan So this new meth arrives, and it’s easier to make it’s cheaper to make and start spreading across the country up into Canada. How does law enforcement react? What’s being done in real time as this stuff is spreading to try to combat it?

Sam That’s a terrific question, because this is happening at the very time when we have a pandemic, it’s reached its apex during the pandemic, when folks are being let out of jail, they’re not being put in jail for fear of spreading the virus. At the same time, we’re in the midst of criminal justice reform in the United States. I’m not sure about Canada, but down here we are looking to not arrest people, not charge people with minor stuff. The problem with that is to not arrest somebody, to not get that person off the street is not an act of kindness. It’s not an act of justice. It’s actually a torment because frequently people tell me the one time when that person is not going to be using dope is when that person’s in jail. That is also part of the issue.

I think many law enforcement agencies have stepped back because they’ve been told by political or elected leaders, ‘we’re going a very different way with this, we’re not going to be arresting people for this stuff’. Certainly not minor stuff. But the problem with that is that comes from another time when the drugs on the street were more forgiving, the drugs on the street are now fentanyl, which will kill you guaranteed. There’s no such thing as a long term fentanyl user on the street and methamphetamine, which is very likely to create horrible symptoms of mental illness.

So all of that is kind of if you ask me, has really made law enforcement’s job very difficult at the very time when they really ought to be part of the solution in getting people off the street. The street is the most dangerous place to be now as a drug user, it’s always been dangerous, but nothing like what it is today. It’s really a death sentence to be out on the street today and using the drugs that are out there.

Jordan What about at the top of the food chain? Because I know we could debate policy concerning locking up drug users or not. And there’s a huge debate right now in the United States and Canada as well about that. But when you kind of described the situation to me of these drugs flooding in, you mentioned in Mexico, they’re controlling the stuff and bringing it in through ports. And it just seems like such a massive operation at scale that I wonder what’s being done to kind of try to stop it at the source?

Sam Well, I think probably a better way to talk about it is to talk about what the nature of the production is down in Mexico. We call these organizations cartels. They’re not cartels. Cartels are organizations formed to restrict the amount of production to force price up. And obviously the complete opposite is happening. That’s because the groups that we call cartels do have control when it comes to certain things. Certainly when there’s regional wars with other groups, that kind of thing, they’re certainly part of the mix. But when it comes to production, very often, there’s no board of directors saying, now we’re going to do this now we’re going to do this. It’s in fact, on the contrary, it’s a wild, wide open free market.

We legalized marijuana. And the effect down in Mexico was to push many people out of the marijuana trade. And they were not looking to get into legal work at that point. Can’t make enough money to make it work. And you’re not going to return to milking cows and so on. So a lot of those folks became methamphetamine producers. There’s so many people producing this stuff now. It’s just stunning. And that is because they have control of those two ports on the Western side of Mexico. You can get all the world’s chemicals that you need from those ports. And they are receiving those from China, India, Chile, you name it. It doesn’t really matter where the country is. You can get these chemicals from all over the world.

And so there is no one person or one board of directors controlling it. It’s in fact, the opposite. It’s a vast free market. Everybody doing it. And we also have with Mexico free trade, which means there are millions of cars and trucks crossing back and forth every day. And it’s to my way of thinking, this is the nature of the drug trade with Mexico, it’s always been about this diffuse, lots of smallish to mid level producers producing over time huge amounts. And when the price drops, what do they do? Do they get out of the business? No, they produce more to make up with, say, three labs, what they were making with one and furthering the glut. But that’s what we’re seeing across Mexico today it seems to me.

Jordan Is there any way to, I guess, halt the progress, put the Genie back in the bottle? like this is a whole new world of synthetic drugs. Those kind of technological advances don’t usually disappear. How do you tackle something that seems to be in a downward spiral?

Sam Well, it’s an excellent question and a very good point. Putting a Genie back in the bottle is doubtful. I believe that these drugs pose enormous benefits, offer enormous benefits to the trafficking world, and therefore we’re likely to see them for a long time. With synthetic drugs, you don’t need any land. You don’t need to worry about seasons or weather or irrigation or farming or any of that. You just make it in a lab all year round if you have the chemicals.

I would say that what it’s highlighting more than ever. Although having lived in Mexico for ten years, I really feel this should have been done many years ago. And that is that we absolutely must begin to work very closely hand in glove with Mexico on this. We need to push them to understand that their corruption is creating a disaster for their country, and they know that, many, many Mexicans are highly aware of that. We also need to understand, as the United States anyway, that our gun laws, the smuggling of guns from the United States down into Mexico is what gives all these trafficking groups their impunity and allows them to produce the enormous amounts of drugs.

The cost of all those weapons is meth, sold at $2000, $3,000 a pound when it used to be $15,000 a pound. Those weapons allow them to exert their power and their impunity in ways that are very destructive to Mexican institutions, economy and all the rest. So to me, this is calling on the two countries to figure out—I know it’s hard, it’s difficult, but it’s not any harder than trying to get people off this damn methamphetamine—to figure out how to come together, to work together, to make those connections that we haven’t really made, even though we’ve shared a border for hundreds of years now, we still don’t know each other well at all. These synthetic drugs, I don’t believe there’s any real solution to it other than the synergies that we can achieve when we collaborate as two countries. Again, I’m not saying it’s an easy thing to do. It’s very hard, but it’s got to be done.

Jordan So the last part of this, I’ll just ask you to bring it back to the chemistry we kind of started with. You mentioned that there’s no research currently going on about the actual differences between the two kinds of meth. What should happen next in terms of that research, in terms of the chemistry, should we have people like Joe Bozenko on this and trying to nail down exactly what’s going on? It’s crazy to me that this has become an epidemic, as you say. And as I think everybody who’s seen this in the larger cities in North America would agree, and we’re not looking into what’s actually happening inside people’s brains.

Sam No, I totally agree. And I think there’s also a huge role for neuroscientists. They need to be testing ephedrine meth and street P2P meth on mice and rats. You need to be doing far greater studies and kind of ethnography into the people who are using it. That kind of thing. I think we have made enormous strides and advances in neuroscience in the last 20 years around the world, but certainly in the United States. And I think that we can bring a lot of those tools to bear on this problem.

As one woman said, she would love for more research to be done. I quote her at the end of one chapter. She does meditation and all that, but ‘I want to know what else I can do to help my brain heal,’ she told me. She was one of the few that I had ever heard of who’d actually recovered, literally recovered from P2P meth. It was such a poignant way of ending the chapter and saying to me, yeah, we need to study this. We need to understand what’s actually happening in the brain on this stuff, as opposed to the ephedrine meth. But also we need to understand and find ways, and I think our Neuroscientists can lead us there, of how to help the brain heal.

Because now there’s so many thousands and thousands of people all across our country have been affected and had their brains damaged in this way. And we’re not quite clear on how they come out of it exactly.

Jordan Sam, thanks so much for this. I enjoyed your piece in the Atlantic as terrifying as it was, and I look forward to reading the book.

Sam Appreciate the time on your program, Jordan, thank you very much.

Jordan Sam Quinones, you can find his new book The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth , on preorder starting November 1.

That was The Big Story, for more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN Talk to us anytime via email at thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. And look us up in any podcast player you prefer. Add us to your favorites. Hit subscribe, hit like, hit rate, hit review, hit every button they let you unless it’s a thumbs down button.

Thanks for listening, I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, we’ll talk tomorrow.

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