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.
Good article. A similar thing happened here when the Australian Federal Police enacted an operation in Cambodia and similar areas to shut down the production of safrole, extracted from the root of the Sassafras tree (also the flavouring in root beer and sarsparilla). Ecstasy became much harder to get on the street and pushed users towards harder drugs like meth and heroin (resulting in a large number of addictions and increase in overall crime).
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.
If they did that, the consumption would only go up, resulting in even more overdoses. That’s what happened in Portugal, after drug decriminalization — drug consumption there went up significantly (with exception of heroin, which went down, but it also went down in other European countries at the same time which did not decriminalize it). Full on legalization will increase consumption even higher.
Of course, one might argue that it’s fine, because it’s the drug users themselves who would suffer from this. But, considering the current push to get people vaccinated against their will, for their own good, I don’t expect this argument to work for drugs either… who am I kidding, of course people should have a right to use as much drugs as they want, but should have no right to get a job if they are not vaccinated, it’s 2021 after all.
In Canada you can still buy that over the counter. You get id-ed and they keep a record of your purchases, but since it's now generic pills it is now much cheaper than it was before
I grew up in Germany in a household that never used nasal decongestants, probably out of some fear that they might be dangerous.
When in Canada a doctor told me to buy some pseudoephedrine pills to treat a clotted ear and I found the experience so nice, that when back in Germany I walked into a pharmacy to get some.
It is the same in the US, but the FDA calls it "behind the counter". OTC means you grab it off a shelf yourself, BTC means the pharmacy checks your ID, and gives it to you, but still no prescription required.
New Zealand banned it some years ago and I'm still pissed off. The supposed replacement is clinically useless, and I resent suffering through massive head pain from clogged sinuses every winter, while professional gangs still make money hand over fist from meth.
I was in Vegas some years back and got some under the laxer US rules, and have enjoyed a few years of having it available, but alas my supply has run dry.
I didn’t get IDed either of the times I’ve bought a box.
First time was in 2019: I went to Walmart for something for my ears on flights, after some back and forth the pharmacist recommended me pseudoephedrine.
Second time was in Sobeys last month (can fly again, yaaay) and I asked for it directly. The pharmacist had some trouble finding it, but sold it to me with no further issue.
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 agree that the gin->mean, whisky->emotional, etc, is all bunk. But I'm still convinced there's a link between alcohol and violence. If nothing else, the lowered cognitive function and reduced inhibition would mean more opportunity to be angry, and less self control.
Like, a drunk person might misinterpret someone accidentally bumping into them as aggression. And would be less likely to suppress the urge to respond in kind.
You are probably right in your assertion regarding alcohol, however I suspect it may be possible that there are other compounds unique to various flavors of liquor which may influence the overall effects in various ways. These compounds may not be perceptably psychoactive on their own.
The same goes for strains of marijuana, beyond THC and CBD other psychoactive compounds are inconsistently present with uncertain psychoactive effects (if any). Further there may be complex nonlinear interactions (e.g. two compounds produce no effect but adding a third can change the experience, particularly if you consider reaction products from combustion).
In any case the uncertainty is good for marketing.
> One theory is that much of the meth contains residue of toxic chemicals used in its production, or other contaminants. Even traces of certain chemicals, in a relatively pure drug, might be devastating. The sheer number of users is up, too, and the abundance and low price of P2P meth may enable more continual use among them. That, combined with the drug’s potency today, might accelerate the mental deterioration that ephedrine-based meth can also produce, though usually over a period of months or years, not weeks.
These are the theories mentioned in the article referenced in the comment you replied to. It might be the meth itself. Gin, whiskey, and tequila are different colors, and it's not because they are compositionally identical.
> 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.
You’re not entirely wrong, but a splash of liqueur into a small cup of coffee is pretty different from dissolving caffeine pills in tall boys of malt liquor.
> 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. <
Did they separate the culture link from a potential genetic link? Maybe the association exists in a culture because it is a real effect, it just differs between groups.
I used to believe that. It seemed obvious to me and a phd chemist friend of mine that - as you say - the different reputations were a cultural/social creation. The drink itself was just different amounts of ethanol.
Then one day that chemist friend of mine decided to get a bottle of Hornitos Reposado. We usually preferred a good bourbon or weird herbal stuff[1]. We drank most of the bottle, but that wasn't unusual for us at the time[2]. We were intending on a normal evening of video games. MTG, and/or VtES. Instead... we ended up spending the evening having the stupidest, most aggressive, pointless, childish, "macho" argument of our lives. It was shockingly out of character for us. The amount of ethanol consumption wasn't large, and we drank it at a normal rate. Both of us had been a LOT drunker in the past. The only significant difference was our unusual choice of tequila.
While I agree that the cultural preconceptions are probably responsible for most of the effect, there is at least some truth behind the reputations of different types of alcoholic beverages, because the actual drink isn't just ethanol. The different brewing/distilling/aging processes produce different amounts congeners[3][4]; their psychological effects might be small, but small effects amplified through social mechanisms are how "culture" is created.
> In many ways that makes these rumor filled, science light, unsubstantiated media stories about “this is the most dangerous drug ever” incredibly irresponsible.
Hear, hear!
> moral panic over Four Loko ... amaro and coffee
Yah, people have probably started putting whisky (Irish or otherwise) in their coffee the morning after they invented the whisky. Also, you probably have to drink the entire giant can of Four Loko to get the same caffeine in a typical cup of coffee.
> Yet it never caused moral panic until the “wrong type of people” started consuming it.
It's disturbing how often this kind of bs ends up just being a fancy form of racism/sexism/${targeted_group}ism
[1] e.g. Pernod, Herbsaint, Chartreuse
[2] Yes, we were regularly drinking WAY too much. 375ml/day/person minimum. WAY WAY WAY too much...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congener_%28beverages%29 "These substances include small amounts of chemicals such as methanol and other alcohols (known as fusel alcohols), acetone, acetaldehyde, esters, tannins, and aldehydes (e.g. furfural)."
[4] Also, the different amounts of sugars means different effects on bloodsugar/insulin/etc. The resulting effects are probably complicated and difficult to explain, but their contribution to the different reputations might be larger than we expect.
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.
Yeah it's all very straightforward when you look at usage patterns. Often meth abusers will smoke multiple points across a day (a point = 100mg). As a result they stay awake for days straight, don't eat, and often will engage in enormously risky sexual behavior (this is the dirty secret of AIDS btw...it arose in the context of the "party and play" gay subculture where people would smoke meth or other drugs and have sex for hours and hours and hours straight with many, many different partners...but I digress)
The infamous "meth mouth"? That's caused by not sleeping and by just overall letting one's life go to shit. Amphetamines do suppress saliva production, so they aren't great for teeth, but it's 95% the lack of sleep and other associated behavior patterns.
I've taken pharmaceutical adderall (which is 75% d-amp and 25% l-amp btw), and pharmaceutical dextroamphetamine (100% d-amp), and illicit, presumably cartel-sourced, and presumably very pure d-methamphetamine. When taken orally, d-meth is, in my opinion, simply a superior ADHD drug (it is much more dopaminergic than amphetamine, yet causes less peripheral stimulation, so you get a much more favorable ratio of positive cognitive effects to negative peripheral effects).
However, the moment someone starts taking (especially smoking, since the RoA of any drug makes a massive difference in addiction, doubly so for meth) hundreds of milligrams, it becomes a completely different drug. It becomes super deleterious to health through the sleep deprivation and risky behaviors alone. Furthermore meth has a unique property that amphetamine apparently doesn't, which is that it can become directly neurotoxic in large doses (meth has some serotonin release, like a much, much weaker form of MDMA, whereas amphetamine has virtually none, so it's possible that that's the mechanism). This is why in the research literature there's a lot about methamphetamine "neurotoxicity", but the papers conveniently omit that if taking oral doses comparable to what's given for ADHD, it's not neurotoxic whatsoever (and frankly may be neuroprotective, especially against traumatic brain injury).
So yeah, your analogy to Adderall is spot on. I've often seen people derisively refer to Adderall or other amphetamines by saying "we're basically giving kids meth!". Which is true in a sense, except it's really the other way around: meth is really not very different from Adderall. If someone were to smoke 100mg+ of amphetamine, their body would break down the same way it does in a meth user, except possibly for the direct neurotoxicity effect I mentioned.
This "new meth" thing seems like a PR push by government contractors. It's redolent of the UK "skunk" scare (it's not the pot you used to smoke, mommies and daddies - it's special pot that will definitely make your children think they can fly and jump out of windows, and become prostitutes to pay for more.)
> 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.
Background: I'm prescribed 20mg/day of extended release Adderall, via a legitimate ADHD diagnosis. If we take the article's "meth is 2x as potent as Adderall" statement at face value, that would mean I'm taking 10mg equivalent of meth per day.
Now, since part of the reason I take this medication is to remember to take my medication (a joke, yes, but not without its kernel of truth!), I've accidentally double dosed myself before. I've also done the same previously when I was prescribed instant release Adderall. In either case, I've never experienced anything like a euphoric high, but I have experienced the kind of "uselessly driven"/tweaker sort of side of it. And, let me tell you, I do not like it when that happens. Although I'm in no hurry to find out, I honestly find it hard to imagine what the high must actually be like in order for people to voluntarily subject themselves to the negative effects of this drug. And, I don't even exceed the therapeutic range when this happens!
I wish there was some way to actually understand why people abuse meth without actually smoking meth myself, which I'm unwilling to do, for obvious reasons.
Another factor is just sleep deprivation. It's been shown that sleep deprivation increases the likelihood of mania, hallucinations and psychosis. You force someone to stay awake long enough, they will inevitably act crazy. Amphetamine users tend to go on binges and stay awake for days. Keep taking drugs until they pass out from exhaustion.
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.
> 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?
Methamphetamine is very, very stable. It stays as methamphetamine when it's vaporized, regardless of whether we're talking d-meth or l-meth.
> 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.
Not quite. p2p done naively creates racemic meth, yes, but the modern methods, which have been used for years, purify that to enantiopure d-methamphetamine. They do this by bubbling d-tartaric acid through the racemic mixture, which separates the two enantiomers thus yielding the desired pure d-meth.
Furthermore, historically racemic meth was much more common. AFAIK the infamous "shake and bake" technique creates racemic meth. I do know that there is a pseudofed route that yields d-meth, but I think it's different than shake and bake. So don't quote me on this paragraph, but at a minimum we know that in the last several years, almost all meth seized in the US is highly pure/potent d-methamphetamine. There is less l-meth than ever.
> I just don't think the evidence is so weak that we can discard the potential that l-meth is involved.
On the contrary, the evidence is so weak that we literally can discard that l-meth is involved. First of all l-meth is better studied than you say. I would bet to approve the l-methamphetamine-based vics vapo inhaler they had to at least do animal models with large amounts of pure l-meth.
Second of all, and this is what blows the giant hole in your argument, there is no surge of l-meth. There is less l-meth than there has ever been in the history of methamphetamine.
Thirdly - this ties into the second point - you seem to thikn that getting racemic methamphetamine is something particular to the p2p method. It's not. As a general rule, synthesis of any compound yields the racemic version (if we're talking a compound with two enantiomers). This is definitely true for meth, where almost every method yields racemic meth. AFAIK there's a pseudoephedrine route that yields straight d-meth, but like I mentioned above the current state of the art is just to do a big p2p synth route and then separate out the d enantiomer specifically.
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.
I don't think abstinence has been very good at achieving the outcome we're hoping for.
Not all abstinence is the same. Just because one is free to try anything, it doesn't mean people have to try everything.
Once they got into weed they realized just how much of a lie abstinence teaching was, they then graduated to trying other drugs
The problem isn't abstinence. The problem is the lie. Give people the proper, accurate information, and many will simply decide to abstain themselves. I think you and I would agree on this point about information.
The lack of education is terrifying, really.
That's ultimately the result of lies, deliberate obscurity, and attempts at thought control. It's far better to trust people with accurate information and let them decide for themselves.
It depends on person. We are (de)motivated by different things.
I was growing up in a neighborhood where most part of people above 14 were using something. Most adults were using something heavy and awful, like heroin or desomorphine or whatever. I grew up watching them every day, and I grew up with insane fear of what chemicals do to human body and brain.
I am 35 today, I have never in my life tried anything, even a cigarette. For me fear works perfectly as a reason to stay away from drugs.
But to be fair, it is self-induced fear, from life lessons and not from school lessons.
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.
The short answer is that opiates kill by suppressing the breathing reflex. Anything that stimulates breathing can be used to counter act the effect of opiates. In the 70's people would force people to go on walks until their lips weren't blue from 02 deprivation, even if they had to support them while they walked.
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.
For duration of effect, at least meth might more closely match an opioid than cocaine (classic speedball). Part of the high danger of speedballs is that the stimulant (coke) wears off much faster than the depressant. Amphetamines have a longer duration of effect than cocaine, I think.
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.
Meth doesn't have to be smoked, you can just eat the crystals orally, but meth abusers uusally don't do that because it's not nearly as fun.
The pills they're referring to, 30 M (https://www.drugs.com/imprints/30-m-8232.html), are oxycodone pills (a powerful opioid), but he's likely actually specifically referring to pressed fent (or fent analogue) pills that are made to look like real oxycodone pills. Or perhaps a mixture of meth and fentanyl, such as what George Floyd was taking the day he died (see https://interactive.kare11.com/pdfs/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.... as well as the other evidence around the case)
There's a big problem where, now that the government has really cracked down on so-called "pill mills" - which like all of the war on drugs was the worst thing they could have done, because now the demand is being filled by fentanyl and fentanyl analogues that are pressed to look like oxy pills, but aren't. Oxy alone can be dangerous, but fent is another beast (particularly illicit).
As one anecdote I just had a friend-of-a-friend (I didn't know them personally) die of an overdose earlier this year. They took "oxys" orally which were actually pure fent analogue, and now they're dead. They are yet another fatality of the war on drugs (and also the war on COVID since the lockdowns were the proximate cause of them picking up their opioid habit again)
--
Oh, and to elaborate on the GP's point about overdoses being the result of running out of meth, methamphetamine increases respiration rate, which will theoretically counteract the respiratory depression induced by opioids (which are how opioids always kill, with the one exception that fent and related analogues can possibly kill by an addition mechanism of action known as wooden chest syndrome)
From the context I assume he is talking about counterfeit pain pills (a M30 is an oxycodone pill) that are made with fentanyl (often in very high or uneven doses). Though counterfeit Adderall pills made with meth are now starting to show up.
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.)
D.A.R.E. did a great job of teaching us that any drug user has made a conscious choice toward moral failure. Couple that with knowledge of which groups were most heavily impacted by the drug epidemics of the 1980s and you can see an esoteric goal for D.A.R.E.
"D.A.R.E. did a great job of teaching us that any drug user has made a conscious choice toward moral failure."
I don't think it did this. I'm in my early 40's and grew up with DARE. When we were younger, they really leaned into the danger factor and pretty much said you'll hurt everyone you know.
And then, you realize they are liars. I didn't have to actually do drugs to see that. Why would you learn that is a moral failure from lies? I didn't even worry about those sorts of things when I was a preteen/young teen, honestly.
That's like saying "I did a lot of drugs, except the ones that _really_ fuck you up". 100K people will die in the US this year from hard drug overdoses. 93K died last year. This also ignores the fact that several times the number are circling down the societal shitter due to their addiction.
That's not to disagree that e.g. MJ is less dangerous than alcohol when consumed in moderation (although it doesn't have the same effect, so realistically people will just consume both, hopefully not simultaneously).
But don't forget the audience: there's a number of folks on this site who think that heroin and meth should be legal, and freely available, and they will read your comment with that bias in mind. I'd much rather have the old DARE bullshit than allow this to happen.
> heroin and meth should be legal, and freely available, and they will read your comment with that bias in mind. I'd much rather have the old DARE bullshit than allow this to happen.
Why? Do you think somehow things would be worse with legal, controlled drugs?
Contemporary social policy as a whole appears to be a cycle of reaction and hysteria. There's very little substance to this process, in the form of empiricism or evidenced-based feedback. This cycle appears to be a by-product of our modern information mediums. I think that generations prior to ours (I too am approaching 40) weren't as vulnerable to the whims of society's most easily frightened and manipulated members. I think the only solution is to vote with our feet, and leave the hysterics behind. I suspect this process is well underway, now that the more educated members of society have the ability to work from home.
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.
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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.
Anecdotal tidbit: father in law was a casual meth user for decades until life stress pushed him to start shooting it up around 1996. That's when the real breakdown started (paranoid hallucinations and fantastical delusions). There's something to be said for dosages and delivery mechanisms, which to some degree are driven by culture, pricing and availability.
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 will back the Tartaric Acid hypothesis. If it's being done, this is the only way it makes sense. It requires nearly nothing but the D-Tartaric Acid and Ethanol/Methanol + basic glassware.
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.
> 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.
Can you give a bit more detail about what's wrong here, and how it might be fixed? Are all mentions to nitrostyrene/NTS incorrect? This is used repeatedly in the cited papers, so I'm confused if they are also wrong, or the post has mangled usage, or what.
"Nitrostyrene" is sometimes used to refer to the whole class of chemicals featuring the phenyl-ethylene-nitro linkage. So it's not wrong to call it "the nitrostyrene method". But the specific nitrostyrene that is a precursor to methamphetamine is 1-phenyl-2-nitro-propene, while the parent compound "nitrostyrene" is 1-phenyl-2-nitro-ethene.
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.
> 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.
Meth has always, always, always been known to cause those behaviors/effects since it first became widespread. Breaking bad shows those behaviors because they're classic tweaker behaviors. The scene where Jesse distracts the guy by digging is super spot on. Brilliant scene.
So yep, the paranoia, hallucinations etc have nothing to do with "new meth", they're just what happens when someone abuses sufficient amounts of meth. And the more potent the meth, the easier it is to get to that threshold. But note that you still need to be smoking or injecting quite a bit. The people exhibiting psychosis and the like are using hundreds of milligrams per session.
I happen to be re-watching this right now, and it blew my mind to see those graphs and not see the show lagging a few years behind the reality. How is this possible? It borderline seems like the background research for the show must have actually talked to the mass manufacturers of the stuff...
The transition to super labs, and away from small time Sudafed based meth production, happened prior to the release of Breaking Bad. They based their show on what was occurring in the real world.
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.
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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.
Sorry for the confusing terminology. "Peripheral stimulation" means unwanted stimulation of the body itself, such as suppressed appetite, general jitteriness, and the like. Whereas the cerebral effects are the actual cognitive effects of improved attention/focus/alertness/scanning behavior, euphoria, and that kind of thing.
In general when taking amphetamines for ADHD-type symptoms, you want to maximize the cerebral stimulation while minimizing the peripheral stimulation, because the latter causes [most of] the unpleasant side effects like inability to eat/sleep. Note that some degree of peripheral stimulation is unavoidable regardless of whether one is taking pure d-methamphetamine or not, and also probably some amount of peripheral stimulation is desirable because ADHD is not just difficulty in maintaining focus/attention but also getting the kick in the ass to start tasks in the first place. But in my experience relying on the peripheral stimulation (which, for example, Adderall produces more of than Vyvanse) simply doesn't work long-term, and just makes appetite regulation and the like get totally out of whack.
The short answer is "yes". The long answer is "that's a philosophical question".
Downregulation is a natural homeostatic mechanism that happens with almost everything. Any time a certain receptor gets stimulated above baseline, over the long-term it's going to get downregulated. The actual neurobiology of how this works is enormously complicated and beyond my (and probably almost anyone's) understanding. I do recall that NMDA receptors have a critical role to play, given that NMDA receptor antagonists can attenuate some (presumably not all) of the down or up regulation
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.
Just taken a brief look at that link. It's no wonder Wikileaks doesn't endear itself to many.
That said, I suppose in reality it's just a more in-your-face presentation of what's already in many organic chemistry textbook in any number of libraries.
Frankly, I reckon there's little that can be done to stop the illicit manufacture of these drugs for the logical reason that they're such simple molecules. Many are just minor variations on the basic d-enantiomer (dexamphetamine) which essentially is only a benzene ring with a single branch containing a CH3 methyl and a NH2 amine group. So it stands to reason that there are many comparatively simple ways to synthesize them and that more are likely to be found. Moreover, the more precursors there are, the harder it becomes to ban them all, as eventually we'll hit the point where certain precursors are too ubiquitous and or important to ban.
It seems to me that if we're to take harm minimization seriously then we need to take a more sophisticated approach. For staters, we need much more efficient public health measures to detect and separate out genuine self-medicatiors from the partygoers who take illicit drugs.
As we know, these sympathomimetic amines have been prescribed by the medical profession for decades for certain depressive illnesses, ADHD, etc., but because of their their potential for abuse - not to mention certain moralistic attitudes among many politicians - these drugs have a horrible stigma attached to them and that has stopped many undiagnosed people from being prescribed them legally. The consequence is that many of them self-medicate with illegal drugs and the outcomes are often dire.
I think that taking a serious approach to medicalizing the problem would help very significantly. This would also include distinguishing the amines from the opiates. Whilst the medical profession understands fundamental difference between these two classes of drugs, public policy often doesn't and the drug problem ends up as an amorphous mess that becomes even harder to sort out than it otherwise would have been.
Therefore, there needs to be a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding amongst the general community to the effect that someone who turns to illicit amines is likely doing so for fundamentally different reasons to another who has turned to opiates. A more sophisticated approach to the drug problem would lead to better outcomes for not only those addicted to drugs but also for society in general.
I’d guess from the ads in Priesler’s book there’s more of his writings where this one came from. Since my initial look at the book I’ve now had time to spent a few more minutes examining Uncle Fester’s Secrets and I’ve concerns that I reckon need to be said before posts to this story time out.
Despite its controversial title, the book is pretty boring unless you’re actually following/putting into action his various ‘recipes’. I suppose having read certain information therein that concerns me I’m obliged to say something about it if it might save someone from coming to harm.
Anyone who’s read various other posts of mine would know that I neither hold conservative establishment views nor am I an anarchist—except in the sense that I believe democracy needs urgent reform but not through violence. Thus, essentially, I’m against censorship, and usually it’s not my style to criticize anyone who puts an alternative view. So why am I acting as if I want to censor parts of Priesler’s book? It’s simply because some of the actions he advises are outright irresponsible.
First, my position is that [as stated] it doesn’t make sense to try to censor any of the chemical processes for any of the sympathomimetic amines whether they be legal-OTC, legal-on script or illegal, but it’s my opinion that they should be confined to a chemistry text or an adjunct to one—one which describes the chemistry at a commensurate level to the actual processes involved and that appropriate chemical nomenclature is used to do so.
Priesler’s cookbook approach is irresponsible for these reasons:
1. Whilst he states in very fine print on the ISBN/copyright page “Neither the author nor the publisher intends for any of the information in this book to be used for criminal purposes...”, as an attempt to cover himself legally, he does not emphatically state that the drug manufacturing processes he describes are covered by international treaty—in that the production of such drugs and possession of many of their precursors are illegal in almost every jurisdiction worldwide—that is, unless one is in some way ‘licensed’ to possess or manufacture them. Yes, those tempted to undertake such manufacture will almost certainly know this already, but the exact ramifications ought to spelt out in considerably more detail. More about this in a moment.
2. Priesler’s cookbook approach means that he’s written the text down to a level where he expects those who’ve either no theoretical or practical knowledge of chemistry or who have only novice-level chemistry skills to undertake what is essentially sophisticated chemical engineering/synthesis. In a practical sense, there’s much here that can go wrong for both the manufacturer and the drug consumer. Normally, such manufacturing processes would be undertaken by experienced chemists in a pharmaceutical company or research institutes, etc. where much of chemical engineering involved is specifically aimed at QA—ensuring that the manufacturing process proceeds safely and that the end product complies with proper purity and quantitative tolerances/standards, etc. Backyard manufacturing is usually not conducive to high standards or being highly consistent.
3. Despite Priesler’s warning that the "book is sold for informational purposes only, etc." it’s very difficult to conclude that he actually means it, for if he had done so, then he’d have written up the information in the manner that I've suggested above. Clearly, Priesler is deliberately goading authority to provoke a response and all indications are that he’s been very successful in doing so, especially given that he’s suggesting that chemistry neophytes take up the dangerous challenge.
4. One doesn’t have to look any further than Chapter One—Chemicals and Equipment to illustrate the issues. First, anyone experienced in organic synthesis of this caliber doesn’t need lessons in how to handle their glassware (thus my assertion he’s deliberately pitching at neophytes); second, the purchasing of almost any quantity of just about every one of the 32 precursor chemicals listed on pages 6 and 7 will draw the attention of the powers that be; and so will most of the Listed Essential Chemicals on page 7.
5. Moreover, the quantities of chemicals that Priesler is suggesting that one obtains are quite staggering. For example, under Imports and Exports we find 500 gal or 1 ,500 kg of acetone; 500 gal or 1 ,364 kg of ethyl ether; 500 kg of potassium permanganate; 500 gal or 1 ,591 kg of toluene just to mention a few of the more dangerous ones.
I understand his logic by suggesting that one’s likely to be less ‘exposed’ if one makes one large batch instead of lots of little ones but my mind simply boggles beyond belief that any neophyte drugmaker/chemist would be handling the mentioned quantities of those dangerous chemicals in ‘backyard’, less-than-ideal conditions—as three of those I’ve mentioned are highly volatile and their vapors dangerously explosive. Playing with such quantities in suboptimal conditions is living dangerously in the extreme not to mention that by purchasing such huge quantities one would be waving red flags to the world.
Any reasonable person would never recommend such a risky and dangerous undertaking.
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.
"exactly where the supply comes from is probably a fascinating story never to be fully told."
Where it's made is one matter but I'd imagine its only significant precursor would be ergotamine tartrate (a la Hoffman), as ergotamine is a commonly available drug for migraine (although somewhat less so than some years back, as it's been largely superceded by sumatriptan).
The next alternative I'd imagine would be to get 'raw' ergot and process it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot although I'd guess that gathering and refining the fungus would be no mean feat for any backyard manufacturer.
It's hard to imagine there being any other major human-manufactured precursor due to the complexity of the molecule. Moreover, refined ergotamine for medical use is a mixture of various ergot
alkaloids. Presumably, this would complicate the synthesis but I've never bothered to think about how it would or to what extent.
With the rise of online shopping, the big suppliers are a lot more visible than they were before. I like to read stories on forums sometimes.
It turns out there are more than a couple LSD labs, some having a bigger internet presence than others.
Suppliers will not sell directly to random people, but as it turns out their approved resellers are happy to offer spoonfuls of LSD in powder form to anyone who asks!
"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?
You probably don't have to (unless you live in the US), as xylometazoline HCl works exceptionality well and is readily available OTC sans script: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylometazoline
P.S.: If you live in the US, then it's readily available from Canada.
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.
I think he means that when you're tweaking on the "old meth," you'd be more likely to go outside and interact with people (many times, with hostility and aggression), while the "new meth" is more likely to make you want to stay inside, and withdraw from society.
What's cheaper than a tent? 1/2 or 1/3rd of a tent. That's enough if shelter is the only issue. If there is a need for the poorest to have solitude, there's going to be a proliferation in the number of tents.
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.
i have had a theory for years if you sold any drug like meth or cocaine in an advil bottle with a label on the side saying “take at most 1 tablet every 4 hours, do not exceed 6 tablets in one day. do not use for more than 2 days in a row” etc then the vast majority of people would not have any issue with it. the people who are already abusing it would continue to abuse it. most people can be around hard addictive drugs ingrained in society like alcohol and do just fine
They've been devastating for good reason, which is that with oxycodone the long proven, well established administration and monitoring protocols for narcotic opioids were not observed.
Essentially, every narcotic opioid ever discovered or used has addictive properties and thus they all have the potential to addict users. Opiate addition takes a very pernicious form because withdrawal makes the addict feel so absolutely rotten which is instantly fixed by restoring the level of drug to its normal 'maintenance' levels.
Opiates come in a huge range of types and strengths. Some are considered sufficienty mild or innocuous to sell OTC without a script, others are considered too powerful and dangerous to ever sell legally even though they do have legitimate medical uses, heroin (diacetyl morphine) falls into this category in most countries as it's considered too 'hot' to handle/administer - although the UK is one exception where it's used for intractable pain (as in terminal cancer).
(The UK struck out/did not sign the section that covered the complete prohibition of heroin in the international treaty on banned narcotic drugs because its
doctors used the rationale that heroin is actually a more effective painkiller in terminal cancer cases over morphine (which in fact it is by a reasonable margin) - thus addiction was a secondary consideration in such dire circumstances. Whilst the UK, didn't ban heroin for medical use, it agreed to the other provisions of the treaty - those concerning its illegal trade, and possession, etc.)
As I said, ALL opioids that induce narcotic and pain-reducing effects have the potential to be addictive - even mild OTC ones. I'll use myself as an example here. Years ago, I used to take OTC painkillers for the occasional headache of the type that included both codeine and paracetamol (acetaminophen) and whilst they cured the pain I found the headaches becoming more frequent which then led me to take more tablets. Eventually, it dawned on me that the codeine was the reason for the increase in frequency of the headaches - not what caused them in the first instance. I then switched to the paracetamol-only tablets and the frequency of my headaches subsided to the frequency that they were originally.
Of course, in my case, withdrawing from the codeine was was trivial - just a simple matter of switching to codeine-free tablets, but it's anything but simple for a heroin addict - in most cases it's a fucking painful 'nightmare' of the worst kind.
Right, I've taken a long time to get to the point which is this: simply introducing a new opioid drug, especially so a powerful one such oxycodone, without keeping in place all the existing protocols that cover the medical administration of opoids which have existed for well over 100 years is a recipe for an unmitigated disaster - and that's exactly what happened.
We know that Purdue Pharmaceuticals and its owners - that ragbag mob the Sacklers - were the irresponsible pushers of oxycodone, but in many ways it's how we'd gotten to the point where oxycodone was so widespread that it's had such a devastating impact on the population that is so damning and it still must be explained in detail.
What's never been explained to me or, for that matter any other member of the public, why the FDA didn't nip this potential problem in the bud at the outset when it originally approved oxycodone. Moreover, why did the second line of defense fail so catastrophically - that is, why didn't the medical profession - all those doctors prescribing oxycodone - use their knowledge of opiate addiction (which is basic 101 pharmacy knowledge required for them to pass their medial exams), stop the opioid crisis before it took hold?
The opioid/oxycondone crisis is one of the greatest failings in public health administration in modern times. Purdue and the Sacklers started the crisis but why public health administration failed so catastrophically has never been answered.
Good question. If you were to go by relative effects on consciousness, alcohol is a far harder drug than cannabis. Lots of illegal drugs are, alcohol is much worse than we believe.
it's a good question - I avoided it in my own response with the clever use of quotation marks.
But to answer, I think the term is used colloquially all of the time and of course is open to interpretation.
I would suggest it has nothing to do with a drug's pharmacology or chemical structure but rather the degree to which a drug when taken in easily-consumed quantities can shape our perceptions of the world, the likelihood of negative externalities due to consumer behavior and the probability of becoming addicted to the drug.
A mixture of those things makes a drug "hard" in conversational language e.g. something that dramatically changes a persons perceptions, frequently has negative externalities and can cause addiction with short-term sustained use is a "hard drug". Like alcohol.
When addicted to such a drug, the negative externalities typically expand in scope and severity and if the use scales to a significant portion of the population would generally be regarded as an undesirable state for society to be in.
In the article, "P2P" is an abbreviation for Phenylacetone, a precursor to meth (the drug). It's not "peer to peer" so that solved a lot of puzzling over what the headline could mean.
I don’t think that would be a bad description of the state of meth manufacturing in the Midwest during the 2000s and early 2010s. Users would source together (one person buys the Sudafed, another the chemicals, etc) to make meth and then they would trade with each other, etc. The rise of super labs and purity levels the average meth head couldn’t achieve basically killed the peer-to-peer meth business. At least this was my experience with my addicted cousins back home (in the Midwest.)
I think the same analogy can be made for social media. We had Myspace and Friendster, but social networks didn't become a problem until we had so much of it - always internet connected little computers with us every waking hour.
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.)
https://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume19/v19i3...
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.
https://www.econtalk.org/sam-quinones-on-meth-fentanyl-and-t...
This book was abstracted into a great Atlantic article mentioned at the beginning of the original post.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
Good article. A similar thing happened here when the Australian Federal Police enacted an operation in Cambodia and similar areas to shut down the production of safrole, extracted from the root of the Sassafras tree (also the flavouring in root beer and sarsparilla). Ecstasy became much harder to get on the street and pushed users towards harder drugs like meth and heroin (resulting in a large number of addictions and increase in overall crime).
I heard that. Interesting discussion.
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.
As dramatized in the television series Breaking Bad
If only they'd legalize, tax, and regulate the meth...
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.
If they did that, the consumption would only go up, resulting in even more overdoses. That’s what happened in Portugal, after drug decriminalization — drug consumption there went up significantly (with exception of heroin, which went down, but it also went down in other European countries at the same time which did not decriminalize it). Full on legalization will increase consumption even higher.
Of course, one might argue that it’s fine, because it’s the drug users themselves who would suffer from this. But, considering the current push to get people vaccinated against their will, for their own good, I don’t expect this argument to work for drugs either… who am I kidding, of course people should have a right to use as much drugs as they want, but should have no right to get a job if they are not vaccinated, it’s 2021 after all.
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In Canada you can still buy that over the counter. You get id-ed and they keep a record of your purchases, but since it's now generic pills it is now much cheaper than it was before
I grew up in Germany in a household that never used nasal decongestants, probably out of some fear that they might be dangerous.
When in Canada a doctor told me to buy some pseudoephedrine pills to treat a clotted ear and I found the experience so nice, that when back in Germany I walked into a pharmacy to get some.
The looks...
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It is the same in the US, but the FDA calls it "behind the counter". OTC means you grab it off a shelf yourself, BTC means the pharmacy checks your ID, and gives it to you, but still no prescription required.
https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-drug-class/legal-requi...
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It's the same in the US; you can buy it without a prescription, but you have to have your ID logged.
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New Zealand banned it some years ago and I'm still pissed off. The supposed replacement is clinically useless, and I resent suffering through massive head pain from clogged sinuses every winter, while professional gangs still make money hand over fist from meth.
I was in Vegas some years back and got some under the laxer US rules, and have enjoyed a few years of having it available, but alas my supply has run dry.
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I didn’t get IDed either of the times I’ve bought a box.
First time was in 2019: I went to Walmart for something for my ears on flights, after some back and forth the pharmacist recommended me pseudoephedrine.
Second time was in Sobeys last month (can fly again, yaaay) and I asked for it directly. The pharmacist had some trouble finding it, but sold it to me with no further issue.
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Can still buy it over the counter in the UK too.
Around a week ago, I came across this link here on HN that suggested that there's a new form of meth:
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.
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 agree that the gin->mean, whisky->emotional, etc, is all bunk. But I'm still convinced there's a link between alcohol and violence. If nothing else, the lowered cognitive function and reduced inhibition would mean more opportunity to be angry, and less self control.
Like, a drunk person might misinterpret someone accidentally bumping into them as aggression. And would be less likely to suppress the urge to respond in kind.
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You are probably right in your assertion regarding alcohol, however I suspect it may be possible that there are other compounds unique to various flavors of liquor which may influence the overall effects in various ways. These compounds may not be perceptably psychoactive on their own.
The same goes for strains of marijuana, beyond THC and CBD other psychoactive compounds are inconsistently present with uncertain psychoactive effects (if any). Further there may be complex nonlinear interactions (e.g. two compounds produce no effect but adding a third can change the experience, particularly if you consider reaction products from combustion).
In any case the uncertainty is good for marketing.
> One theory is that much of the meth contains residue of toxic chemicals used in its production, or other contaminants. Even traces of certain chemicals, in a relatively pure drug, might be devastating. The sheer number of users is up, too, and the abundance and low price of P2P meth may enable more continual use among them. That, combined with the drug’s potency today, might accelerate the mental deterioration that ephedrine-based meth can also produce, though usually over a period of months or years, not weeks.
These are the theories mentioned in the article referenced in the comment you replied to. It might be the meth itself. Gin, whiskey, and tequila are different colors, and it's not because they are compositionally identical.
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> 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.
You’re not entirely wrong, but a splash of liqueur into a small cup of coffee is pretty different from dissolving caffeine pills in tall boys of malt liquor.
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> 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. <
What about krokodile?
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Did they separate the culture link from a potential genetic link? Maybe the association exists in a culture because it is a real effect, it just differs between groups.
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> It’s all ethanol
I used to believe that. It seemed obvious to me and a phd chemist friend of mine that - as you say - the different reputations were a cultural/social creation. The drink itself was just different amounts of ethanol.
Then one day that chemist friend of mine decided to get a bottle of Hornitos Reposado. We usually preferred a good bourbon or weird herbal stuff[1]. We drank most of the bottle, but that wasn't unusual for us at the time[2]. We were intending on a normal evening of video games. MTG, and/or VtES. Instead... we ended up spending the evening having the stupidest, most aggressive, pointless, childish, "macho" argument of our lives. It was shockingly out of character for us. The amount of ethanol consumption wasn't large, and we drank it at a normal rate. Both of us had been a LOT drunker in the past. The only significant difference was our unusual choice of tequila.
While I agree that the cultural preconceptions are probably responsible for most of the effect, there is at least some truth behind the reputations of different types of alcoholic beverages, because the actual drink isn't just ethanol. The different brewing/distilling/aging processes produce different amounts congeners[3][4]; their psychological effects might be small, but small effects amplified through social mechanisms are how "culture" is created.
> In many ways that makes these rumor filled, science light, unsubstantiated media stories about “this is the most dangerous drug ever” incredibly irresponsible.
Hear, hear!
> moral panic over Four Loko ... amaro and coffee
Yah, people have probably started putting whisky (Irish or otherwise) in their coffee the morning after they invented the whisky. Also, you probably have to drink the entire giant can of Four Loko to get the same caffeine in a typical cup of coffee.
> Yet it never caused moral panic until the “wrong type of people” started consuming it.
It's disturbing how often this kind of bs ends up just being a fancy form of racism/sexism/${targeted_group}ism
[1] e.g. Pernod, Herbsaint, Chartreuse
[2] Yes, we were regularly drinking WAY too much. 375ml/day/person minimum. WAY WAY WAY too much...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congener_%28beverages%29 "These substances include small amounts of chemicals such as methanol and other alcohols (known as fusel alcohols), acetone, acetaldehyde, esters, tannins, and aldehydes (e.g. furfural)."
[4] Also, the different amounts of sugars means different effects on bloodsugar/insulin/etc. The resulting effects are probably complicated and difficult to explain, but their contribution to the different reputations might be larger than we expect.
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.
Yeah it's all very straightforward when you look at usage patterns. Often meth abusers will smoke multiple points across a day (a point = 100mg). As a result they stay awake for days straight, don't eat, and often will engage in enormously risky sexual behavior (this is the dirty secret of AIDS btw...it arose in the context of the "party and play" gay subculture where people would smoke meth or other drugs and have sex for hours and hours and hours straight with many, many different partners...but I digress)
The infamous "meth mouth"? That's caused by not sleeping and by just overall letting one's life go to shit. Amphetamines do suppress saliva production, so they aren't great for teeth, but it's 95% the lack of sleep and other associated behavior patterns.
I've taken pharmaceutical adderall (which is 75% d-amp and 25% l-amp btw), and pharmaceutical dextroamphetamine (100% d-amp), and illicit, presumably cartel-sourced, and presumably very pure d-methamphetamine. When taken orally, d-meth is, in my opinion, simply a superior ADHD drug (it is much more dopaminergic than amphetamine, yet causes less peripheral stimulation, so you get a much more favorable ratio of positive cognitive effects to negative peripheral effects).
However, the moment someone starts taking (especially smoking, since the RoA of any drug makes a massive difference in addiction, doubly so for meth) hundreds of milligrams, it becomes a completely different drug. It becomes super deleterious to health through the sleep deprivation and risky behaviors alone. Furthermore meth has a unique property that amphetamine apparently doesn't, which is that it can become directly neurotoxic in large doses (meth has some serotonin release, like a much, much weaker form of MDMA, whereas amphetamine has virtually none, so it's possible that that's the mechanism). This is why in the research literature there's a lot about methamphetamine "neurotoxicity", but the papers conveniently omit that if taking oral doses comparable to what's given for ADHD, it's not neurotoxic whatsoever (and frankly may be neuroprotective, especially against traumatic brain injury).
So yeah, your analogy to Adderall is spot on. I've often seen people derisively refer to Adderall or other amphetamines by saying "we're basically giving kids meth!". Which is true in a sense, except it's really the other way around: meth is really not very different from Adderall. If someone were to smoke 100mg+ of amphetamine, their body would break down the same way it does in a meth user, except possibly for the direct neurotoxicity effect I mentioned.
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This "new meth" thing seems like a PR push by government contractors. It's redolent of the UK "skunk" scare (it's not the pot you used to smoke, mommies and daddies - it's special pot that will definitely make your children think they can fly and jump out of windows, and become prostitutes to pay for more.)
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> 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.
Background: I'm prescribed 20mg/day of extended release Adderall, via a legitimate ADHD diagnosis. If we take the article's "meth is 2x as potent as Adderall" statement at face value, that would mean I'm taking 10mg equivalent of meth per day.
Now, since part of the reason I take this medication is to remember to take my medication (a joke, yes, but not without its kernel of truth!), I've accidentally double dosed myself before. I've also done the same previously when I was prescribed instant release Adderall. In either case, I've never experienced anything like a euphoric high, but I have experienced the kind of "uselessly driven"/tweaker sort of side of it. And, let me tell you, I do not like it when that happens. Although I'm in no hurry to find out, I honestly find it hard to imagine what the high must actually be like in order for people to voluntarily subject themselves to the negative effects of this drug. And, I don't even exceed the therapeutic range when this happens!
I wish there was some way to actually understand why people abuse meth without actually smoking meth myself, which I'm unwilling to do, for obvious reasons.
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Another factor is just sleep deprivation. It's been shown that sleep deprivation increases the likelihood of mania, hallucinations and psychosis. You force someone to stay awake long enough, they will inevitably act crazy. Amphetamine users tend to go on binges and stay awake for days. Keep taking drugs until they pass out from exhaustion.
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
Maybe it doesn't cause permanent psychosis but people do become psychotic due to it and need to spend the night cooling off in the psych ED.
You are severely underestimating the power of these drugs. Anyways, most people do and usually find out the hard way.
Really interesting read. Thank you for sharing. For some reason this sort of information about street drugs and science/culture surround it fascinates me.
you might enjoy this then:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia
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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.
> 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?
Methamphetamine is very, very stable. It stays as methamphetamine when it's vaporized, regardless of whether we're talking d-meth or l-meth.
> 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.
Not quite. p2p done naively creates racemic meth, yes, but the modern methods, which have been used for years, purify that to enantiopure d-methamphetamine. They do this by bubbling d-tartaric acid through the racemic mixture, which separates the two enantiomers thus yielding the desired pure d-meth.
Furthermore, historically racemic meth was much more common. AFAIK the infamous "shake and bake" technique creates racemic meth. I do know that there is a pseudofed route that yields d-meth, but I think it's different than shake and bake. So don't quote me on this paragraph, but at a minimum we know that in the last several years, almost all meth seized in the US is highly pure/potent d-methamphetamine. There is less l-meth than ever.
> I just don't think the evidence is so weak that we can discard the potential that l-meth is involved.
On the contrary, the evidence is so weak that we literally can discard that l-meth is involved. First of all l-meth is better studied than you say. I would bet to approve the l-methamphetamine-based vics vapo inhaler they had to at least do animal models with large amounts of pure l-meth.
Second of all, and this is what blows the giant hole in your argument, there is no surge of l-meth. There is less l-meth than there has ever been in the history of methamphetamine.
Thirdly - this ties into the second point - you seem to thikn that getting racemic methamphetamine is something particular to the p2p method. It's not. As a general rule, synthesis of any compound yields the racemic version (if we're talking a compound with two enantiomers). This is definitely true for meth, where almost every method yields racemic meth. AFAIK there's a pseudoephedrine route that yields straight d-meth, but like I mentioned above the current state of the art is just to do a big p2p synth route and then separate out the d enantiomer specifically.
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> There are claims that this new form of meth is chemically different in some what that started creating schizophrenia around 2017.
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#:....
OP is debunking the same claim you are.
Extremely good analysis. I was also skeptical of the original podcast.
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.
Thank you for doing the research and writeup.
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.
I don't think abstinence has been very good at achieving the outcome we're hoping for.
Not all abstinence is the same. Just because one is free to try anything, it doesn't mean people have to try everything.
Once they got into weed they realized just how much of a lie abstinence teaching was, they then graduated to trying other drugs
The problem isn't abstinence. The problem is the lie. Give people the proper, accurate information, and many will simply decide to abstain themselves. I think you and I would agree on this point about information.
The lack of education is terrifying, really.
That's ultimately the result of lies, deliberate obscurity, and attempts at thought control. It's far better to trust people with accurate information and let them decide for themselves.
It depends on person. We are (de)motivated by different things.
I was growing up in a neighborhood where most part of people above 14 were using something. Most adults were using something heavy and awful, like heroin or desomorphine or whatever. I grew up watching them every day, and I grew up with insane fear of what chemicals do to human body and brain.
I am 35 today, I have never in my life tried anything, even a cigarette. For me fear works perfectly as a reason to stay away from drugs.
But to be fair, it is self-induced fear, from life lessons and not from school lessons.
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.
The short answer is that opiates kill by suppressing the breathing reflex. Anything that stimulates breathing can be used to counter act the effect of opiates. In the 70's people would force people to go on walks until their lips weren't blue from 02 deprivation, even if they had to support them while they walked.
> I’m assuming “glass” is the meth and the “M30” pills are fentanyl?
Correct. M30's are opiates pressed to look like percocet - when from the street, typically fentanyl or another potent opioid.
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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.
For duration of effect, at least meth might more closely match an opioid than cocaine (classic speedball). Part of the high danger of speedballs is that the stimulant (coke) wears off much faster than the depressant. Amphetamines have a longer duration of effect than cocaine, I think.
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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.
> Talk to your kids and tell them not to use any pills, not even once.
Can you elaborate? I have no idea what this is about. I thought meth was smoked.
Meth doesn't have to be smoked, you can just eat the crystals orally, but meth abusers uusally don't do that because it's not nearly as fun.
The pills they're referring to, 30 M (https://www.drugs.com/imprints/30-m-8232.html), are oxycodone pills (a powerful opioid), but he's likely actually specifically referring to pressed fent (or fent analogue) pills that are made to look like real oxycodone pills. Or perhaps a mixture of meth and fentanyl, such as what George Floyd was taking the day he died (see https://interactive.kare11.com/pdfs/Autopsy_2020-3700_Floyd.... as well as the other evidence around the case)
There's a big problem where, now that the government has really cracked down on so-called "pill mills" - which like all of the war on drugs was the worst thing they could have done, because now the demand is being filled by fentanyl and fentanyl analogues that are pressed to look like oxy pills, but aren't. Oxy alone can be dangerous, but fent is another beast (particularly illicit).
As one anecdote I just had a friend-of-a-friend (I didn't know them personally) die of an overdose earlier this year. They took "oxys" orally which were actually pure fent analogue, and now they're dead. They are yet another fatality of the war on drugs (and also the war on COVID since the lockdowns were the proximate cause of them picking up their opioid habit again)
--
Oh, and to elaborate on the GP's point about overdoses being the result of running out of meth, methamphetamine increases respiration rate, which will theoretically counteract the respiratory depression induced by opioids (which are how opioids always kill, with the one exception that fent and related analogues can possibly kill by an addition mechanism of action known as wooden chest syndrome)
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From the context I assume he is talking about counterfeit pain pills (a M30 is an oxycodone pill) that are made with fentanyl (often in very high or uneven doses). Though counterfeit Adderall pills made with meth are now starting to show up.
You can smoke, eat, or inject. Could boof it too ;)
> counter balances the effects of Fentanyl
Could this explain the falling prices described in the article? Fentanyl is the money maker. Meth is being priced to encourage more opioid use?
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.)
D.A.R.E. did a great job of teaching us that any drug user has made a conscious choice toward moral failure. Couple that with knowledge of which groups were most heavily impacted by the drug epidemics of the 1980s and you can see an esoteric goal for D.A.R.E.
"D.A.R.E. did a great job of teaching us that any drug user has made a conscious choice toward moral failure."
I don't think it did this. I'm in my early 40's and grew up with DARE. When we were younger, they really leaned into the danger factor and pretty much said you'll hurt everyone you know.
And then, you realize they are liars. I didn't have to actually do drugs to see that. Why would you learn that is a moral failure from lies? I didn't even worry about those sorts of things when I was a preteen/young teen, honestly.
Meth was legal until the 70s, society functioned. The current problem is another side effect of the war on drugs
https://www.history.com/topics/crime/history-of-meth
> with the exception of meth and opiates
That's like saying "I did a lot of drugs, except the ones that _really_ fuck you up". 100K people will die in the US this year from hard drug overdoses. 93K died last year. This also ignores the fact that several times the number are circling down the societal shitter due to their addiction.
That's not to disagree that e.g. MJ is less dangerous than alcohol when consumed in moderation (although it doesn't have the same effect, so realistically people will just consume both, hopefully not simultaneously).
But don't forget the audience: there's a number of folks on this site who think that heroin and meth should be legal, and freely available, and they will read your comment with that bias in mind. I'd much rather have the old DARE bullshit than allow this to happen.
> heroin and meth should be legal, and freely available, and they will read your comment with that bias in mind. I'd much rather have the old DARE bullshit than allow this to happen.
Why? Do you think somehow things would be worse with legal, controlled drugs?
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Contemporary social policy as a whole appears to be a cycle of reaction and hysteria. There's very little substance to this process, in the form of empiricism or evidenced-based feedback. This cycle appears to be a by-product of our modern information mediums. I think that generations prior to ours (I too am approaching 40) weren't as vulnerable to the whims of society's most easily frightened and manipulated members. I think the only solution is to vote with our feet, and leave the hysterics behind. I suspect this process is well underway, now that the more educated members of society have the ability to work from home.
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.
He has other anecdotes from much earlier.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
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.
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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.
Anecdotal tidbit: father in law was a casual meth user for decades until life stress pushed him to start shooting it up around 1996. That's when the real breakdown started (paranoid hallucinations and fantastical delusions). There's something to be said for dosages and delivery mechanisms, which to some degree are driven by culture, pricing and availability.
I think P2P was the main type of meth in 196x-198x.
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?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKhcan8pk2w
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 did not know it had a name. TIL.
I will back the Tartaric Acid hypothesis. If it's being done, this is the only way it makes sense. It requires nearly nothing but the D-Tartaric Acid and Ethanol/Methanol + basic glassware.
Disclaimer: Am not a chemist.
Methamphetamine synthesized from pseudoephedrine gives enantiomerically pure Dextro-methamphetamine.
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:"
Fascinating read! I really appreciated the graphs, which give insight to market dynamics that are often quite opaque to us outsiders.
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...
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.
> 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.
Can you give a bit more detail about what's wrong here, and how it might be fixed? Are all mentions to nitrostyrene/NTS incorrect? This is used repeatedly in the cited papers, so I'm confused if they are also wrong, or the post has mangled usage, or what.
"Nitrostyrene" is sometimes used to refer to the whole class of chemicals featuring the phenyl-ethylene-nitro linkage. So it's not wrong to call it "the nitrostyrene method". But the specific nitrostyrene that is a precursor to methamphetamine is 1-phenyl-2-nitro-propene, while the parent compound "nitrostyrene" is 1-phenyl-2-nitro-ethene.
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.
> 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.
Meth has always, always, always been known to cause those behaviors/effects since it first became widespread. Breaking bad shows those behaviors because they're classic tweaker behaviors. The scene where Jesse distracts the guy by digging is super spot on. Brilliant scene.
So yep, the paranoia, hallucinations etc have nothing to do with "new meth", they're just what happens when someone abuses sufficient amounts of meth. And the more potent the meth, the easier it is to get to that threshold. But note that you still need to be smoking or injecting quite a bit. The people exhibiting psychosis and the like are using hundreds of milligrams per session.
I happen to be re-watching this right now, and it blew my mind to see those graphs and not see the show lagging a few years behind the reality. How is this possible? It borderline seems like the background research for the show must have actually talked to the mass manufacturers of the stuff...
The transition to super labs, and away from small time Sudafed based meth production, happened prior to the release of Breaking Bad. They based their show on what was occurring in the real world.
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.
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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.
> peripheral stimulation but no cerebral effects
What does this mean?
Sorry for the confusing terminology. "Peripheral stimulation" means unwanted stimulation of the body itself, such as suppressed appetite, general jitteriness, and the like. Whereas the cerebral effects are the actual cognitive effects of improved attention/focus/alertness/scanning behavior, euphoria, and that kind of thing.
In general when taking amphetamines for ADHD-type symptoms, you want to maximize the cerebral stimulation while minimizing the peripheral stimulation, because the latter causes [most of] the unpleasant side effects like inability to eat/sleep. Note that some degree of peripheral stimulation is unavoidable regardless of whether one is taking pure d-methamphetamine or not, and also probably some amount of peripheral stimulation is desirable because ADHD is not just difficulty in maintaining focus/attention but also getting the kick in the ass to start tasks in the first place. But in my experience relying on the peripheral stimulation (which, for example, Adderall produces more of than Vyvanse) simply doesn't work long-term, and just makes appetite regulation and the like get totally out of whack.
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Is down regulation a form of protection? Or what is the driver behind the down regulation mechanism?
The short answer is "yes". The long answer is "that's a philosophical question".
Downregulation is a natural homeostatic mechanism that happens with almost everything. Any time a certain receptor gets stimulated above baseline, over the long-term it's going to get downregulated. The actual neurobiology of how this works is enormously complicated and beyond my (and probably almost anyone's) understanding. I do recall that NMDA receptors have a critical role to play, given that NMDA receptor antagonists can attenuate some (presumably not all) of the down or up regulation
Meth is just a very harmful drug, which can cause psychosis. I don't know if I buy this theory that it's a different drug.
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.
https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/attach/130/130179_Secrets_of_M...
Just taken a brief look at that link. It's no wonder Wikileaks doesn't endear itself to many.
That said, I suppose in reality it's just a more in-your-face presentation of what's already in many organic chemistry textbook in any number of libraries.
Frankly, I reckon there's little that can be done to stop the illicit manufacture of these drugs for the logical reason that they're such simple molecules. Many are just minor variations on the basic d-enantiomer (dexamphetamine) which essentially is only a benzene ring with a single branch containing a CH3 methyl and a NH2 amine group. So it stands to reason that there are many comparatively simple ways to synthesize them and that more are likely to be found. Moreover, the more precursors there are, the harder it becomes to ban them all, as eventually we'll hit the point where certain precursors are too ubiquitous and or important to ban.
It seems to me that if we're to take harm minimization seriously then we need to take a more sophisticated approach. For staters, we need much more efficient public health measures to detect and separate out genuine self-medicatiors from the partygoers who take illicit drugs.
As we know, these sympathomimetic amines have been prescribed by the medical profession for decades for certain depressive illnesses, ADHD, etc., but because of their their potential for abuse - not to mention certain moralistic attitudes among many politicians - these drugs have a horrible stigma attached to them and that has stopped many undiagnosed people from being prescribed them legally. The consequence is that many of them self-medicate with illegal drugs and the outcomes are often dire.
I think that taking a serious approach to medicalizing the problem would help very significantly. This would also include distinguishing the amines from the opiates. Whilst the medical profession understands fundamental difference between these two classes of drugs, public policy often doesn't and the drug problem ends up as an amorphous mess that becomes even harder to sort out than it otherwise would have been.
Therefore, there needs to be a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding amongst the general community to the effect that someone who turns to illicit amines is likely doing so for fundamentally different reasons to another who has turned to opiates. A more sophisticated approach to the drug problem would lead to better outcomes for not only those addicted to drugs but also for society in general.
I’d guess from the ads in Priesler’s book there’s more of his writings where this one came from. Since my initial look at the book I’ve now had time to spent a few more minutes examining Uncle Fester’s Secrets and I’ve concerns that I reckon need to be said before posts to this story time out.
Despite its controversial title, the book is pretty boring unless you’re actually following/putting into action his various ‘recipes’. I suppose having read certain information therein that concerns me I’m obliged to say something about it if it might save someone from coming to harm.
Anyone who’s read various other posts of mine would know that I neither hold conservative establishment views nor am I an anarchist—except in the sense that I believe democracy needs urgent reform but not through violence. Thus, essentially, I’m against censorship, and usually it’s not my style to criticize anyone who puts an alternative view. So why am I acting as if I want to censor parts of Priesler’s book? It’s simply because some of the actions he advises are outright irresponsible.
First, my position is that [as stated] it doesn’t make sense to try to censor any of the chemical processes for any of the sympathomimetic amines whether they be legal-OTC, legal-on script or illegal, but it’s my opinion that they should be confined to a chemistry text or an adjunct to one—one which describes the chemistry at a commensurate level to the actual processes involved and that appropriate chemical nomenclature is used to do so.
Priesler’s cookbook approach is irresponsible for these reasons:
1. Whilst he states in very fine print on the ISBN/copyright page “Neither the author nor the publisher intends for any of the information in this book to be used for criminal purposes...”, as an attempt to cover himself legally, he does not emphatically state that the drug manufacturing processes he describes are covered by international treaty—in that the production of such drugs and possession of many of their precursors are illegal in almost every jurisdiction worldwide—that is, unless one is in some way ‘licensed’ to possess or manufacture them. Yes, those tempted to undertake such manufacture will almost certainly know this already, but the exact ramifications ought to spelt out in considerably more detail. More about this in a moment.
2. Priesler’s cookbook approach means that he’s written the text down to a level where he expects those who’ve either no theoretical or practical knowledge of chemistry or who have only novice-level chemistry skills to undertake what is essentially sophisticated chemical engineering/synthesis. In a practical sense, there’s much here that can go wrong for both the manufacturer and the drug consumer. Normally, such manufacturing processes would be undertaken by experienced chemists in a pharmaceutical company or research institutes, etc. where much of chemical engineering involved is specifically aimed at QA—ensuring that the manufacturing process proceeds safely and that the end product complies with proper purity and quantitative tolerances/standards, etc. Backyard manufacturing is usually not conducive to high standards or being highly consistent.
3. Despite Priesler’s warning that the "book is sold for informational purposes only, etc." it’s very difficult to conclude that he actually means it, for if he had done so, then he’d have written up the information in the manner that I've suggested above. Clearly, Priesler is deliberately goading authority to provoke a response and all indications are that he’s been very successful in doing so, especially given that he’s suggesting that chemistry neophytes take up the dangerous challenge.
4. One doesn’t have to look any further than Chapter One—Chemicals and Equipment to illustrate the issues. First, anyone experienced in organic synthesis of this caliber doesn’t need lessons in how to handle their glassware (thus my assertion he’s deliberately pitching at neophytes); second, the purchasing of almost any quantity of just about every one of the 32 precursor chemicals listed on pages 6 and 7 will draw the attention of the powers that be; and so will most of the Listed Essential Chemicals on page 7.
5. Moreover, the quantities of chemicals that Priesler is suggesting that one obtains are quite staggering. For example, under Imports and Exports we find 500 gal or 1 ,500 kg of acetone; 500 gal or 1 ,364 kg of ethyl ether; 500 kg of potassium permanganate; 500 gal or 1 ,591 kg of toluene just to mention a few of the more dangerous ones.
I understand his logic by suggesting that one’s likely to be less ‘exposed’ if one makes one large batch instead of lots of little ones but my mind simply boggles beyond belief that any neophyte drugmaker/chemist would be handling the mentioned quantities of those dangerous chemicals in ‘backyard’, less-than-ideal conditions—as three of those I’ve mentioned are highly volatile and their vapors dangerously explosive. Playing with such quantities in suboptimal conditions is living dangerously in the extreme not to mention that by purchasing such huge quantities one would be waving red flags to the world.
Any reasonable person would never recommend such a risky and dangerous undertaking.
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 cartels are hiring professional chemists:
> 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-...
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.
Maybe at the top of the food chain, but a lot of lower level people are addicts working to support a habit by pinching from wholesale
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.
"exactly where the supply comes from is probably a fascinating story never to be fully told."
Where it's made is one matter but I'd imagine its only significant precursor would be ergotamine tartrate (a la Hoffman), as ergotamine is a commonly available drug for migraine (although somewhat less so than some years back, as it's been largely superceded by sumatriptan).
The next alternative I'd imagine would be to get 'raw' ergot and process it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot although I'd guess that gathering and refining the fungus would be no mean feat for any backyard manufacturer.
It's hard to imagine there being any other major human-manufactured precursor due to the complexity of the molecule. Moreover, refined ergotamine for medical use is a mixture of various ergot alkaloids. Presumably, this would complicate the synthesis but I've never bothered to think about how it would or to what extent.
The DEA (so, not exactly a reliable source) claims Pickard was producing most of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard
With the rise of online shopping, the big suppliers are a lot more visible than they were before. I like to read stories on forums sometimes.
It turns out there are more than a couple LSD labs, some having a bigger internet presence than others.
Suppliers will not sell directly to random people, but as it turns out their approved resellers are happy to offer spoonfuls of LSD in powder form to anyone who asks!
https://imgur.com/a/r2FkJOD (not my picture)
William Leonard Pickard and Owsley Stanley have interesting stories, some of which have been told.
"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.
The Atlantic has a decent summary. (If a bit of an over-the-top headline.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...
More about the impact of P2P meth: https://www.hmpgloballearningnetwork.com/site/ap/news/stimul...
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?
You probably don't have to (unless you live in the US), as xylometazoline HCl works exceptionality well and is readily available OTC sans script: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylometazoline
P.S.: If you live in the US, then it's readily available from Canada.
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.
That's a bizarre argument. All humans need shelter, whether it's a tent or a house.
I think he means that when you're tweaking on the "old meth," you'd be more likely to go outside and interact with people (many times, with hostility and aggression), while the "new meth" is more likely to make you want to stay inside, and withdraw from society.
In my opinion, this is a plausible hypothesis.
What's cheaper than a tent? 1/2 or 1/3rd of a tent. That's enough if shelter is the only issue. If there is a need for the poorest to have solitude, there's going to be a proliferation in the number of tents.
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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.
By just about any measure alcohol is a "harder" drug than marijuana but certainly more broadly acceptable.
i have had a theory for years if you sold any drug like meth or cocaine in an advil bottle with a label on the side saying “take at most 1 tablet every 4 hours, do not exceed 6 tablets in one day. do not use for more than 2 days in a row” etc then the vast majority of people would not have any issue with it. the people who are already abusing it would continue to abuse it. most people can be around hard addictive drugs ingrained in society like alcohol and do just fine
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Having never done weed, if I smoke one will I preform worse at cognitive tasks than I would if I had a beer?
I know, comparing uppers and downers, not the same effects, etc.
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Society does, it's called Oxycodone. The results of it have been quite devastating.
In Britain at least diamorphine hydrochloride (heroin) can be prescribed to individuals.
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"The results of it have been quite devastating."
They've been devastating for good reason, which is that with oxycodone the long proven, well established administration and monitoring protocols for narcotic opioids were not observed.
Essentially, every narcotic opioid ever discovered or used has addictive properties and thus they all have the potential to addict users. Opiate addition takes a very pernicious form because withdrawal makes the addict feel so absolutely rotten which is instantly fixed by restoring the level of drug to its normal 'maintenance' levels.
Opiates come in a huge range of types and strengths. Some are considered sufficienty mild or innocuous to sell OTC without a script, others are considered too powerful and dangerous to ever sell legally even though they do have legitimate medical uses, heroin (diacetyl morphine) falls into this category in most countries as it's considered too 'hot' to handle/administer - although the UK is one exception where it's used for intractable pain (as in terminal cancer).
(The UK struck out/did not sign the section that covered the complete prohibition of heroin in the international treaty on banned narcotic drugs because its doctors used the rationale that heroin is actually a more effective painkiller in terminal cancer cases over morphine (which in fact it is by a reasonable margin) - thus addiction was a secondary consideration in such dire circumstances. Whilst the UK, didn't ban heroin for medical use, it agreed to the other provisions of the treaty - those concerning its illegal trade, and possession, etc.)
As I said, ALL opioids that induce narcotic and pain-reducing effects have the potential to be addictive - even mild OTC ones. I'll use myself as an example here. Years ago, I used to take OTC painkillers for the occasional headache of the type that included both codeine and paracetamol (acetaminophen) and whilst they cured the pain I found the headaches becoming more frequent which then led me to take more tablets. Eventually, it dawned on me that the codeine was the reason for the increase in frequency of the headaches - not what caused them in the first instance. I then switched to the paracetamol-only tablets and the frequency of my headaches subsided to the frequency that they were originally.
Of course, in my case, withdrawing from the codeine was was trivial - just a simple matter of switching to codeine-free tablets, but it's anything but simple for a heroin addict - in most cases it's a fucking painful 'nightmare' of the worst kind.
Right, I've taken a long time to get to the point which is this: simply introducing a new opioid drug, especially so a powerful one such oxycodone, without keeping in place all the existing protocols that cover the medical administration of opoids which have existed for well over 100 years is a recipe for an unmitigated disaster - and that's exactly what happened.
We know that Purdue Pharmaceuticals and its owners - that ragbag mob the Sacklers - were the irresponsible pushers of oxycodone, but in many ways it's how we'd gotten to the point where oxycodone was so widespread that it's had such a devastating impact on the population that is so damning and it still must be explained in detail.
What's never been explained to me or, for that matter any other member of the public, why the FDA didn't nip this potential problem in the bud at the outset when it originally approved oxycodone. Moreover, why did the second line of defense fail so catastrophically - that is, why didn't the medical profession - all those doctors prescribing oxycodone - use their knowledge of opiate addiction (which is basic 101 pharmacy knowledge required for them to pass their medial exams), stop the opioid crisis before it took hold?
The opioid/oxycondone crisis is one of the greatest failings in public health administration in modern times. Purdue and the Sacklers started the crisis but why public health administration failed so catastrophically has never been answered.
What, exactly, in a drug's pharmacology or chemical structure makes it "hard"?
Good question. If you were to go by relative effects on consciousness, alcohol is a far harder drug than cannabis. Lots of illegal drugs are, alcohol is much worse than we believe.
it's a good question - I avoided it in my own response with the clever use of quotation marks.
But to answer, I think the term is used colloquially all of the time and of course is open to interpretation.
I would suggest it has nothing to do with a drug's pharmacology or chemical structure but rather the degree to which a drug when taken in easily-consumed quantities can shape our perceptions of the world, the likelihood of negative externalities due to consumer behavior and the probability of becoming addicted to the drug.
A mixture of those things makes a drug "hard" in conversational language e.g. something that dramatically changes a persons perceptions, frequently has negative externalities and can cause addiction with short-term sustained use is a "hard drug". Like alcohol.
When addicted to such a drug, the negative externalities typically expand in scope and severity and if the use scales to a significant portion of the population would generally be regarded as an undesirable state for society to be in.
You can get edibles now that are dosed at 5mg increments and are the size of an antihistamine.
> There’s an impressive project in Europe to measure drug use from biomarkers in sewage.
There's actually a US company doing this as well: https://biobot.io/
> But there are many reports out there of people taking 500 mg of meth at a time without overdosing
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.
The anecodte is that in Ancient Greek
meth-ee (μέθη) means being high (by alcohol or weed).
Does this mean we can have Sudafed back?
In the article, "P2P" is an abbreviation for Phenylacetone, a precursor to meth (the drug). It's not "peer to peer" so that solved a lot of puzzling over what the headline could mean.
Thanks - we've put Phenylacetone in the title above.
Technically, P2P is an abbreviation for phenyl-2-propanone which can also be called phenylacetone depending on the naming convention used.
When I read the headline, the idea I had in my head was of some kind of crowdsourced meth production system.
I don’t think that would be a bad description of the state of meth manufacturing in the Midwest during the 2000s and early 2010s. Users would source together (one person buys the Sudafed, another the chemicals, etc) to make meth and then they would trade with each other, etc. The rise of super labs and purity levels the average meth head couldn’t achieve basically killed the peer-to-peer meth business. At least this was my experience with my addicted cousins back home (in the Midwest.)
I thought someone had decided to be edgy, and named their project, "meth"!
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Clearly, anyone questioning peer-to-peer has not watched Breaking Bad
Thanks. My brain kind of parsed it as “p2p mesh” but I was a little bit confused still …
the p2p drug would be ocytocine I guess
I think the same analogy can be made for social media. We had Myspace and Friendster, but social networks didn't become a problem until we had so much of it - always internet connected little computers with us every waking hour.