Comment by rkk3
5 years ago
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]
[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.