In last week's mayoral debate, candidate Spencer Pratt said “Super meth” was causing homelessness in Los Angeles.
After several years reporting and writing a book on this topic, I can say that Los Angeles, indeed the United States, does not necessarily have a “super meth” problem.
Methamphetamine is methamphetamine. As aspirin is aspirin. What matters is how much is in each dose.
Today, Los Angeles has a hyperpure meth problem. It is a leading cause of homelessness and mental illness here and in many other parts of the country.
But it's not new.
Twenty years ago, what was sold on the street as methamphetamine was between 40% and 50% methamphetamine, and the rest was cheap filler that dealers used to expand their supply.
Today, methamphetamine manufactured in Mexico and sold on the streets of the United States routinely measures more than 90% pure, and has been for more than a decade. The catastrophic results have been visible on the streets of Los Angeles for some time.
Here's what happened: For many years, the Mexican trafficking world used a decongestant called ephedrine as the main ingredient in their methamphetamine. Ephedrine is difficult to produce. Traffickers were never able to obtain enough ephedrine to produce methamphetamine in quantities sufficient to cover more than parts of the western United States. In other parts of the country, local meth cooks used Sudafed pills to extract ephedrine and manufacture small quantities of low-quality, high-priced meth.
In 2008, the Mexican government reduced the permitted quantities of imported ephedrine, which traffickers had always diverted for illicit uses.
They switched to another method, old but new to them, with a central ingredient called phenyl 2 propanone, an industrial chemical called P2P for short.
The P2P method has one major advantage over the ephedrine method: ease of access to the key ingredient.
P2P can be done in many ways, using a variety of legal, cheap and widely available industrial chemicals. Unlike the ephedrine method, traffickers could manufacture methamphetamine using P2P in large quantities. They were limited only by access to these ingredients, which, considering they control Mexico's major seaports, is almost unlimited.
In 2013, staggering amounts of cheap, very pure, and highly addictive Mexican methamphetamine were flowing into the United States. By 2014, according to my reports, methamphetamine had overtaken crack as the top drug sold on Skid Row in Los Angeles.
In 2016, hyperpure meth blanketed the Midwest. In 2020, meth was coming to New England, where it had never been seen much before.
Surprisingly, hyperpure methamphetamine blanketed the country. and Its price fell by 80%. Local meth cooks couldn't compete and disappeared.
Street vendors seem reluctant to dilute their offerings, perhaps for fear that customers will turn to their competitors. Whatever the case, samples of methamphetamine seized throughout the United States are typically greater than 90% pure, according to the DEA.
The old, consumerist and addictive ephedrine-based methamphetamine was widely used as a social drug. Users wanted to be around other people. She was big in the gay community, often known as T or tina. Its harmful effects became evident over time. Remember the famous “Faces of Meth” posters featuring mugshots of users over a half-dozen years, showing dramatic physical deterioration?
However, the effects of this hyperpure methamphetamine were quite different. Users were plunged into their own tormented, sleepless isolation and symptoms of profound mental illness. They became paranoid, belligerent, violent, deranged, and in many cases, quickly became homeless.
Methamphetamine-induced psychosis has become indistinguishable from schizophrenia, except that the latter primarily affects young men aged 16 to 30.
Given the drug's relentless prevalence, purity, and affordability, homeless people for various reasons used it to stay up all night, for days, to defend themselves from rape, robbery, and beatings, exacerbating their addiction and further chaining them to the streets.
In 2018, fentanyl arrived, wreaking its own deadly havoc and grabbing most of the headlines. By comparison, methamphetamine is rarely mentioned in media reports. However, when it comes to homelessness, methamphetamine is the most widespread illegal drug on the streets of Los Angeles. It is also more likely to generate the disruptive, erratic and sometimes violent public behavior that Angelenos have come to associate with homelessness.
In Los Angeles, methamphetamine was accompanied by factors that intensified its harm.
First was the proliferation of tents. In 2011, the Occupy movement normalized tents on public sidewalks. Tents then colonized Skid Row, transforming the nature of the city's homeless, who were now stationary and therefore easy targets for drug dealers, pimps, and others.
Addicts in tents, immersed in endless supplies of methamphetamine and now fentanyl, were rarely ready for treatment, which they routinely refused.
In the camps, this hyperpure methamphetamine led to the hoarding of items that others considered trash. Bicycle parts were of particular interest, hence the tented “bike shops,” with piles of disassembled parts, so common in Los Angeles campgrounds during the COVID-19 pandemic.
All of this was further encouraged by a series of court cases that the city interpreted to mean that it could do nothing about those camps.
“Skidrowified” tent-based homelessness spread, often intensified and emboldened by methamphetamine addiction. First it went to Venice, then Hollywood, Koreatown, Mid-City South LA and freeway exits and overpasses as the hyperpure form of the drug settled over the city. A large camp on the Venice waterfront became known as “Methlehem.”
The tents became vectors for diseases, but also for methamphetamine consumption, where the drug was practically free or was purchased with sex.
This is what the city faces today: a problem of homeless people living in tents that is difficult to disentangle from the endless supplies of hyperpure methamphetamine from Mexico.
The next mayor will have to find solutions using radically different thinking than that used until now.
Freelance journalist Sam Quiñones, former Times reporter, is the author, among other books, of “The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.” he writes the Dreamland newsletter on Substack.
