A story about polysubstance use in at the moment’s New York Occasions mentions “super meth” 4 instances: as soon as within the headline, as soon as in a subhead, and twice within the physique textual content. “A decade or so in the past, Mexican drug lords found out find out how to mass-produce an artificial ‘tremendous meth,'” Occasions reporter Jan Hoffman writes. “It has provoked what some researchers are calling a second meth epidemic. Common up and down the West Coast, tremendous meth from Mexican and American labs has been marching East and South and into elements of the Midwest.”
But Hoffman by no means explains what “tremendous meth” means. As a substitute she hyperlinks to a extensively cited 2021 article in The Atlantic by journalist Sam Quinones. In that piece, which relies on Quinones’ 2021 guide The Least of Us, he posits that methamphetamine derived from phenyl-2-propanone (P2P), the dominant method these days, is stronger and extra hazardous than methamphetamine derived from pseudoephedrine, a course of that grew to become much less frequent after the U.S. authorities restricted entry to that precursor.
If that had been true, it might be one more illustration of prohibition’s tendency to make drug use more dangerous: By cracking down on cold and allergy medications containing pseudoephedrine, the federal government pushed manufacturing overseas and inspired traffickers to make use of P2P as an alternative, which, in keeping with Quinones, made the ensuing methamphetamine purer, extra addictive, extra bodily dangerous, and extra more likely to set off “psychological sickness”—a lot in order that, in keeping with the headline over his Atlantic article, it may not even make sense to “name it meth anymore.” However though Hoffman evidently considers Quinones a reputable supply, he by no means supplied a believable purpose to consider any of that.
As drug historian David Herzberg notes in a Washington Put up overview of Quinones’ guide, “Quinones has no laboratory or epidemiological proof that P2P meth is totally different from ephedrine-produced meth—the ‘super-meth’ idea relies fully on anecdotes.” Herzberg provides that “journalists had been writing equally terrifying issues about ‘crack’ cocaine and ephedrine-based meth (and heroin) again within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties.”
Quinones himself is hazy on the scientific foundation for his idea. “Nobody I spoke with knew for positive” why “P2P meth” was “producing such pronounced signs of psychological sickness in so many individuals,” he says.
Claire Zagorski, a paramedic who teaches hurt discount on the College of Texas at Austin Faculty of Pharmacy, questions the belief underlying that query. “We have now no proof supporting the concept that the meth at the moment available on the market is meaningfully totally different at a inhabitants stage,” she writes in Filter, “or that P2P-produced meth is any kind of neurotoxic than ephedrine meth.” Neither is that stunning, since “all meth truly has the identical chemical make-up,” and “the one distinction is the manufacturing technique.”
Hoffman avers that “tremendous meth” packs “a probably deadly, addictive wallop far stronger” than ephedrine-based meth. However on the face of it, you’d anticipate the latter technique to supply stronger methamphetamine—precisely the alternative of what Hoffman and Quinones are claiming. An “ephedrine/pseudoephedrine discount,” the Drug Enforcement Administration notes, yields “prime quality d-methamphetamine,” the psychoactive isomer, with out undesirable l-methamphetamine. The P2P technique, in contrast, “yields decrease high quality dl-methamphetamine,” a mixture of the 2 isomers.
Quinones concedes that P2P-derived meth shouldn’t be truly a brand new factor, noting that “the Hell’s Angels and different biker gangs” used this technique earlier than phenyl-2-propanone, which was positioned on Schedule II of the Managed Substances Act in 1980, grew to become more durable to come back by. By his telling, the important thing improvement within the advertising and marketing of P2P meth occurred someday round 2006, when Mexican cartels found out find out how to “separate d-meth from l-meth,” which he describes as “difficult” and “past the talents of most clandestine chemists.” In actuality, Zagorski says, “isomer separation is pretty teachable” and “not all that mysterious”:
The cleanest and most easy option to take away the L from the psychoactive D isomer is capillary electrophoresis. This course of entails feeding a meth pattern right into a small capillary tube and exploiting variations between the 2 isomers that trigger one to “stick” to the tube’s coating whereas the opposite continues on. Anybody with round $4,000 can do that with by way of a capillary electrophoresis machine, which automates the method to reduce human error and labor.
Nevertheless difficult the method, it’s crucial solely as a result of the P2P technique yields an inferior combination in comparison with the “prime quality d-methamphetamine” produced by the pseudoephedrine technique. Both manner, Zagorski notes, the purpose is one thing like “pharmaceutical-grade meth, the regulated model of which is bought underneath the model identify Desoxyn.” But that “FDA-approved prescription kind” of the drug “does not trigger ‘cerebral disaster'” involving the “violent paranoia, hallucinations, conspiracy theories, isolation, large reminiscence loss, [and] jumbled speech” that Quinones describes.
Unfazed by the shortage of such signs in sufferers who take Desoxyn, Quinones asserts that “methamphetamine is a neurotoxin” that “damages the mind regardless of how it’s derived.” Nonetheless, he says, “P2P meth appears to create the next order of cerebral disaster.”
Why would that be? “One idea is that a lot of the meth accommodates residue of poisonous chemical compounds utilized in its manufacturing, or different contaminants,” Quinones writes. “Even traces of sure chemical compounds, in a comparatively pure drug, is perhaps devastating.”
The issue, in different phrases, is not that P2P meth is very pure however slightly that it accommodates probably “devastating” contaminants. Perhaps.
Or perhaps not. “The sheer variety of customers is up, too, and the abundance and low worth of P2P meth could allow extra continuous use amongst them,” Quinones says. “That, mixed with the drug’s efficiency at the moment, would possibly speed up the psychological deterioration that ephedrine-based meth also can produce.” That rationalization, nonetheless, has nothing to do with the inherent properties of P2P-derived methamphetamine, opposite to the “tremendous meth” idea that The New York Occasions has credulously embraced.
