Meth has changed into something far more dangerous

[Michael Ulloa of Sinajana contributed to the research of this article]

You ever see the obviously-strung out streetwalkers and wonder, ‘What kind of meth is that?’ We, who used to do the drug, recognize the look, but ask ourselves what in the world the meth manufacturers are putting into the drug these days. Because the meth we knew – already life-threatening and evil as it was – did not make us hallucinate. It did not cause us to imagine a person next to us and and end up having a conversation with ourselves. And we didn’t just leave our homes to start wandering on the streets.

Long-term meth use certainly will lead to a host of physiological, emotional, and behavioral health problems. But, what we’re seeing on Guam – a wholesale degeneration of people – is new, even to people familiar with what we knew as the drug ‘ice.’

And it may be because meth today is different from the meth we grew up with. It’s much worse, if you can even imagine.

An October 18, 2021 article by Sam Quinones in The Atlantic titled “I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore,” makes the point that today’s meth is very different from the drug of yesteryear, and is causing alarming rates of mental illness and homelessness.

Essentially, there are two very different types of industrially-produced meth: ephedrine meth, and according to the U.S. Department of Justice, Phenyl-2-propanone meth, or P2P meth.

“A Japanese researcher had first altered the ephedrine molecule to synthesize crystal methamphetamine in 1919,” the Quinones article states. “During World War II, it was marketed in Japan as hiropon, a word that combines the Japanese terms for ‘fatigue’ and fly away.’ Hiropon was given to Japanese soldiers to increase alertness.”

The ephedrine method for making meth was rediscovered by American gangsters in the 1980s, according to the article, but a smaller market emerged for a new P2P method. While the ephedrine model of clandestine labs relied on Sudafed as its main ingredient, the P2P method relied on materials readily available and generally unregulated everywhere: cyanide, lye, mercury, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitrostyrene.

The problem at the time was that the P2P model was not as easy to manufacture as its ephedrine step sister.

Until the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency found a lab in Mexico in 2009 that was manufacturing 900 kilotons of the product annually.

“By 2012, massive quantities of meth were flowing into Southern California. That same year, 96 percent of the meth samples tested by DEA chemists were made using the P2P method,” the Quinones articles states. “Over the next half-dozen years or so, the flood of P2P meth would spread east, immersing much of the rest of the country, too.”

Federal law enforcement officials have repeatedly said most of the meth coming into Guam are manufactured in Mexico and sent via California and other west coast states.

The Quinones article described an encounter with an ex-Marine Californian, which may sound familiar to people familiar with meth addicts on Guam. According to the article:

“The meth he had been using for several years by then made him talkative and euphoric, made his scalp tingle. But that night, he was gripped with paranoia. His girlfriend, he was sure, had a man in her apartment. No one was in the apartment, she insisted. Barrera took a kitchen knife and began stabbing a sofa, certain the man was hiding there. Then he stabbed a mattress to tatters, and finally he began stabbing the walls, looking for this man he imagined was hiding inside. ‘That had never happened before,’ he told me when I met him years later.”

“Ephedrine meth tended to damage people gradually, over years,” Quinones wrote. “With the switchover to P2P meth, that damage seemed to accelerate, especially damage to the brain.”

Does this sound familiar?

And then there’s this from the article:

“Over the past year and a half, I’ve talked with meth addicts, counselors, and cops around the country. The people I spoke with told me stories nearly identical to Eric Barrera’s: P2P-meth use was quickly causing steep deterioration in mental health. The symptoms were always similar: violent paranoia, hallucinations, conspiracy theories, isolation, massive memory loss, jumbled speech. Methamphetamine is a neurotoxin—it damages the brain no matter how it is derived. But P2P meth seems to create a higher order of cerebral catastrophe. ‘I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore,’ Ken Vick, the director of a drug-treatment center in Kansas City, Missouri, told me. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are afflictions that begin in the young. Now people in their 30s and 40s with no prior history of mental illness seemed to be going mad.”