Let me be absolutely clear,
we are in the midst of a crisis when it comes to methamphetamine.
A crisis.
It’s a drug that is everywhere in our community.
I see your opiates,
I raise you methamphetamine.
That’s a trip.
There’s a lot of mythology and a lot of stigma around meth.
From the idea that one hit will get you addicted for life
to the cliches about it making all your teeth fall out,
as with so much that’s written and talked about drugs,
a lot of this stuff is simply ****.
Methamphetamine is definitely a powerful stimulant.
Along with the opioid crisis,
meth is America’s other great drug epidemic.
But this is absolutely a global problem
that goes way beyond just the US.
It’s also seriously misunderstood.
In this episode, we’re going to try to pick apart crystal meth fact
from fiction.
This is the story of how the war on drugs
has created a world on speed.
[The War on Drugs Show]
[World on Speed]
First of all, let’s get rid of the idea that
this is some kind of wild new drug.
Amphetamine was first synthesized in 1887.
This was followed by methamphetamine in 1893.
During the Second World War,
both sides extensively gave meth to soldiers to improve their performance
and endurance.
Particularly large doses were given to Japanese kamikaze pilots,
which is one way to convince someone to
crash their plane into a battleship.
But what this meant is that after the war,
there was a large surplus of amphetamine that needed to be used.
Doctors began prescribing speed for weight loss, Parkinson's,
depression, and narcolepsy.
Those medical amphetamines, most famously Benzedrine,
then started being used by long-distance truckers
and laborers to get through long shifts.
And from there they began coming into recreational use.
It was largely amphetamine
that fueled the beatnik writers of the 1950s
and the first generation of early rock and roll musicians.
The Beatles were doing Benzedrine
to get through four-hour gigs in Hamburg
long before they got into their
Through the 1960s,
speed was associated with the darker end of the counterculture,
with the black market largely run by biker gangs.
Then Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs.
Throughout the late 70s and 80s,
the chemicals needed to make speed became restricted in America.
That meant production just shifted across the border to Mexico,
and that is how the cartels got involved,
and that is how the modern problems really started.
Meth use in America rose throughout the 90s and early 2000s,
and has exploded over the past decade.
In 2018, 14.8 million Americans
reported using the drug at least once,
with 1.1 million reporting using it within the past month.
In Mexico, chemicals come in almost just free trade.
It is drowning us with how much meth that they’re making.
When I was young, this didn’t exist.
Meth is so cheap, it’s everywhere now.
It doesn’t matter who has it.
But what are we looking at right now?
Every one of those people are on heroin or meth,
or both.
Meth has never acquired the cultural cachet of cocaine or ecstasy.
In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite.
Meth users are subject to near constant stigmatization
and demonization.
But there’s one major reason why it’s proved so popular in recent years.
It wasn’t until relatively recently,
periods in the 70s and 80s and 90s,
that it started to find its way into the recreational drug use scene
and the party scene.
But also, I think, perhaps more significantly,
a drug that was problematically used by economically marginalized groups
because it’s very cheap, because it was very accessible.
I would venture to say mostly people,
a lot of them use because of their situation.
Or their using got them in this situation,
but they stay using even though it’s going to keep them here
because they don’t have to deal with it.
You know, it lightens it for you.
It’s probably this association with poverty
that has led to the popular emphasis on meth as some sort of
particularly evil demon drug.
But here’s the thing.
Despite the cliches that bits of the media
and some government agencies like to trot out,
there’s actually nothing in methamphetamine itself
that makes it dramatically more dangerous than other stimulants.
To address one particular myth,
meth does not make your teeth fall out.
It’s not the fact that you’re taking methamphetamine
that makes your teeth fall out
or makes your skin go sallow
or makes you look like some of those photos where they
do these awful before and after images,
“This is what meth will do to you.”
What you're seeing there is someone who has a dependence problem
and is neglecting their health more broadly.
Lots of people are prescribed methamphetamine or other amphetamines
and use them every day,
and their teeth don’t fall out,
and they don’t look like those awful faces of meth photos.
Basically, what we treat is all the occupational hazards
that comes from being an injection drug user,
whether it’s heroin or whether it’s methamphetamine,
This is charity.
This shouldn’t be charity, this should be public health.
What a health emergency, and they’re not addressing that?
They should be ashamed of themselves.
Perhaps we could say that it’s not just that America has a meth problem,
but more that America has both a prohibition problem
and a capitalism problem.
But poverty and stigmatization are global,
and by now these issues go way beyond the US.
The Mexican war on drugs has always been a hyper-violent outgrowth of
the insatiable US demand for certain illegal products.
But now, inequality and poverty
seem to be making methamphetamine catch on in Mexico itself
in a way that even cocaine never did.
Between 2008 to 2016, the number of people seeking treatment tripled,
and meth is now considered the drug with
the second biggest health impact in Mexico after alcohol.
But the rising tide of methamphetamine is now also
impacting countries far beyond US borders.
Thailand, Myanmar, and Laos form the so-called “Golden Triangle.”
During the 1960s and 70s,
this was the center of international heroin production.
But in the 80s and 90s,
a combination of government crackdowns on opium production
and Afghanistan taking over as the world’s top heroin producer
put a serious dent in business.
So were the local organized crime gangs just meant to roll over,
get out of the drug game, and lose all their profits?
Obviously not.
They just switched to making Yaba,
a form of methamphetamine that is cheaper to produce than heroin
and is raging all across Southeast Asia.
In Thailand, the drug's popularity has been growing for decades,
but it's completely exploded in the past few years.
This may be a long way from the American West,
but some similar dynamics are at play.
Yaba first became popular in Thailand amongst long-distance truck drivers,
and it spread because it’s cheap
and it helps when the work is hard and the hours are long.
In 2018, Thai authorities seized 516 million Yaba pills.
That’s more than double what they seized in 2017,
and up from 114 million in 2016.
So perhaps the Thai Health Ministry’s strategy of scarily renaming the drug
wasn’t quite the intervention that was needed.
But Thailand and Myanmar
are not even the sharpest edge of the global meth epidemic.
In 2016,
Rodrigo Duterte, president of the Philippines,
declared a bloody, no-holds-barred war on drugs.
He unleashed police and militias across the country
to murder suspected drug users at will.
So far, this campaign has left up to 25,000 people dead.
It was meth that provided the background for
Duterte to begin mass killing his own people.
We’ve seen how the American crackdown on speed
drove production into Mexico,
which then flooded the US with crystal meth.
We’ve seen how the Thai war on opium production
created the Yaba epidemic there.
Is there any reason to think the bloody war in the Philippines
will turn out differently?
Unfortunately, the future may well get even worse.
Europe has never really experienced a crystal meth epidemic
in the way the US or Asia has.
Europeans seem to prefer MDMA, cocaine, and ketamine.
But in the aftermath of the financial crisis
that devastated the Greek economy,
a new ultra-cheap version of meth called sisa,
adulterated with everything from engine oil to battery acid,
began sweeping through Greece,
especially among the poor and homeless.
Sisa caught on in Greece during the Great Recession
for the same reason meth has proved popular elsewhere—
it’s cheap and people are looking for an escape.
As the world emerges from Covid-19
into potentially even greater economic catastrophe,
the conditions of poverty and hopelessness
may well set the scene for the next great meth epidemic,
particularly if our governments keep pursuing
the same strategies that have failed so abysmally in the past.
But until they figure out something better,
one thing we can all probably do is
give it a rest with the inaccurate meth memes.
All they’re doing is unfairly demonizing someone who
probably has it a fair bit tougher than you.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.