Jennifer Grzesik, counselor at the MORE Center in Louisville, says that it used to be rare to see patients who were using meth. People across the country are now seeing the effects of this evolution in the meth epidemic. And previously, the South and Midwest had not been reached by Mexican traffickers with limited ephedrine supplies, but now local dealers began to introduce the P2P meth. New England had seen very little meth use in the past, but the drug found its way there by the mid-2010s. In the Southwest, the meth epidemic became more prevalent than ever. Meth labs had popped up all over, and this increase in supply caused the price to drop – which spurred even more sales and abuse. By 2018, if you were one of the 1.8 million people in the US using meth, you most likely used the P2P-based drug. Over the next six years, P2P meth continued to spread across the country. That year, 96% of meth samples tested by the DEA were made with P2P. By 2012, meth was flowing into Southern California from Mexico in droves. The effects were so noticeable that when the “new” meth started to circulate, some gang members began calling it “weirdo dope.” People with “no prior history of mental illness seemed to be going mad.”īut its damaging effects didn’t slow down use. Hallucinations, violent paranoia, isolation, jumbled speech, and memory loss are common symptoms. Using the P2P meth results in a “cerebral catastrophe” – quickly causing severe deterioration in mental health. P2P meth seems to cause immediate damage to the brain. But ephedrine meth caused slow damage over years of abuse. Meth is a neurotoxin, meaning it damages the brain no matter how it is cooked. Why was this chemical alteration significant? Its effects. This clear liquid could be made cheaply through the combination of several easy-to-access chemicals.īy the early 2000s, this new and evolved version of meth was widespread.
Meth cooks turned to a second way to make the drug – with phenyl-2-propanone (P2P).
Instead, it forced everything about meth to evolve.
This may have helped slow the meth market, but it didn’t stop it. Officials took action to make it harder for criminals to access ephedrine (such as restricting Sudafed sales). rediscovered this method, and a huge meth market exploded. Ephedrine comes from the ephedrine plant and is commonly used in decongestants. When this drug was first introduced in 1919, a Japanese researcher created it by altering ephedrine. Add a second oxygen atom and you have something very different – hydrogen peroxide.
Put two atoms of hydrogen with one atom of oxygen and you get water. Let’s take a look at something more benign: water. A slight change in chemistry is no big deal, right? Meth is meth.
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