Contributor: ‘Super meth’ isn’t exactly true, but meth is a real factor in homelessness in LA

In last week’s mayoral debate, candidate Spencer Pratt said “Super meth” was causing homelessness Los Angeles.

After several years of reporting and writing a book on this topic, I can say that Los Angeles, indeed the United States, does not really have a “super meth” problem.

Meth is meth. Like aspirin, aspirin. What matters is how much per dose.

Today, Los Angeles has a problem with hyper-pure methamphetamine. It is a major cause of homelessness and mental illness here and in many other parts of the country.

But it is not new.

Twenty years ago, what was sold on the street as meth was 40% to 50% meth, the rest being cheap filler that dealers used to increase their supply.

Today, meth made in Mexico and sold on US streets often measures more than 90% pure — and has been for more than a decade. The disastrous results have been seen on the streets of LA for a long time.

Here’s what happened: For years, the Mexican drug cartel used an anti-inflammatory drug called ephedrine as the main ingredient in their methamphetamine. Ephedrine is difficult to make. Traffickers have never found enough ephedrine to make meth in sufficient quantities to cover more than the western United States. In some parts of the country, local meth producers use Sudafed tablets to extract ephedrine to make small amounts of low-quality, high-priced meth.

In 2008, the Mexican government reduced the amount allowed for imported ephedrine, which traffickers used to siphon off for illegal use.

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 great advantage over the ephedrine method: easy access to the key ingredient.

P2P can be done in many ways, using legal, cheap, widely available industrial chemicals. Unlike the ephedrine method, traffickers were able to make meth using P2P in bulk. They are restricted only to access to these ingredients, which, considering that they control the major ports of Mexico, is almost unlimited.

In 2013, incredible amounts of the cheapest, purest, and most addictive Mexican meth were flowing into the United States. In 2014, in my reporting, meth had overtaken crack as the main drug sold on Skid Row in Los Angeles.

In 2016, hyper-pure meth was sweeping the Midwest. In 2020, meth was reaching New England, which had never seen much before.

Incredibly, hyper-pure meth swept the country again its price has dropped by 80%. Local meth chefs couldn’t compete and disappeared.

Street vendors seem reluctant to sell their wares, perhaps fearing that customers will flock to their competition. Regardless, samples of methamphetamine seized across the United States typically test more than 90% pure, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Classical ephedrine-based meth, which is edible and addictive, was widely used as a community drug. Users wanted to be among others. It was big in the gay community, often referred to as T or tina. Its harmful effects became clear over time. Remember the famous “Faces of Meth” posters with mug shots of users over the course of two and a half years, showing dramatic body weight loss?

The results of this hyper-pure meth, however, were very different. Users are immersed in their insomnia, painful isolation and symptoms of deep mental illness. They grow up rebellious, combative, violent, confused – and in many cases, quickly become homeless.

Meth-induced psychosis was indistinguishable from schizophrenia, except that the latter more commonly affects young men aged 16 to 30.

Given the endless spread of the drug, its purity and accessibility, homeless people for any number of reasons use it to stay up all night, for days, to protect themselves from rape, robbery, beatings – fueling their addiction and tying them to the streets.

In 2018, fentanyl arrived, wreaked havoc and grabbed most of the headlines. Meth, by contrast, was rarely mentioned in media reports. But when it comes to homelessness, meth is the most prevalent illegal drug on LA’s streets. And more likely to create disruptive, inconsistent, sometimes violent social behavior, Angelenos will associate with homelessness.

In Los Angeles, meth was accompanied by factors that enhanced its harm.

First was the spread of tents. In 2011, the Occupy movement staged regular sit-ins on public streets. The tents then joined Skid Row, changing the landscape of the city’s homeless, who were now stationary and easy targets for drug dealers, informants and others.

Addicts in the tents, steeped in endless amounts of meth and now fentanyl, were rarely ready for treatment, which they always refused.

In the camps, this pure methamphetamine is known to encourage the collection of what others considered to be junk. Bike parts were of particular interest, hence the tented “bike shops,” with piles of disassembled parts, that are so common in LA camps during the COVID-19 crisis.

All this was also encouraged by a series of lawsuits that the city interpreted as saying that it cannot do anything about those camps.

Tent-based, “blind” homelessness, often fostered and reinforced by meth addiction, became widespread. First it went to Venice, then Hollywood, Koreatown, Mid-City South LA and the freeways and beyond as the pure form of the drug settled over the city. A large camp on the promenade of Venice is known as “Methlehem.”

Tents became carriers of disease but also used meth, when the drug was not available for free – or was bought through sex.

This is what the city is dealing with today: a problem of tent-based homelessness that is difficult to solve in the constant availability of hyper-pure meth from Mexico.

The next mayor will have to find solutions using a very different mindset than what has been used so far.

Freelance journalist Sam Quinones, a former Times reporter, is the author of, among other books, “A Little of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.” He writes Dreamland newsletter on Substack.