I thought I was informed about the current drug scene until I read Sam Quinones book The Least of Us. His first book focused on the Sackler family and their horrendous marketing effort of Oxycontin and the addiction surge that followed across the United States. While this book continues relating the gymnastics the Sackler continued to perform even after their legal convictions, its main focus is on fentanyl and meth.
I was fairly informed about fentanyl since it has been turning up here for several years. Last week a 13 year old boy died from an exposure at his junior high school where 100 bags of the stuff were found. It is regularly involved in our overdose deaths because of it potency. When mistaken for heroin it is deadly, and many users don’t know what they are buying.
But the biggest surprise was his depiction of meth. I thought of it as “speed,” a drug which amped up energy and kept users awake for stretches of time. It turns out that was the “old meth” made from decongestants like Sudafed(which are no longer easily available.) The new is factory made from chemicals. But its effects are drastically different. As Quinones talks to doctors, outreach workers, police and addiction centers he shares with us the results of the “new meth.”
Rather than giving bursts of energy, the drug more often produces paranoia,hallucinations and behavior frequently mistaken for schizophrenia. He says that many of the tent occupying street people are meth addicts: paranoid, hoarding, ranting and acting irrationally, often violently without provocation. Not all of the homeless are on meth, but many are and old ways of helping them are no longer working.
There seems to be a tendency in cities filled with tent street “villages” to either have compassion for those who can’t afford a home or to see all as drug addicts and seek to remove them. And of course it isn’t one way or the other. Some people who can’t afford a home have spent all their money on drugs. Some have been kicked out of their own home for drug use. And then there are many who simply can’t afford a home because of low wages and high rent.
There is no one solution for the myriad of US citizens now living in tents on public sidewalks. But without a clear understanding of the “new meth,” many public officials will continue to operate with old answers. I hope many of them will take the time to read the book. And I recommend it for anyone who wants to understand what is going on around many of us right now.
Saved By Words 
This makes my flirtation with drugs in the 1970s look very tame by comparison. In Britain, the two biggest ‘drugs of choice’ are still Heroin and Ketamine. Cocaine remains the ‘leisure drug’ for those better-off party animals.
Best wishes, Pete.
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I don’t hear about cocaine here at all.
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It is still very popular here, though mostly used as a so-called ‘recreational drug’.
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Here marijuana is legal so people seem to be smoking, eating and drinking the stuff.
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This is so terribly sad, Elizabeth. It is dreadful that substances like this are made and sold to people who become addicted to them. Drug pushers are so soulless.
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It is predatory for sure.
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The king pins at the top make yet more millions with impunity whilst all down the chain there is horror, despair, and death. I have absolutely no idea what could, or should, be done.
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I don’t either, but I did want an explanation for some of the new hoarding and paranoid behavior of some of these folks on the street.
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Things have gotten so bad in our city that the homeless, many with drug addiction problems, lie near the door to open businesses. Our drug problems as a nation are out of control.
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Were you aware of the way this meth mimics mental illness? It explained a lot of the random attacks by some of these people.
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It is very sad. Thank you for the insight. Boston has the same homeless city. They call it Methadone Mile, and people have tried many different ways to help.
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I had no idea about the “new meth” but it explains much about the chaos of those camps.
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It really does.
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Th relentless rise of addictive substances and the way that they are sold to people is beyond tragic
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It is actually criminal and has been approached like that here with Oxycontin
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Well, they are prescription medications
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They were marketed here as non addictive when they were. Many doctors believed the company and many people became inadvertently addicted. That was the reason for the lawsuir.
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Quite
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I was a consultant at a Substance Abuse Rehabilitation Centre years ago Elizabeth.
I saw an increase in those patient’s using Marijuana presenting with ‘Psuedo Schizophrenia’ (a chemically induced Schizophrenia).
Which the patient will have for the rest of their life once induced.
It entirely depends on the person’s metabolism, neurochemistry & mental health at the time of using. Whether using short or long term, Marijuana isn’t a drug to be taken lightly!
And I’m alarmed at how many countries have legalised it for the general population!
Anything that adversely impacts neurochemistry will have a negative long term effect for the user.
As I used to say when I did High School awareness talks…is it worth the Risk!
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I didn’t know that about marijuana though I have certainly seen the deterioration of frequent users. Here it has just become legal.
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It’s a real concern. 😬
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The [now] Not So Secret History of the Sackler Family is also worth looking at.
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thanks.
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