WHAT MAKES METH SO BAD

Pioneer Press ^ | February 22, 2004 | Amy Becker

[Stone Mountain]

Sure, why not? You have a problem with speed addicts offing themselves?

[Stone Mountain]

Anyone who would claim that meth is a harmless recreational drug, to be equated with pot, or is OK because "doctors prescribe it", is full of ****.

I don't think anyone, whether or not you are for the WOD or not, claims that...

[Monty22]

""I've seen crystals on myself, like a little snowflake that comes through my pores," he said. He remembers thinking, "Whoa! Dope's coming out of my skin!""

I've seen some people with that, around their finger joints. Is that meth? White flakey stuff?

[Constantine XIII]

The trouble is that this stuff leads to users flipping out and victimizing their neighbors (burglary, assault, murder, and so on). When such a direct link can be established, then isn't government action warrented?

This isn't "reefer madness." Meth litterally takes normal people and makes them criminally insane.

[macrahanish #1]

This would make a great anti-drug ad. The only thing most teen girls are interested in is their appearance. Typical scare tactics(i.e.-you might die)don't work.

[Constantine XIII]

He he, supply side economics at it's finest. :)

[Skooz]

That is quite true.

In 1984-1985 I was one of the biggest meth dealers in my city. I saw first-hand the havoc wrought by crystal. First, everyone started doing it for the rush.

Then, people would start losing jobs because they would stay up for days at a time and could not (literally, physically could not) make it to work after they crashed.

Then, marriages would break up because two people doing meth all the time cannot get along for long.

Then, paranoia would set it. Everyone was out to get them. Everyone was a narc. Everyone wanted to steal their meth. Long-time friendships would end in violence.

Then, the guns would start showing up. The most mild-mannered and meek people would walk around with guns ready to shoot anything that moved, absolutely convinced they were in constant danger. My brother in law was my partner in the meth biz. He lived next door. One day, we just decided that we were out to get one another and started fighting. Next thing, he bought a rifle to protect himself from me. I responded by buying an AR-15 to use on him if necessary. For the next 8 months or so, we had a cold war that tore my family apart.

I remember one guy in my neighborhood who shot up a full length mirror in his apartment. he couldn't stand looking at it.

I once sat down with a friend who had been doing meth for about 6 months. His wife had taken the kids and moved. He had lost his job. He had no more furniture. His utilities had been cutoff. As he sat by candlelight making up a shot, he repeatedy told me he didn't have a drug problem.

Meth is the drug from Hell. Regardless of where one stands on drug legalization, crystal meth cannot be tolerated in a civilized society.

[coloradan]

The authoritarian streak in dennisw runs a lot deeper than with respect to meth alone.

I think we'd both agree that weed and booze have similar overall societal impacts.

I don't agree. Alcohol is responsible for far more abusive behavior and far more lives and families destroyed by drunk drivers. If you add in the interdiction and enforcement against pot, alcohol is a less clear winner, but I still think it wins. Of course, doing so confuses the costs of prohibition with the costs of use.

But meth is an entirely different manner. Growing pot in your backyard isn't a danger to others, unlike the manufacture of meth.

False. There are safe ways to make meth and dangerous ways. The precursors to the safe ways - the ones thought of years ago, have been already been controlled, so now the only precursor readily available is cold pills, which require a dangerous chemical synthesis to turn into meth. This too is a cost of prohibition, not of use.

Consider the deaths from antifreeze, the blindings from methanol, and the violent illnesses from isopropyl alcohol during the prohibition, used to justify the prohbition. "Surely we can agree that alcohol is much more dangerous than other things, based on these facts," I can hear you say.

Come to think of it, if meth weren't prohibited, you wouldn't have to make it at all - you could just buy it and the safety hazards associated with making it would vanish altogether.

We criminalize drunk driving even if harm does not occur because of the high likelihood of harm and the severity of the harm from drunk drivers. Likewise, IMO both the manufacture and use of meth crosses a similar threshhold and justify criminalization.

I have already addressed the manufacture case, so I'll consider use here. For one thing, the purity of home-cooked meth is questionable, and the paranoia it seems to produce could be a consequence of the impurities present in this particular way of making it, and not intrinsic to the drug itself. Meth has been around a long time, but the high incidence of paranoia induced by its use is relatively new. I knew several meth users in college, and none were paranoid or violent. The paranoia could also be associated with the knowledge that the users have of it's illegality, which would also go away if it were decriminalized. OTOH I know many cases in which alcohol use has led to criminal violence, and we return to the question of alcohol prohibition.

It would take a real clinical study to determine if pure meth led to an unacceptably high level of violent or psychotic episodes, which one cannot do looking at anecdotal evidence from street-cooked meth affecting a non-randomly selected population of users. (For example, perhaps paranoia-inclined people tend to use meth more frequently than people in the general population.)

It would also be interesting to see if meth, studied under such conditions, caused more violence than, say, kids treated with antidepressants such as zoloft, paxil, and prozac, which seem to have been connected to nearly every school shooting in the last decade - and every one of which earned FDA approval.

I have heard the "worst of the worst" rhetoric applied, at different times in the last century, to opium, alcohol, tobacco, pot, cocaine, meth, PCP and heroin. In terms of raw numbers of lives destroyed, I'd say alcohol, not meth, should hold that honor.

[GSWarrior]

I was a heavy meth user for several years in the 80s. I never sunk to the depths that the people in the article reached. I was able to stop, but saw other friends sink farther into what can only be described as paranoia.

I was at some old drug buddy's house in downtown Long Beach about 12 years ago. He and his roommate had found a Standard & Poor's online user guide or something in the dumpster behind their apartment. They were convinced that they had uncovered a plot to topple Wall Street and no amount of logical thinking could sway them from this belief.

[coloradan]

Meth is probably the most dangerous hard drug out there, and the manufacture creates a clear hazard to neighbors.

Incidentally, this logic parallel's that of gun grabbers, who seek to criminalize the "weapon of choice" of criminals. Irrespective of the facts, or lack thereof, underlying their arguments, once one of them is criminalized, another legal gun becomes the new "weapon of choice" - and so in need of prohibition. Of all the legal drugs out there, deciding the criminalize only the most dangerous one is a path to criminalizing all of them.

[coloradan]

Incidentally, the criminalization of drunk driving is a poor example to compare with meth prohibition: In some states, drunk driving is legal ... on one's private property. Driving drunk is only illegal on public roads or places where the public has a general right to be, like grocery store parking lots. Drunk driving is also a behavior, which is fundamentally different from meth which is a substance. If you want to treat them more alike, then you could criminalize driving while on meth, or being in public while on meth, or have enhanced penalties for crimes committed while on meth, while still allowing responsible people to make, own, and/or use meth on their own property so long as they don't harm others. Which is a long way from the present militarized prohibition.

[TKDietz]

"I am an ED physician andi have treated patients with OD and chronic abuse of Methamphetamine, Ritalin, and other amphetamines. They all affect the dopaminergic, and sertonine receptors of the brain. Some are slightly more potent then others, but not to the huge and varied degree you state."

With all due respect, I'm going to have to disagree with you. I am no doctor, but I do have a neurologist in the family and I and one of my daughters have been prescribed stimulant medications. I am currently taking a small daily dose of Concerta, which as you know is time release Methylphenidate. I am also an adviser on our local drug court committee and as a public defender I work with drug addicts all the time. I have done quite a bit of research on stimulant medications used to treat ADHD and quite a bit on addiction as well, especially addiction to methamphetamine which is the hard drug most often abused where I live. Moreover, I must admit that when I was younger I took cocaine, amphetamines and methamphetamine several times, so I can speak from some experience as to how these drugs make people feel.

With respect to effects of methamphetamine and amphetamines on dopamine and seritonin levels, from what I have learned amphetamines and methamphetamine are much more potent when it comes to releasing dopamine, and that the jury is still out as to whether Methylphenidate has any appreciable effect on seritonin. (See http://www.jneurochem.org/cgi/content/abstract/68/5/2032 ; http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/288/5463/11a ) These drugs may work on the same parts of the brain generally and may be much more similar than they are different, but the differences, however subtle they might seem on paper, result in a far different "high." The high dopamine levels caused by amphetamine and methamphetamine use produce a euphoric feeling far greater than that caused by Ritalin. This is one of the main reasons why meth is so much more addictive than Ritalin. It feels good. It makes you feel like your team just got done winning the big game and you're all ready and raring to go party. Ritalin does not tend to produce the same energy level or the same feeling of well being. In fact, taking too much can make people feel awful.

A couple of months ago I forgot that I had already taken my Concerta and I took another dose. It was one of the most miserable days I have had in a long time. I felt terrible. I just had to "ride it out" all day until the stuff finally wore off. I was speeding like crazy, but it sure wasn't fun. I've done that before with Ritalin too but Ritalin wears off in a couple of hours so it's not as bad. It still wasn't a pleasant experience though.

With meth, you can take enough to make you speed like a rocket but it still feels good. You feel lucid, confident, energetic, and usually happy. It feels good to feel like you have enough energy to tackle the world. The only adverse side effects for me that I can remember from the relatively smallish doses I took were that it made me too talkative and made me grind my teeth if I took too much, that and it lasts too long. Too much Ritalin on the other hand made me feel anxious, twisted my stomach into knots, and made simple tasks like reading and just thinking in general seem like monumental tasks.

I realize there are kids out there who abuse Ritalin. I cannot imagine why except perhaps that they are just really bored. It's not a fun drug.

[TKDietz]

"It would take a real clinical study to determine if pure meth led to an unacceptably high level of violent or psychotic episodes, which one cannot do looking at anecdotal evidence from street-cooked meth affecting a non-randomly selected population of users. (For example, perhaps paranoia-inclined people tend to use meth more frequently than people in the general population.)"

I think there is plenty of evidence that pharmaceutical grade drugs cause these problems as well, especially with regard to straight amphetamines. Pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine has never been prescribed or abused on anywhere near the same levels that straight amphetamines have been prescribed and illegally abused in this country and others. But meth is nothing but a more powerful form of amphetamines so it is even more prone to causing these problems than amphetamines. Violence, psychosis and so on are common when people overuse meth or amphetamines. People often stay up for days and begin hallucinating. Their overworked brains start misfiring and they do stupid things. They often become easily agitated and are often prone to explode in anger. This is well documented common knowledge, and we've known about these problems at least since amphetamine use was so widespread here in the fifties and sixties.

I'm not a big fan of the war on drugs either but you can only go so far with blaming all of the problems on prohibition. Methamphetamine is an extremely addictive dangerous drug. Legal or not, it will cause people enormous problems. I would suggest that if meth were legalized and sold really cheap at the local convenience store that many more people would use it and we'd see many more lifelong addicts who would burden themselves, those around them and society in general with serious problems. I don't believe in giving people felony records and locking them in prisons for doing nothing wrong other than possessing/using a drug like meth, but I think legalizing such that any adult with a few bucks could buy it at the convenience store would be a disaster.

[Mark was here]

I think the War on Some Drugs needs to be modified in several areas, especially regarding pot. But your comment is, quite frankly, dangerously ignorant of the reality of meth manufacture and abuse. Meth is probably the most dangerous hard drug out there, and the manufacture creates a clear hazard to neighbors.

I have no doubt that "Meth" is nasty stuff.

My comment concerning the WOD and the "Meth" problem still stands.

Meth only came about as a way to get around the WOD.

Using a reaction to the WOD as a justification for the WOD is faulty.

If there was no WOD the likely hood of something as dangerous as Meth gaining a marketshare would be less than it is now. I would imagine that people who like to get high would prefer a safer means if it was available.

[Xenalyte]

I thought that multiply banned MrLeRoy stated that alcohol is the only drug that causes agression. Looks like he was wrong again.

I dare you to produce one post in which MrLeRoy ever said that.

You can't, so try not to be intellectually dishonest.

[dirtboy]

If there was no WOD the likely hood of something as dangerous as Meth gaining a marketshare would be less than it is now.

Addiction is not your normal market/economic response, and it's absurd to treat it as such.

I would imagine that people who like to get high would prefer a safer means if it was available.

I see you have never talked to anyone who has been on meth. They'll crawl across the rug looking for crumbs of meth that might have spilled. I know people who have used hard drugs and they say meth is even more addictive than heroin and crack. That dynamic (otherwise known as reality) defies any attempt to apply cold rational libertarian economic analysis to the abuse of methamphetamine.

[FITZ]

If there was no WOD the likely hood of something as dangerous as Meth gaining a marketshare would be less than it is now. I would imagine that people who like to get high would prefer a safer means if it was available.

Well --- there are safer drugs available --- marijuana and the legal alcohol. If what you say is true --- why wouldn't someone skip the meth and drink beer?

[dirtboy]

Once they're on it, sure -- but why would they start with meth if less risky stimulants were legal?

I see you have absolutely no comprehension of the addict mentality. They really aren't the least bit concerned about any warning labels.