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nearly 18,000 quarter-gram doses

Back in the day ... you would have been laughed out of town if you came up with some weak-ass crap like that.

I remember stuff so powerfull that a 1/32 of a gram was a "hot" shot.
1/64 could blast you for 2 days ...

I find it hard to believe that the quality has gone down that much.

So much for the "drugs are increasing in purity" propaganda, huh?

I remember stuff so powerfull that a 1/32 of a gram was a "hot" shot. 1/64 could blast you for 2 days ...

I believe that you are referring to crystal methadrine (sp?). That is not what methamphetamine is; not even close. This stuff is absolute garbage.

A quarter gram isn't generally a one dose amount, although some addicts with a high tolerance will do that much or more in one shot. I've heard of people doing a gram in one sitting. The quarter gram amount is a typical amount for a casual user to consume in a night of partying though.

As for purity, it varies considerably. Working as a public defender I see crime lab reports all the time that report the purity of meth seized from our clients. Sometimes it is as high as 99% pure, and there was a guy who went to trial a few weeks back who had been caught with a couple of pounds of crap that was only 12.5% pure. He's going to spend the rest of his life in prison. Purity around here probably averages in the the neighborhood of 65% though, give or take a few points. The "ice," meth that has gone through an additional process to "glass it up," making it look similar to shards of glass or broken pieces of translucent sugar candy, is generally a little stronger than standard meth, but not always. Ice is the kind preferred for smoking and it's the stuff most often law enforcement claims is 99% pure. That's hysterical nonsense though, as are many government claims about drugs. Ice and regular meth are really the same stuff. Crappy meth glassed up is still crappy meth and it can be cut after being converted to ice. It's easier for people to stick some white powder in with regular meth to cut it than it is for them to find something that looks like ice though, although many use Epsom salts. Some know how to break it down and reconstitute it with cut to so buyers don't get mad when they put a piece of Epsom salts in their pipe and smoke it and know right away it isn't meth.

Overall though, the meth people get today is the same as the stuff they used to get. When supply is up, purity tends to go up as people compete for business. If you got meth thirty years ago that was 99% pure though, it isn't any better or worse than meth people might get today that pure. The same goes for 12.5% meth. It may very well be though that since meth is a little more widely used than meth in the old days that police are finding many more samples to test and are seeing more that is more pure than before. Also, a lot more is being seized in large quantities. Large quantity seizures are almost always going to be more pure than little seizures of a gram or less, because usually most of the cutting is done at the retail sales level. The two pound load that was only 12.5% pure was an anomaly. Whoever bought that stuff either got really screwed or somebody stole a bunch of it and replaced it with cut after the bust (it happens). I did a plea on a case a couple of months ago where my client had close to five pounds and each bundle of it was between 95% and 99% pure. He also had nearly sixty pounds of coke and 570 Ocycontin tablets, but that's off topic. The big loads are generally pretty strong and the small user amounts seized are rarely over 70% pure or so, with most probably being in the 40% to 65% or so range. I've heard that what they used to seize twenty or thirty years ago tended to be in the 20% range. That may be bs or maybe that's what they found on the streets back then. Surely some of the truckers and bikers who did most of the meth back in those days were getting stuff that wasn't cut nearly so much.