A stronger, more dangerous version of methamphetamine and fentanyl is helping fuel America’s homelessness crisis, with users rapidly slipping into a debilitating addiction and mental illness that makes it impossible for them to function in society.
“These two drugs come in such enormous quantities and are so amazingly potent that they do the job so much more masterfully than the previous drugs,” said author Sam Quinones, who detailed the opioid crisis in books like Dreamland and The Least of Us. . he said in an interview with the Intelligencer last week. “So you have the meth that is driving people into homelessness and becoming incoherent and irrational and delusional and paranoid.”
Quiñones’ comments come as the homeless population in the United States has experienced a resurgence in recent years. According to a 2022 analysis by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the nation’s homeless population fell from a peak of more than 647,000 in 2007 to nearly 550,000 in 2016. Now, the homeless population has seen a resurgence in subsequent years, rising again to more than 580,000 by 2020, the most recent year the organization was able to collect comprehensive data.
There are signs that the problem has continued to deepen, with shelters in the US reporting a tripling of their population over the past year, while reports of large homeless encampments springing up in major cities from the coast to coast have dominated the headlines.
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Tent encampments for the homeless tucked under Route I-80 along Roseville Road in Sacramento, California.
(Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Blame for the renewed crisis has been placed on many factors, with many Americans left behind by an economy trying to recover from pandemic restrictions now facing the burden of skyrocketing inflation.
But Quiñones points to dangerous drugs as a major contributor to the problem, noting that new strains of methamphetamine have had a debilitating impact on people across the country, forcing them onto the streets where they live focused lives. on getting your next high.
“Both of those drugs, together and alone, make people literally refuse treatment, literally refuse housing even when they’re living in tent camps, even when they’re living on feces, in lethal temperatures, beaten, pimped out, because they do such a masterful job of potently and sustaining supply, of thwarting that self-preservation instinct,” the author said of fentanyl and methamphetamine.
The rise of fentanyl as the main driver of the opioid crisis in the last two years has dominated news coverage in large part because of how dangerous the drug is, as it is life-threatening even in small doses. According to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, synthetic opioids like fentanyl accounted for 82.3% of opioid-related overdose deaths in 2020.
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Soldiers with the Arizona Department of Public Safety (AZDPS) seized more than 26 pounds of fentanyl pills at a Border Patrol checkpoint near Gila Bend on September 23, 2022.
(Arizona Department of Public Safety)
Meth users, meanwhile, are more likely to see their health deteriorate over time rather than die from an accidental overdose, a problem that hasn’t received as much attention. However, the drug has a dangerous impact on people’s lives.
“It doesn’t kill people. It’s also like the raw, raw face of addiction: crazy people roaming the streets, screaming naked like an Allen Ginsberg poem,” Quiñones said. “I think it’s something that people would rather not have to deal with. It’s easier to send condolences to someone who’s dead than it is to deal with someone who’s out on the streets, out of their minds.”
Making the problem worse is a new and more dangerous variety of methamphetamine that has spread across the country, creating higher rates of mental illness and homelessness in its wake.
According to a report last year in the Atlantic, the methamphetamine that hit America’s streets for decades was mostly made using the “ephedrine method.” Ephedrine, a drug commonly found in decongestants like Sudafed, was widely available and was the main active ingredient found in methamphetamine.
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A tented encampment for the homeless sits perfectly below the I-5 freeway in Sacramento, California.
((Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images))
But in 2010, an international campaign against the availability of the ingredient brought about a change. Drugmakers looking to keep profits flowing turned to a liquid called phenyl-2-propanone, or P2P. P2P was easier for traffickers because its ingredients were commonly found in cheap, legal chemicals.
The switch to the P2P method was not without its pitfalls, as it would often result in the production of d-meth or l-meth. While d-meth is the type that makes drug users crave, l-meth will make the heart race but do little for the brain, making it undesirable for drug users.
Separating the two types of methamphetamine has usually only been without the understanding of a knowledgeable and experienced chemist and not the typical drug manufacturer, but that has changed in recent years, with drug dealers across Mexico beginning to figure out how preparing the most desirable meth which led to a shift towards the P2P method.
The growth of the new method has been a boom for dealers, who use the cheap and readily available ingredients to mass-produce methamphetamine on a scale never seen before. In less than a decade, the newest version moved north and spread to every region of the US, poisoning thousands of Americans with a drug that’s more dangerous than anything they’ve ever used before.
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655.65 pounds of suspected methamphetamine found by US Customs and Border Protection with an estimated street value of $5,861,159.
(U.S. Customs and Border Protection)
While more attention has been paid to the problem in recent years, there is little sign that there will be progress in solving it. Drug dealers have increased production of drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl, moving away from plant-based drugs that often relied on growing seasons and weather to produce. Instead, dealers can now mass-produce the most potent and addictive drugs in any weather and at any time of the year.
That reality may force the federal government to take more action, argued Quiñones, who has the power to dictate international diplomacy as opposed to municipal governments trying to address homelessness.
“At no point in the history of the so-called war on drugs have we seen the kind of collaborative efforts that need to be done, that can be done, between Mexico and the United States at the national level,” Quiñones said. “But I do believe that this now requires a collaborative relationship between the two countries, but that it not tiptoe past the truth, which is that Mexico has a real problem with deep corruption in the criminal justice system.”
