Are meth documentaries made up for the media?

[Hugs For Drugs]

I've seen a couple of meth videos on YouTube from the news.

And the reporter kept pulling random facts off his áss

 

[sekio]

Some are. Some are not.

A really good recent one was Hamilton Morris' "A Positive Methamphetamine Story", showing some enterprising Mexicans showing what you can do in your local jungle in your spare time - namely make kilos of meth, a straight laced X-ray crystallographer looking at meth and amphetamine crystals academically, an amateur meth cook dressed as a fireman and his buddy with a jar of pickles ("for everyone to share"), a Christian anti-meth pastor, and the infamous Uncle Fester of legend.

None of his footage is faked, it's all well researched, Hamilton is a perfect gentleman and good interviewer, and parts are funny as fuck - the amateur tweaker-cook's usual dose of meth being "all of it, until it's gone", him almost gassing himself, and also being so spun he makes nothing but a mess - his friend's long philosophical rant while Hamilton looks like he is formulating an escape plan - a former meth user advocating "overdosing on Jesus" as an alternative to meth - Uncle Fester doing the whole segment (even shopping for necessities) while dressed as a devil, red horns and tail and all, and of course...
Hamilton (asking a Mexican meth cook operating on multi kilo scale): Do you feel any remorse for putting mom and pop meth cooks out of business?
Meth cook: ¿Que? ("What?")

All of the Hamilton's Pharmacopeia videos (there's 3 seasons) are actually great watches.

 

[OCjunky88]

I've seen a couple of meth videos on YouTube from the news.

And the reporter kept pulling random facts off his áss

For sure, some are. There was the tweak vids of old where people were talking to themselves and picking their skin. That is history. You won't find vids of people on this new P2P meth, cause they are inside their tents in darkness and isolation not saying a word. Good luck finding them to film.

With Mexico outlawing ephedrine and pseudo, cartels had to come up with something else, and where P2P comes in. This new shit has a way different effect profile than pseudo meth. It is no longer a sociable drug, it no longer makes you want to talk and party. This P2P shit literally breeds schizophrenia too too easily, will produce profound anxiety and paranoid delusions/hallucinations too easily. This crap breeds homelessness. Homelessness has sky rocketed because of P2P, and not because people are spending all their money on dope, but because they are so tripped out in their own minds from this shit they cannot even function. P2P is sinister. We call it weirdo dope around here because it makes you tripped out and weird pretty much instantly..

 

[sekio]

“New Meth” Is Nothing to Fear. It Isn’t New. It’s Just Meth.

Phenyl-2-propanone is not a new precursor. A relevant paper from 1989 says: In the early and mid 1970's, the Leuckart synthesis, which employs [N-methylformamide and phenyl-2-propanone], was the popular clandestine route to amphetamine and methamphetamine. For whatever reason, this route, which is still very common in Western Europe, lost popularity in the United States by the end of the 1970s

However, in actual practice, the three most frequently encountered routes in the United States are: The aluminum foil reduction of the Schiff base adduct of P2P and methylamine, the palladium catalyzed reduction of the chloro analog of ephedrine to methamphetamine, and the hydriodic acid reduction of ephedrine to methamphetamine

So P2P has been used for quite some time. While it does produce 50/50 D- and L-methamphetamine, L-meth does not have strong negative effects (or P2P meth would never have been abused in the '70s), and in this day and age, it is a trivial operation to seperate the D- and L- products in 95% purity with simple tartaric acid, and the excess L-amphetamine can be turned back to a mixture of D/L.
And it is easy to definitively tell if you have D- or DL- meth with a polarimeter, which is less than $50 and can be operated by a high school student.
Also, racemic methamphetamine does not form big crystals,([ref])
Also, chemically speaking, the methamphetamine is the exact same molecule no matter how it is produced...

I have not found one reliable peer reviewed paper demonstrating that meth is in any way significantly different, just a bunch of meth users complaining but not offering any proof.

If you trust apocryphal sources, there's a whole book about meth (No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth by Frank Owen, which you can "borrow" and read for free at that link) that has a long-time meth cook and user user quoted as, "It was the good stuff, the old P2P dope, not the anhydrous crap"...
In fact back in the late 1980s to early 1990s people were complaining about the reverse: the P2P dope was awesome and the "Nazi"/"anhydrous" dope (from reduction of ephedrine, specifically, the anhydrous ammonia/lithium metal synthesis, and later "optimized" into "shake and bake" meth, and the same product as the red phosphorous/iodine method) was bad, had bad side effects, and made everyone tweak: The meth scene in Springfield started to change for the worse in the early 1990s, according to Harris, after Nazi dope started to become all the rage. “We called it ‘chicken scratch meth’ because it made you cluck around like a chicken,” says Harris. “It was different from the P2P dope. The anhydrous dope made people crazy. People became scandalous. That’s when all the domestic violence started. On the P2P dope you wouldn’t see people out at four in the morning mowing their lawns. On the anhydrous dope you did.”

I think it's just a matter of meth getting ever cheaper, more pure, and more widespread. As more and more meth gets made, the price goes down, more people use meth, and existing users use increased doses. So you are much more likely to see negative effects these days because every single person on the street with schizophrenia and no self-care can somehow get $5 (or anything of value, really) and get enough meth to get too high for their own good, at any hour of the day, from several different dealers. And if the meth price drops, heavy users will not simply keep buying the same amount, they will buy more, and often they use "all of it... everything... until it's gone" (from a Hamilton's Pharmacopeia episode on meth). So it's not like their tolerance will go down, or they will sleep any easier, have a better high, or feel better in general - in fact in general they will feel worse and have a higher risk of e.g. psychosis from chronic sleep deprivation.

Also, where I live (Vancouver Canada), I have a reliable source who lives in a complex with literally 50 active meth users (IV and smoked) and he has NEVER heard of anyone who thinks meth has somehow changed and hasn't heard any complaining about P2P dope or any of its "symptoms". He actually had not ever heard about the whole "meth has changed/P2P dope is bad" story until I told him the other day. Same with N-iso, which has been proven BS as well: it is detectable on common GC and GCMS tests, and moreover, according to their database, it has for the most part been seen mixed with ketamine (?!) and once sold instead of meth, but has never been detected in the 700+ or so meth samples tested.

So don't believe every source you hear, a lot of them make claims but are unwilling to back them up with reliable scientific factors. And honestly, meth users can come up with creative stories, but they may not be able to provide verifiable facts. "I felt like [xxx] after I smoked meth" may be true to you, but how can you prove this? Are you measuring blood pressure, heart rate, EKG, EEG? Do you have the ability to do a spinal tap and analyze the CSF for dopamine levels, or do a fMRI? Can your negative feelings be explained by something else that would be more concrete, like lack of sleep or food, or continuous use of high doses? It's important to be rigorous or you can make any conclusion from any experience, i.e. if you end up meeting a person of your desired gender who you later become romantically involved with, a certain time you take a certain substance, you can't make the claim that "they changed the drug to cause true love".

 

[BlossomsBlooming]

“New Meth” Is Nothing to Fear. It Isn’t New. It’s Just Meth.

Phenyl-2-propanone is not a new precursor. A relevant paper from 1989 says: In the early and mid 1970's, the Leuckart synthesis, which employs [N-methylformamide and phenyl-2-propanone], was the popular clandestine route to amphetamine and methamphetamine. For whatever reason, this route, which is still very common in Western Europe, lost popularity in the United States by the end of the 1970s

However, in actual practice, the three most frequently encountered routes in the United States are: The aluminum foil reduction of the Schiff base adduct of P2P and methylamine, the palladium catalyzed reduction of the chloro analog of ephedrine to methamphetamine, and the hydriodic acid reduction of ephedrine to methamphetamine

So P2P has been used for quite some time. While it does produce 50/50 D- and L-methamphetamine, L-meth does not have strong negative effects (or P2P meth would never have been abused in the '70s), and in this day and age, it is a trivial operation to seperate the D- and L- products in 95% purity with simple tartaric acid, and the excess L-amphetamine can be turned back to a mixture of D/L.
And it is easy to definitively tell if you have D- or DL- meth with a polarimeter, which is less than $50 and can be operated by a high school student.
Also, racemic methamphetamine does not form big crystals,([ref])
Also, chemically speaking, the methamphetamine is the exact same molecule no matter how it is produced...

I have not found one reliable peer reviewed paper demonstrating that meth is in any way significantly different, just a bunch of meth users complaining but not offering any proof.

If you trust apocryphal sources, there's a whole book about meth (No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth by Frank Owen, which you can "borrow" and read for free at that link) that has a long-time meth cook and user user quoted as, "It was the good stuff, the old P2P dope, not the anhydrous crap"...
In fact back in the late 1980s to early 1990s people were complaining about the reverse: the P2P dope was awesome and the "Nazi"/"anhydrous" dope (from reduction of ephedrine, specifically, the anhydrous ammonia/lithium metal synthesis, and later "optimized" into "shake and bake" meth, and the same product as the red phosphorous/iodine method) was bad, had bad side effects, and made everyone tweak: The meth scene in Springfield started to change for the worse in the early 1990s, according to Harris, after Nazi dope started to become all the rage. “We called it ‘chicken scratch meth’ because it made you cluck around like a chicken,” says Harris. “It was different from the P2P dope. The anhydrous dope made people crazy. People became scandalous. That’s when all the domestic violence started. On the P2P dope you wouldn’t see people out at four in the morning mowing their lawns. On the anhydrous dope you did.”

I think it's just a matter of meth getting ever cheaper, more pure, and more widespread. As more and more meth gets made, the price goes down, more people use meth, and existing users use increased doses. So you are much more likely to see negative effects these days because every single person on the street with schizophrenia and no self-care can somehow get $5 (or anything of value, really) and get enough meth to get too high for their own good, at any hour of the day, from several different dealers. And if the meth price drops, heavy users will not simply keep buying the same amount, they will buy more, and often they use "all of it... everything... until it's gone" (from a Hamilton's Pharmacopeia episode on meth). So it's not like their tolerance will go down, or they will sleep any easier, have a better high, or feel better in general - in fact in general they will feel worse and have a higher risk of e.g. psychosis from chronic sleep deprivation.

Also, where I live (Vancouver Canada), I have a reliable source who lives in a complex with literally 50 active meth users (IV and smoked) and he has NEVER heard of anyone who thinks meth has somehow changed and hasn't heard any complaining about P2P dope or any of its "symptoms". He actually had not ever heard about the whole "meth has changed/P2P dope is bad" story until I told him the other day. Same with N-iso, which has been proven BS as well: it is detectable on common GC and GCMS tests, and moreover, according to their database, it has for the most part been seen mixed with ketamine (?!) and once sold instead of meth, but has never been detected in the 700+ or so meth samples tested.

So don't believe every source you hear, a lot of them make claims but are unwilling to back them up with reliable scientific factors. And honestly, meth users can come up with creative stories, but they may not be able to provide verifiable facts. "I felt like [xxx] after I smoked meth" may be true to you, but how can you prove this? Are you measuring blood pressure, heart rate, EKG, EEG? Do you have the ability to do a spinal tap and analyze the CSF for dopamine levels, or do a fMRI? Can your negative feelings be explained by something else that would be more concrete, like lack of sleep or food, or continuous use of high doses? It's important to be rigorous or you can make any conclusion from any experience, i.e. if you end up meeting a person of your desired gender who you later become romantically involved with, a certain time you take a certain substance, you can't make the claim that "they changed the drug to cause true love".

I have never heard that state described as clucking like a chicken any where besides my own description when I witnessed it! It is so true-that’s exactly what it is like.

 

[Methandpantyhose]

Some are. Some are not.

A really good recent one was Hamilton Morris' "A Positive Methamphetamine Story", showing some enterprising Mexicans showing what you can do in your local jungle in your spare time - namely make kilos of meth, a straight laced X-ray crystallographer looking at meth and amphetamine crystals academically, an amateur meth cook dressed as a fireman and his buddy with a jar of pickles ("for everyone to share"), a Christian anti-meth pastor, and the infamous Uncle Fester of legend.

None of his footage is faked, it's all well researched, Hamilton is a perfect gentleman and good interviewer, and parts are funny as fuck - the amateur tweaker-cook's usual dose of meth being "all of it, until it's gone", him almost gassing himself, and also being so spun he makes nothing but a mess - his friend's long philosophical rant while Hamilton looks like he is formulating an escape plan - a former meth user advocating "overdosing on Jesus" as an alternative to meth - Uncle Fester doing the whole segment (even shopping for necessities) while dressed as a devil, red horns and tail and all, and of course...
Hamilton (asking a Mexican meth cook operating on multi kilo scale): Do you feel any remorse for putting mom and pop meth cooks out of business?
Meth cook: ¿Que? ("What?")

All of the Hamilton's Pharmacopeia videos (there's 3 seasons) are actually great watches.

Yeah I only caught that one from the point where the guy was trying to make his own meth LOL LOL LOL hahaha LOL LOL haha that was pure comedy gold man especially as he's like mixing random shit and like they cut over to. Hamilton he has that look on his face like shit looks like danger Will Robinson and the fireman look was really the topper as, it represents safety whilst dude shakin bakin