Meth Speed vs ice

[Angus12]

Speaking for myself and knowing I’m an addict, In and out of recovery for years, I personally don’t think it has to do with the dope. It’s the progression of my disease that’s changed. It’s gotten a lot worse as I’ve gotten older no matter how long I’m abstinent.

 

[SmilexGwG]

In australia most street speed is cut to shit meth while ice (crystal meth) tends to be high quality meth. The question is why can I smoke half a gram of speed but never feel as wired as smoking 20mg of ice despite consuming more meth in that amount of speed. That amount of speed will keep me awake much longer than that amount of ice due to the higher amount of meth consumed in half a g but the actual initial high off that small amount of ice is a lot more intense. What gives? Is it due to meth in ice being absorbed much more efficiently than the meth in speed?

Ice is crystal meth, speed is, (or least used to be) powder amphetamine sulphate meant to be snorted.

You cant smoke amphetamine (at least sulphate) which may be why your speed isn't working when you try to vaporize it. Sadly now, speed isn't really differentiated much from meth, and can be used as an umbrella term for many different street stimulants.

The best way to tell the difference between meth and amphetamine, is the duration. Meth can last substantially longer than amphetamine, making it easy to tell which is which.

It's also likely that both your ice and speed is meth, but the ice is higher quality than the speed since its crystalline and difficult to cut.

Even if the speed is just low quality meth, I would imagine it being hard to smoke because its a powder. I'd stick to snorting/bombing it for now own.

 

[JTemperance]

Logically, if the claim old speed was made with pseudo and was therefore a pre-crystal form of meth you’d think the experiences would be closer.

Wait a sec. Is there something about meth made with pseudoephedrine that prevents it from being crystal? The stuff being made from Sudafed in trailer parks across America during the 90s and 00s was always "crystal" meth in name, at least. And the whole "epidemic" in those days really began with "ice" in Hawaii, which was East Asian in origin and therefore likely made with pseudo, right?

Your point about the P2P>dextro- conversion is well-taken. There are reasons to be skeptical of the claim that all the crystal now produced in Mexico is 100% dextro. Presumably there is a some organization out there that's analyzing seized drugs in a way that can differentiate isomers, so they'd have the definitive answer. It still might not be publicized, but I'd like to take a look when I get a chance

 

[JTemperance]

@Perforated I was curious enough to know the answer to the answer to our P2P/isomer question to spend the last 15 minutes trying out search terms. The best source I found was _this article_ which says in relevant part:

Analysis of domestic methamphetamine purchases from January 2012 through March 2017 indicates that the price per pure gram of methamphetamine decreased from $81 to $70, a decline of 13.6%. The purity (measured by the amount of any chiral form of methamphetamine) and potency for methamphetamine (measured by the amount of the highly potent d-isomer present) both have reached all-time peaks of approximately 95%. [12]

The citation above is to the DEA's 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment. That means you were right about their definition of "purity" being isomer-unspecific, though at least they do measure the enantiomer ratio under the heading of "potency."

This is not conclusive, of course, especially without knowing more about the methodology. Still, I think it suggests pretty strongly that the Mexican cartels not only have a possible method for P2P/d-meth, but that they've also put it into practice on a very large scale, not to mention considerable skill, whatever else can be said for them.

 

[Jabberwocky]

@Perforated I was curious enough to know the answer to the answer to our P2P/isomer question to spend the last 15 minutes trying out search terms. The best source I found was _this article_ which says in relevant part:

Edit: sorry I screwed up this post, will fix in a few hours

It’s a good article and I noted the author claims that some Mexican meth seized in the US has tested as high as 93 % for BOTH purity (any isomer) and potency (d-isomer) only.

When I get some time I’ll find a paper explaining why/how the basic P2P process produces Racemic (max 50% potency) meth.

The paper would also suggest that if you were shooting up some kind of speed-like drug in the US in 1980’s or 1990’s it was probably meth. Although it uses the terms amphetamine and methamphetamine interchangeably a few times.

I don’t think it sheds any light on what we were really shooting up in Australia at that time. I know I never even heard the term ‘meth’ or similar until decads later:

 

[cletusSamboy]

Ice is crystal meth, speed is, (or least used to be) powder amphetamine sulphate meant to be snorted.

You cant smoke amphetamine (at least sulphate) which may be why your speed isn't working when you try to vaporize it. Sadly now, speed isn't really differentiated much from meth, and can be used as an umbrella term for many different street stimulants.

The best way to tell the difference between meth and amphetamine, is the duration. Meth can last substantially longer than amphetamine, making it easy to tell which is which.

It's also likely that both your ice and speed is meth, but the ice is higher quality than the speed since its crystalline and difficult to cut.

Even if the speed is just low quality meth, I would imagine it being hard to smoke because its a powder. I'd stick to snorting/bombing it for now own.

Amphetamine in Australia is very uncommon apart from pharmaceutical d-amp known as dexedrine.
This stuff I've been smoking is def meth as it lasts a lot longer compared to amphetamine and urine tests confirm it's meth with no amp detected.
A lot of speed I bought looks more like really small crystals rather than a fine powder and melts and vaporizes clean.

 

[Jabberwocky]

Amphetamine in Australia is very uncommon apart from pharmaceutical d-amp known as dexedrine.

There is a shitload of “speed” aka amphetamine available from a half dozen Aussie vendors on the DNM. I’ve sampled 3 different types from 3 different vendors. One was allegedly Turkish and was pinkish and one was allegedly Dutch and was brownish and one was of unknown origin and off white.

All three tested positive on a reagent test for amphetamine but negative on a reagent test for methamphetamine.

When acetone washed they each lost in excess of 40 % weight.

When 100g snorted they each had kind of an amp tasting drip and I felt a bit energised and a bit of a heart rate and temperature increase. But nothing more than that.

When I commented to one vendor that it was garbage he pointed out that people who use a lot of meth shouldn’t expect to feel much from speed/amphetamine especially if they could smoke a gram of meth per day and remain fairly functional.

I think there was truth in what he said. But losing 40% in a wash is bullshit and a sign of very poor quality. When I washed meth from my usual source I would usually lose only 5 %. Even washing the stuff I got from my sketchy backup street guy in an emergency only lost 10-12 %.

 

[cletusSamboy]

There is a shitload of “speed” aka amphetamine available from a half dozen Aussie vendors on the DNM. I’ve sampled 3 different types from 3 different vendors. One was allegedly Turkish and was pinkish and one was allegedly Dutch and was brownish and one was of unknown origin and off white.

All three tested positive on a reagent test for amphetamine but negative on a reagent test for methamphetamine.

When acetone washed they each lost in excess of 40 % weight.

When 100g snorted they each had kind of an amp tasting drip and I felt a bit energised and a bit of a heart rate and temperature increase. But nothing more than that.

When I commented to one vendor that it was garbage he pointed out that people who use a lot of meth shouldn’t expect to feel much from speed/amphetamine especially if they could smoke a gram of meth per day and remain fairly functional.

I think there was truth in what he said. But losing 40% in a wash is bullshit and a sign of very poor quality. When I washed meth from my usual source I would usually lose only 5 %. Even washing the stuff I got from my sketchy backup street guy in an emergency only lost 10-12 %.

I've bought both the turkish pink pussy whip and the dutch brown powder speed you speak of.
I pissed meth for the urine samples. No amp detected.
All speed I've tried and I've had a lot of different speed batches and never once pissed out amp.
It makes sense cos meth is easier and cheaper to make.

 

[SmilexGwG]

Amphetamine in Australia is very uncommon apart from pharmaceutical d-amp known as dexedrine.
This stuff I've been smoking is def meth as it lasts a lot longer compared to amphetamine and urine tests confirm it's meth with no amp detected.
A lot of speed I bought looks more like really small crystals rather than a fine powder and melts and vaporizes clean.

If it comes in small crystals which cleanly vaporize it's likely meth, also I'm seeing more and more people mention Dexadrine, and I'm starting to think it may replace Adderal on the black market. I guess only time will tell

 

[JTemperance]

When I get some time I’ll find a paper explaining why/how the basic P2P process produces Racemic (max 50% potency) meth.

I'd be interested to read it. Back in the "meth epidemic" days I has the impression that P2P was the more desirable precursor, since they used it back in the old days, before it was heavily restricted/monitored. So I thought that pseudoephedrine was only being used for convenience and didn't turn out as good a product. I didn't know much about isomers at the time (only that Vicks inhalers had levo-meth in them and weren't any fun), and nobody I knew seemed to be aware of the difference between P2P and PE.

The paper would also suggest that if you were shooting up some kind of speed-like drug in the US in 1980’s or 1990’s it was probably meth. Although it uses the terms amphetamine and methamphetamine interchangeably a few times.

Yes, it certainly was; and in the 60s and 70s, too. The US, unlike a lot of other places, developed a strong meth subculture while re0-ular amps were still going strong in the form of pharmaceutical tablets and capsules. (Some diverted from Rx, but the vast majority smuggled in from Mexico, since the Big Pharma of yesteryear was perfectly willing to "export" ridiculous quantities there, as long as the order was printed on letterhead.)

I don't think amphetamine sulfate (from illicit synthesis) was ever used or produced here on a large scale. I can only think of the "white-cross" tablets that mimicked Benzedrine 10mg (hence the nickname "bennies") and used to be popular with truckers. They were produced in clandestine labs (most likely in Mexico) once pharmaceutical controls were tightened by the early 70s, but I don't know if methamphetamine was really being used instead.

(By the 80s a lot of these tablets, as well as "black beauty" lookalike capsules, were just a high-dose combo of caffeine, ephedrine, and/or phenylpropanolamine [PPA], and could be ordered quasi-legally from the back of High Times magazine. In a sadly ironic commentary on drug prohibition, these pills were cardiotoxic enough that some of the teenagers who experimented with 2 or 3 of them ended up crippled or dead, a virtual impossibility with that many doses of any pharmaceutical amphetamine on the market past or present.)

I don’t think it sheds any light on what we were really shooting up in Australia at that time. I know I never even heard the term ‘meth’ or similar until decads later:

No, certainly not. I was just curious about your use of the term "pre-crystal" to describe the form of meth made from pseudoephedrine, claimed to be the "old speed" in your example. Did it only take the form or name of crystal when P2P-meth arrived on the scene? In the US, the concept of crystal meth (or methedrine crystal) has been around since pretty soon after illicit production began.

(Which was c. 1963-64, when Burroughs-Wellcome voluntarily withdrew its injectable Methedrine ampoules from the market due to abuse. So by the time amphetamines were incorporated into the "hardcore" of IV drug use, that subculture was already well-established in the US and just about to begin a new cycle of rapid growth. IMO this was probably an important factor in explaining the ways that the amphetamine market and culture in the US has diverged from other Western nations.)

 

[JTemperance]

I think there was truth in what he said. But losing 40% in a wash is bullshit and a sign of very poor quality. When I washed meth from my usual source I would usually lose only 5 %. Even washing the stuff I got from my sketchy backup street guy in an emergency only lost 10-12 %.

Does the wash get rid of caffeine exclusively? Or do more of the other common cuts (like sugars) dissolve too?

If it did wash out more of them, then I guess your speed would've had a purity of 60% or maybe a little shy of that? I don't know what your vendor advertised, since that really determines if you got ripped off or not. But the standards for sulphate seem to be totally different than crystal

For the former, low purity appears to be the norm. In most European countries, the median purity of a gram bought on the street in 2019 was 11-15%. And that reflects a big improvement over the last decade, over a 60% increase from the turn of the last decade, when purity in the UK was hovering around 4%. (For comparison purposes: 1 gram of speed at 11% purity has 55mg d-amphetamine; at 15% purity, it has 75mg of d-amp.)

Some countries, like Belgium and Sweden (no surprises), lead the pack with sustained 25%-30% averages (not just single-year possible-flukes), but even the best product around tends to be diluted somewhat. The UK's purest single sample in 2019 was 67%; in 2018, only 52%. I remember reading that UK purities peaked around 20% in the mid-90s, so it's likely that they've been down for a while in all of Europe.

Even within a continental context of low-purity amp, the EU meth purities are way higher across the board, in countries where it is dominant and where it -19is8 not. During the 2010s, Czezchia's median purity was continuously above 70%, while Austria's ranged from 57-73%. It wasn't uncommon to see street-gram purities reaching up even higher.

France is primarily an amp sulphate country, but their meth hit the 80% threshold twice in the 2010s [with most of the other years at 76-78%]. And in Turkey, where meth is predominant (and blowing up ATM), the top year for purity was 2015 with 86%, but three other years in the decade hit 80%+.

So in conclusion, I guess your speed was pretty good after all, at least if you put it in context (and assuming there's no false advertising). If "only" 40% of the weight was diluents, the strength was certainly way above Euro standards. Hell, you oughta enter it into the 2021 UK Strong Phet competition, probably would've made runner-up two years ago.

But it's also completely understandable why you were nonplussed, given the norms for meth. I don't know why the disparity is so huge, but I do know that amphetamine in most of Europe has been launched down the sad slide to anachronism by cocaine in the last two decades, quite the opposite of crystal meth. Did the lower purity level result in a low popularity level? Or was it unpopularity that lead to unpurity?

 

[Jabberwocky]

Sugar is insoluble in anhydrous acetone (the kind you need to use to wash amphetamines). I don’t know enough about the cutting of euro-speed to know exactly what might have been in the 40 % that disappeared during cleaning. I assume a fair bit of it was unreacted precursors and reaction by-products from manufacturing. When washing meth in form of shards the main thing you are after is MSM plus manufacturing impurities.

I’ve always been interested in those figures about Euro drug purity. I don’t know why anybody would bother with any of it. I only bought a few samples of euro speed out of curiosity as to whether it was the same thing I’d been shooting up 30 years ago in AUstralia.

The really surprising thing about those number is the low purity of meth. The biggest manufacturers of meth in the world - the Chines/Burmese and the Mexicans are churning out hundreds of tonnes of 90+ % pure meth at extremely low prices (especially theMexicans). Plus it costs a lot of time and hassles to cut rocks/shards by dissolving them, mixing them with another crystal forming substances like MSM, and then recrystallising both together to give the appearance of a single substance.

I would guess that in Europe the meth is manufactured in some more proximal country that has not yet mastered P2P production. When the Mexicans lost access to pseudo as a precursor and had to turn to P2P there was a big drop in purity for several years (down into the low 80’s) until they got the hang of it. But as far as I know places that Europe might source from, like Iran, have top quality product.

I can’t explain the popularity of meth over speed in Australia. As highlighted in an earlier post, in the 1980s and 1990s when I was first into it we shot white powder called ‘speed’ and never needed more than 0.1g per shot to totally blow our mind. I quit for many years and lived in other countries and 30 years later when I came back all there was was crystal methamphetamine which was fun but entirely different plus the various types of low octane and minimal effect imported speed available on the DNM.

At a guess, I’d say that in Australia meth as a product just crowded out old fashioned speed because it had a much much higher margin for the importers/suppliers and that’s all they made available.

 

[unodelacosa]

Wait a sec. Is there something about meth made with pseudoephedrine that prevents it from being crystal?

Absolutely not. If the product is clean it will form aesthetically pleasing crystals, the slower they grow, the bigger and more contiguous they'll be. You can even form the ephedrine (or pseudoephedrine) into crystals before any reaction to reduce it (read: remove the hydroxyl) to methamphetamine.

The stuff being made from Sudafed in trailer parks across America during the 90s and 00s was always "crystal" meth in name, at least.

Not always. And there were chemists out there performing either the Birch reduction (anhydrous ammonia + lithium) or the Nagai route (red phos. + iodine) who knew how to purify their product into beautiful shards that fetched a higher price on the black market.

And the whole "epidemic" in those days really began with "ice" in Hawaii, which was East Asian in origin and therefore likely made with pseudo, right?

No, not necessarily. Racemic meth can also be slowly recrystallized though it tends to stay a bit more opaque and white in coloration of the crystals compared to d-meth. So saying "ice" doesn't necessarily indicate anything for sure, and furthermore "ice" back then could've been referring to 4-methylaminorex which was the original holder of that drug nickname. It's just that it was eclipsed by the immense popularity of meth coupled with it's ease of manufacturing, relatively speaking.

Regardless, Benzaldehyde or even Phenylacetone itself (read: P-2-P) were fairly easily acquired in the past at certain times and places, and at other times the more easily acquirable precursor was/is ephedrine or some close variant of it. It behooves a clandestine operation to remain flexible with precursor acquisition and competency.

As far as the epidemic goes, it really began with the mass proliferation of internet access facilitating the rapid sharing of meth manufacturing information throughout the rural parts of the United States where there was ample room to "cook", truckstop ephedrine for a precursor, and ammonia tanks used by farmers supplying nitrogen to their crops. Most of these easy loopholes were eventually shut-down by circa 2005-ish, but by then, the market and demand for meth had grown exponentially without enough harm reduction information being disseminated. By severely reducing domestic production, the feds essentially opened the door for the Mexican Cartels who stepped up with their superlabs and begin supplying that giant demand using the existing trade routes into the U.S. they had previously established with cannabis and cocaine.

Your point about the P2P>dextro- conversion is well-taken. There are reasons to be skeptical of the claim that all the crystal now produced in Mexico is 100% dextro.

Well yeah of course. DEA themselves as well as groups like Stratfor have said that seized meth shipments from Mexico indicate the aforementioned flexibility regarding precursor availability.

Presumably there is a some organization out there that's analyzing seized drugs in a way that can differentiate isomers, so they'd have the definitive answer.

Yes it's out there, the data I mean. If you search for it, I'm pretty sure you can find it, as I know I've seen it before. IIRC, the majority of meth in the world is still d-isomer meth, which comes from different routes, each leaving a telltale chemical impurity signature usually (though sometimes there's some ambiguity), and I think it was something like 75%. Some of the l-isomer may have been converted back to a racemic mix and then resolved once more into separate isomers for added yield if performing a route from P-2-P, you know…

It still might not be publicized, but I'd like to take a look when I get a chance

Did you even bother looking around? That info is out there for sure.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac9005588

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589871X20300450

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6910919_Analysis_of_the_impurities_in_the_methamphetamine_synthesized_by_three_different_methods_from_ephedrine_and_pseudoephedrine

https://www.longdom.org/open-access/impurity-profiling-of-street-methamphetamine-samples-seized-in-kermanshahiran-with-special-focus-on-methamphetamine-impurities-health-hazards-2161-0495-1000258.pdf

 

[Wiserthanearlier]

Damn this thread is interesting. I can recall fondly the differing references of speed and meth in Aus.

What is perplexing is the variation of rush, euphoria, duration, hedonism, push, uncontrolled energy and general mindset.

I'm currently in position of something sold as speed, the seller doesn't deal with ice. Yet it is clearly a methampetamine. White rocks that lack sny euphoria but have insane duration.

I'm guessing it's I isomer largely.
I've had more enjoyable so called speed and meth.
It is quite interesting to note how this landscape has changed.

 

[Mr. Krinkle]

crank is powder

remember crank?

bathtub tweek

 

[Mr. Krinkle]

krink and crank were on a boat....

 

[Nurse Ratched]

krink and crank were on a boat....

wearing a coat
blowing a goat
crossing the moat
to stay afloat

krink and krank ran up the hill......

 

[unodelacosa]

wearing a coat
blowing a goat
crossing the moat
to stay afloat

krink and krank ran up the hill......

I am reminded of this:

 

[Mr. Krinkle]

am i the only one here who called bathtub tweek "crank"?

the bikers always had that stuff - it almost looked like dope because it was like a tan color

 

[Nurse Ratched]

am i the only one here who called bathtub tweek "crank"?

the bikers always had that stuff - it almost looked like dope because it was like a tan color

I remember it as that. The bikers at Daytona Beach kept it in their "crank"cases and pulled it out to use and sell at bike week. Man, what a madhouse that was.