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The New Meth

Good article.
But I have to say that I've heard all this before: Some radically new terrifyingly different drug that changes everything we thought we knew about drugs. In the 60s it was LSD. In the 70s it was PCP. In the 80s it was crack. In the 90s it was "super-potent marijuana" and "designer drugs." In the 2000s it was fentanyl and take your pick, you get the picture.
It's always something. But it's nothing new, not really.
Just sayin
 
I always knew it’d be back for a comeback tour one day! Can’t keep a good thing down, welcome back meth (or meth 2.0 maybe? Lol)! We’ve missed you since the late 90s/early 2000s!

They’re playing all the hits man, homelessness, mental illness, psychopathic criminality and general lunacy, etc. If you, like me, were a kid when the 90s and early 2000s rolled around, and lived, as I did, in the rural American west, it’ll sound familiar
 
Utter nonsense. The journalist picked a hypothesis and ran with it, but didn't let a lack of evidence get in the way of the story. Just another moral panic from a journalist trying to make a name for himself.

Why is P2P meth producing such pronounced symptoms of mental illness in so many people? No one I spoke with knew for sure. One theory is that much of the meth contains residue of toxic chemicals used in its production, or other contaminants. Even traces of certain chemicals, in a relatively pure drug, might be devastating. The sheer number of users is up, too, and the abundance and low price of P2P meth may enable more continual use among them. That, combined with the drug’s potency today, might accelerate the mental deterioration that ephedrine-based meth can also produce, though usually over a period of months or years, not weeks. Meth and opioids (or other drugs) might also interact in particularly toxic ways. I don’t know of any study comparing the behavior of users—or rats for that matter—on meth made with ephedrine versus meth made with P2P. This now seems a crucial national question.
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Maybe the crucial factors here are the abundance and low price? Those seem like much more realistic causes for increasing mental illness issues (which are, in any case, just anecdotal) than the precursor chemicals used to make the methamphetamine.
 
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In the article I missed if there is any chemical difference between the old and new. Or is it just a difference in price and availability?
 
Over on the chemistry forums you can find people who have been making their own P2P meth at small-scale for years. If there was a problem with it, we'd have heard about it by now.

There's a similar reason you shouldn't believe it's mercury: mercury poisoning has very specific, detectable signs. If people were getting Hg poisoning from bad reductive amination workup, there would be an uptick in unambiguous cases of chronic mercury poisoning. No such cases have appeared.

But there is another, simpler explanation that we're all familiar with: variable-strength products. If the concentration of the meth varies over a factor of two, users will occasionally take twice as much as they intend/expect to. Since the harmful effects of drugs are generally supralinear with dose (i.e. a 200 mg dose of meth is more than twice as damaging as 100 mg), this creates a significant risk for unaware buyers.

For cheap synthetic drugs which are made in large amounts and distributed down a long chain of middlemen, the degree to which it gets stepped on will vary significantly depending on how well production is going at the moment — if there's a glut of product, you might cut it less because storage is a risk and inelastic demand cuts both ways.
 
Staying up for a week causes psychosis no matter how you do it. A large number of meth heads in my city are mentally ill, its a chicken and egg thing though. A drug you can buy 5 dollars worth appeals to homeless people, who are often mentally ill. I'm sure the old bathtub meth caused mental problems too, we are in a new meth epidemic though with an huge increase in users. 10 years ago my city/province was all cocaine, its almost all meth now
 
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Viraldrome said:
Staying up for a week causes psychosis no matter how you do it. A large number of meth heads in my city are mentally ill, its a chicken and egg thing though. A drug you can buy 5 dollars worth appeals to homeless people, who are often mentally ill. I'm the old bathtub meth caused mental problems too, we are in a new meth epidemic though with an huge increase in users. 10 years ago my city/province was all cocaine, its almost all meth now
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*acute psychosis.

That's a world of difference.
 
Wait, what? Racemic methamphetamine has replaced dextro? (I live in canada)

when i used it last in late 2018 it was still obviously dextro

the article was informative, but the judgement , hysteria and „plant based drugs“ (who cares) annoyed me

racemic methamphetamine is the „new meth“? Actually it was the original
 
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the_void said:
Wait, what? Racemic methamphetamine has replaced dextro? (I live in canada)

when i used it last in late 2018 it was still obviously dextro

the article was informative, but the judgement , hysteria and „plant based drugs“ (who cares) annoyed me

racemic methamphetamine is the „new meth“? Actually it was the original
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No, what's happened is methamphetamine produced from (pseudo)ephedrine in North America has largely been replaced by methamphetamine produced from phenyl-2-propanone (P2P), but the Mexican manufacturers have added a resolution step which gets rid of most of the levo-methamphetamine, so it is still mostly dextro. According to the latest numbers from the DEA, methamphetamine seized in the U.S. contains on average only 2.5% levo-methamphetamine (that made from (pseudo)ephedrine contains none).
 
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S.J.B. said:
No, what's happened is methamphetamine produced from (pseudo)ephedrine in North America has largely been replaced by methamphetamine produced from phenyl-2-propanone (P2P), but the Mexican manufacturers have added a resolution step which gets rid of most of the levo-methamphetamine, so it is still mostly dextro. According to the latest numbers from the DEA, methamphetamine seized in the U.S. contains on average only 2.5% levo-methamphetamine (that made from (pseudo)ephedrine contains none).
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Thank god. Alright thanks
 
Question
S.J.B. said:
No, what's happened is methamphetamine produced from (pseudo)ephedrine in North America has largely been replaced by methamphetamine produced from phenyl-2-propanone (P2P), but the Mexican manufacturers have added a resolution step which gets rid of most of the levo-methamphetamine, so it is still mostly dextro. According to the latest numbers from the DEA, methamphetamine seized in the U.S. contains on average only 2.5% levo-methamphetamine (that made from (pseudo)ephedrine contains none).
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Question. Does pseudoephedrine yield dextro-methamphetamine while P2P yields a racemic mixture that then has to be separated?
 
I dunno, but my neighbors offered me a couple hits this morning and I've gotta say shit is killer. It had been over a year since I had hit a pipe.
 
simstim said:
I dunno, but my neighbors offered me a couple hits this morning and I've gotta say shit is killer. It had been over a year since I had hit a pipe.
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Meth seems to be most powerful stimulant but What can duplicate empathy and offer half the stimulant other than Good MDA or MDMA?
 
hardtack said:
Meth seems to be most powerful stimulant but What can duplicate empathy and offer half the stimulant other than Good MDA or MDMA?
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Oh I definitely prefer MDMA over meth.

I've also done a lot more MDMA than meth.

Meth is cheap though. Also, pleasurable and can serve a utilitarian function for things like motivation. Argh, what am I talking about. My demons won't allow me to touch it often, but I'd like to. Especially now that I'm no longer prescribed amphetamine daily.
 
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