“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".
