Meth, the forgotten killer, is back

It’s purer, cheaper, more lethal and everywhere

PORTLAND, Ore. — They huddled against the biting wind, pacing from one corner to another hoping to score heroin or pills. But a different drug was far more likely to be on offer outside the train station downtown, where homeless drug users live in tents pitched on the sidewalk.

“Everybody has meth around here — everybody,” said Sean, a 27-year-old heroin user who hangs out downtown and gave only his first name. “It’s the easiest to find.”

The scourge of crystal meth, with its exploding labs and ruinous effect on teeth and skin, has been all but forgotten amid national concern over the opioid crisis. But 12 years after Congress took aggressive action to curtail it, meth has returned with a vengeance. Here in Oregon, meth-related deaths vastly outnumber those from heroin. At the U.S. border, agents are seizing 10 times to 20 times the amounts they did a decade ago. Methamphetamine, experts say, has never been purer, cheaper or more lethal.

The decadeslong effort to fight methamphetamine is a tale with two takeaways. One: The number of domestic meth labs has declined precipitously, and along with it the number of children harmed and police officers sickened by exposure to dangerous chemicals. Two: There is more meth on the streets today, more people are using it, and more of them are dying.

Drugs go through cycles. In the early 2000s, meth made from pseudoephedrine, the decongestant in drugstore products like Sudafed, poured out of domestic labs like those in the early seasons of the hit television show Breaking Bad.

In 2005, Congress passed the Combat Methamphetamine Act, which put pseudoephedrine behind the counter, limited sales to 7.5 grams per customer in a 30-day period and required pharmacies to track sales. Although some meth makers tried “smurfing,” sending emissaries to several stores to make purchases, meth cases plummeted.

States like Oregon and Mississippi required a prescription. And a new epidemic took hold — prescription painkillers and opiates like heroin. With no more meth lab explosions on the nightly news, the public forgot about the drug.

But meth, it turns out, was only on hiatus. When the ingredients became difficult to come by in the United States, Mexican drug cartels stepped in. The cartels have inundated the market with so much pure, low-cost meth that dealers have more of it than they know what to do with. Nearly 100 percent pure and about $5 a hit, the new meth is all the more difficult for users to resist. “We’re seeing a lot of longtime addicts who used crack cocaine switch to meth,” said Branden Combs, a Portland officer assigned to the street crimes unit. “You ask them about it, and they’ll say: ‘Hey, it’s half the price, and it’s good quality.’ ”

In Oregon, 232 people died from meth use in 2016, nearly twice as many as died from heroin — and three times as many as died from meth 10 years before.

The cartels’ efficiency has flooded the market far beyond Oregon. In 2016, customs authorities in San Diego seized 21,747 pounds of meth, almost 10 times what was apprehended in 2007. At border points in Arizona, California and Texas, agents seized 24 times as much.

In Montana, meth violations more than tripled between 2010 and 2015. In drug-related deaths in Oklahoma, meth is by far the No. 1 cause. In Hawaii, the number of people over 50 who said meth was their drug of choice has doubled in five years. In South Dakota, the attorney general has proclaimed an epidemic.

To counteract the falling price, drug cartels are actively pursing new markets on the East Coast, according to the National Drug Threat Assessment released by the DEA last fall.