Methamphetamine surge picks up speed

The popular drug remains a threat, moves into cities.

WASHINGTON — The opioid epidemic has killed tens of thousands over the last two years and driven major reforms in state and local law enforcement and public health policies for people with addiction.

But another deadly but popular drug, methamphetamine, also has been surging in many parts of the country. And federal officials say that, based on what they learned as opioids swept the U.S., methamphetamine is likely to spread even further.

“The beginning of the opioid epidemic was 2000 and we thought it was just localized,” said Kimberly Johnson, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA. “Now we know that drug outbreaks aren’t likely to stay localized so we can start addressing them sooner and letting other states know of the potential for it spreading.”

From Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma to Montana, Wisconsin and Minnesota and all across the South, inexpensive methamphetamine is flowing in from Mexico, fueling what police and epidemiologists say is an alarming increase in the number of people using the drug, and dying from it.

Nationwide, regular use of the inexpensive and widely available illicit stimulant increased to 4 percent of the population from 3 percent between 2010 and 2015, according to SAMHSA. At the same time, heroin use shot to 2 percent of the population from 1 percent.

The number of people using methamphetamine, also known as meth, crystal meth, crystal, crank, ice and speed, has been among the largest of any illicit substance for decades. But — despite meth’s harmful longterm effects, including rotting teeth, heart and kidney failure, and skin lesions — its overdose potential is much lower than that of prescription painkillers and other opioids.

Still, overdose deaths from methamphetamine have spiked recently. In 2014, about 3,700 Americans died from drug overdoses involving methamphetamine, more than double the 2010 number, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2015, the most recent year for which federal data are available, nearly 4,900 meth users died of overdoses, a 30 percent jump in one year.

In Oklahoma, methamphetamine was involved in 328 overdose deaths last year, a sharp climb from 271 in 2015, and more than the combined deaths from prescription painkillers hydrocodone and oxycodone, according to Mark Woodward, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Narcotics Bureau.

In contrast to the last epidemic, which began in the 1990s, rural meth labs are now a rarity and the fires and explosions that captured headlines back then are practically nonexistent today, Woodward said, “So a lot of people thought if meth labs are down, meth use is down.”

“But so much is coming in from Mexico, and it’s just as good as the domestic cooked product,” he said. “Why risk leaving a paper trail at a pharmacy when you have a buddy coming up from El Paso tonight with a cheap supply?”

The majority of methamphetamine is now smuggled across the Southwest border, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2016 National Drug Threat Assessment Summary. Its purity is high and its street price is relatively low — much lower than heroin’s.

“While the current opioid crisis has deservedly garnered significant attention, the methamphetamine threat has remained prevalent,” the report warns. Opioid users experience a dreamlike state and typically nod off. But methamphetamine produces an entirely different high. Users experience a sense of elation and hypervigilance, and often become paranoid and aggressive.

“They may binge on meth for days without eating or sleeping, and they often start seeing things that aren’t there,” said Carol Falkowski, an addiction expert in Minnesota.

Death from a methamphetamine overdose is also very different from an opioid death. With opioids, which affect the part of the brain that controls breathing, an overdose can shut down respiratory functions, quickly causing death.

With methamphetamine, death is typically caused by a stroke or heart attack, and is characterized by extreme sweating as the body overheats prior to death. But because methamphetamine represents a lower risk of overdose, many use it for decades, which often results in gradual organ failure and death. Those deaths are typically not counted in the overdose statistics.