Meth User Quotes

Meth users include men and women of every class, race, and background. Though the current epidemic has its roots in motorcycle gangs and lower-class rural and suburban neighborhoods, meth, as Newsweek reported in a 2005 cover story, has “marched across the country and up the socioeconomic ladder.” Now, “the most likely people and the most unlikely people take methamphetamine,” according to Frank Vocci, director of the Division of Pharmacotherapies and Medical Consequences of Drug Abuse at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).

Decriminalizing drugs also removes the one lever we have to push men and women toward sobriety. Waiting around for them to decide to opt for treatment is the opposite of compassion when the drugs on the street are as cheap, prevalent, and deadly as they are today. We used to believe people needed to hit rock bottom before seeking treatment. That’s another idea made obsolete by our addiction crisis and the current synthetic drug supply. It belongs to an era when drugs of choice were merciful. Nowadays people are living in tents, screaming at unseen demons, raped, pimped, beaten, unshowered, and unfed. That would seem to be rock bottom. Yet it’s not enough to persuade people to get treatment. In Columbus, Ohio, Giti Mayton remembers a meth addict who was hospitalized with frostbitten, gangrenous hands, yet who left the hospital in midwinter to find more dope. San Francisco and Philadelphia, two cities with years of experience with heroin, are seeing users homeless and dying like never before. The dope is different now. Today, rock bottom is death.

We need to use arrests, but not as a reason to send someone to prison. Instead, criminal charges are leverage we can use to pry users from the dope that will consume them otherwise. Our era of synthetic street drugs requires this. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink—however, you can make him thirsty,” said Brandon Cox, a recovering addict in Lancaster, Ohio, who is now a paramedic. “You’re not going to get better unless you’re willing to get better. Finding that emerging willingness is critical. For me, it was the threat of doing years in prison.” Some people find that willingness on the street. It happens. But many do not, cannot.

Traffickers, meanwhile, had discovered a way to make methamphetamine in harrowing new amounts. While I was on the road, their meth reached all corners of the country and became the fourth stage of the drug-addiction crisis. Opiate addicts began to switch to meth, or use both together. This made no sense in the traditional drug world. One was a depressant, the other a stimulant. But it was as if their brains were primed for any drug. This stage did not involve mass deaths. Rather, the new meth gnawed at brains in frightening ways. Suddenly users displayed symptoms of schizophrenia—paranoia, hallucinations. The spread of this meth provoked homelessness across the country. Homeless encampments of meth users appeared in rural towns—“They’re almost like villages,” one Indiana counselor said. In the West, large tent encampments formed, populated by people made frantic by unseen demons in Skid Row in Los Angeles, Sunnyslope in Phoenix, the tunnels in Las Vegas. This methamphetamine, meanwhile, prompted strange obsessions—with bicycles, with flashlights, and with hoarding junk. In each of these places, it seemed mental illness was the problem. It was, but so much of it was induced by the new meth.

Still, my reporting found that P2P meth in massive quantities is damaging minds, perhaps irreparably, across the United States. The growing homeless encampments in many cities and rural towns are meth’s deadening creation, I’m convinced. Though other drugs and alcohol are part of the mix, many encampments are simply meth colonies. They provide a community for users, creating the kinds of environmental cues that USC psychologist Wendy Wood found crucial in forming habits. Encampments are places where addicts flee from treatment, where they can find the warm embrace of approval for their meth use. “It took me twelve years of using before I was homeless,” said Talie Wenick, a counselor in Bend, Oregon. “Now, within a year they’re homeless. So many homeless camps have popped up around Central Oregon—huge camps on Bureau of Land Management land, with tents and campers and roads they’ve cleared themselves. And everyone’s using. You’re trying to help someone get clean, and they live in a camp where everyone is using.

P2P meth’s intense paranoia, combined with days without sleep, produces bizarre obsessions. One of them is coloring books. Some I spoke to spent hours coloring. Another obsession is with flashlights and headlamps. Paranoia plus endless nighttime hours awake prod users to light up areas where someone might be lurking. Meth users develop flashlight fetishes, collecting a dozen or more. The new meth has also promoted hoarding, which is why so many homeless encampments are filled with seemingly purposeless junk. Many addicts, up all night, ride bicycles through the streets, with flashlights and headlamps to dig through the trash for things to keep, sell, or trade for dope.

Unprecedented potency combined with unrelenting supply. That describes the illegal drug stream on American streets. Today, one drug primes a user for others. In the United States, all this is etching and twisting our brain reward pathways in ways unknown even a few decades ago. The United States is the world’s leading per capita consumer of both opioids and sugar.

A good chunk of what Colt sold, he said, was to people trading goods stolen from Walmart. Walmart was another reason meth spread quickly to small towns and rural parts of America. This did not surprise me. I routinely encountered users and dealers who told me that a large though unmeasurable amount of the drug trade in their area was fueled by goods stolen from Walmart. I ran into this a lot writing Dreamland, and found more of it as I traveled the country after the book was published.

For all its beauty, its weather, and its wealth, Los Angeles is also the nation’s homeless capital. It’s been so for years. But homelessness is different now—more prolific, more stationary, less transient. Much of it now is rooted in the voluminous supplies of meth that Mexican traffickers’ switch to the P2P method made possible. As that happened, another change was taking place that made the drug even more damaging, at least in Los Angeles. Tents. They protect many homeless people from the elements. But they have another, far less benevolent role. Tents and the new meth seem made for each other. With a tent, the user could retreat not just mentally from the world but physically. Tents often became pods of exploitation where people used dope, sold dope, or performed acts that allowed them to procure it.

The homeless addicts the police ticketed were placed in housing. That had been the model for years: get people housed, then treat their drug use. But P2P meth changed the model. These folks invited other users over, and together they tore up the apartments. Ortenzio watched this and realized that the new meth required places for users to detox, then spend time recovering—six weeks at least. Otherwise, “these people are unhousable,” he told me. “They can’t be managed. It’s not sane to just put folks in housing when they’re in this condition.

As COVID-19 hit, instead of continuing the Mission as a flophouse, Ortenzio opened a Resurrection Room, where addicts could spend ninety days quarantined in sobriety. Two users well-known to the Clarksburg street world—Melissa Carter and Jesse Clevenger, who stopped using when they were forced into drug court—found sobriety at the Mission and have become his recovery recruiters. Clevenger had been a major heroin dealer in town, selling to dozens of people a day while feeling, he said, “like you were a house-call doctor. Everybody you talked to all day were at their worst—sick, had no money, crying.” Then Clevenger was forced into a drug court and treatment. It was either that or prison. “I wouldn’t have got clean,” he said, “if I didn’t have that ultimatum.” Now he was out among meth addicts and preaching recovery at the Mission.

Meanwhile, the chain cut back on a lot of what might have helped deter shoplifting. Lee Scott, Walmart’s chairman from 2000 to 2009—the years when the opiate addiction crisis was gathering force—came in to boost profits by cutting costs. Workers already weren’t paid a lot. Under Scott, Walmart stores cut staff on the floor and greeters at the entrances, all of which deterred crime. It seemed to me that their store design already encouraged shoplifting, with dimmer lights compared to other stores, no videos in restrooms or at blind corners. With automatic cashiers at the exits, shoppers could spend an entire outing at Walmart and not see an employee. In a good many towns, Walmart was the only store. In others, it was one of the few, coexisting with a supermarket, maybe a Big Lots or a JCPenney. Either way, I found, no chain had a reputation among drug users for being easier to rip off than Walmart. I heard this over and over. They avoided Target because of its wider aisles and brighter lights. Whatever the dealers wanted in exchange for their dope was usually available at Walmart. The chain offered an easy shopping experience—and an easy shoplifting experience, as well. “It was convenient,” said Monica Tucker, who runs a drug rehab center in eastern Tennessee but was a meth addict for seven years, and supported her habit at Walmart. “Anything you were requested to get [by the dealer], you could find it there. We stole lots of food. We weren’t eating because we were on meth, but everybody else was hungry at the dope dealer’s house.” With opioids, then later with meth, plentiful drug supply was paired with this easy source of goods to barter. Had there been the same vibrant Main Streets, ecosystems of the locally owned stores that were the lifeblood of many owners who lived in town and returned their profits to it, both the opioid crisis and the meth problem might have spread less quickly in many parts of the country.

Bathed in a late autumn glow, Springfield doesn’t seem like a community ravaged by meth despite its reputation as a paradise for tweakers (chronic users). The Battlefield Mall—named in memory of Wilson’s Creek, a famous Civil War battle

Counterintuitive as it may seem, doctors say nicotine is the most habit-forming substance, since cigarettes are the only drug where the majority of users become dependent. We’re

Counterintuitive as it may seem, doctors say nicotine is the most habit-forming substance, since cigarettes are the only drug where the majority of users become dependent.

I was well aware this wasn’t a word most lethal operatives like myself would use, but I had always marched to the beat of my own drummer. “You paint quite the scary picture, Professor,” I continued, raising my eyebrows. “Why do I have the feeling this isn’t the first time you’ve thought about this?” Singh smiled. “Not quite the first time, no,” she replied. “I guess I have gone into lecture mode. And it’s a lot to absorb. So let me wind this down. The bottom line is that the rates of substance and behavioral addictions have skyrocketed. Our levels of stress and neurosis have too. The furious pace of our advancements, and the toxicities and manipulations I just described, are outstripping our psyches, which were evolved for a simpler existence.” “Do you have statistics on the extent of the problem?” asked Ashley. “It’s impossible to really get your arms around,” replied Singh, “but I’ll try. In 1980, fewer than three thousand Americans died of a drug overdose. By 2021 that number had grown to over a hundred thousand. More than thirty-fold! And it’s only grown since then. “And these are just the mortality stats. Many times this number are addicts. Estimates vary pretty widely, but I can give you numbers that I believe to be accurate. Fifteen to twenty million Americans are addicted to alcohol. Over twenty-five million suffer from nicotine dependence. Many millions more are addicted to cocaine, or heroin, or meth, or fentanyl—which is a hundred times stronger than morphine—or an ever-growing number of other substances. Millions more are addicted to gambling. Or online shopping. Or porn.” Singh frowned deeply. “When it comes to the internet, cell phones, and other behavioral addictions, the numbers are truly immense. Probably half the population. The average smart phone user now spends over three hours a day on this device. And when it comes to our kids, the rate of phone addiction is even higher. Much higher. In some ways, it’s nearly universal. “Meanwhile, many parents insist their children keep this addiction device with them at all times. They’re thrilled to be able to reach their kids every single second of their lives, and track their every movement.” There was a long, stunned silence in the room. “I could go on for days,” said Singh finally. “But I think that gives you some sense of what we’re currently facing as a society.” I tried to think of something humorous to say. Something to lighten the somber mood, which was my instinctive reaction when things got depressing.  But in this case, I had nothing. Singh had called the current situation a crisis. But even this loaded term couldn’t begin to do it justice.

Its active ingredient, methamphetamine, is now either illegal or strictly regulated,1 but with the number of consumers currently at over 100 million and rising, it counts today as our most popular poison. Produced in hidden labs by chemical amateurs, usually in adulterated form, this substance has come to be known as “crystal meth.” Usually ingested nasally in high doses, the crystalline form of this so-called horror drug has gained unimaginable popularity all over Europe, with an exponential number of first-time users. This upper, with its dangerously powerful kick, is used as a party drug, for boosting performance in the workplace, in offices, even in parliaments and at universities. It banishes both sleep and hunger while promising euphoria, but in the form of crystal meth* it is a potentially destructive and highly addictive substance. Hardly anyone knows about its original rise in Nazi Germany.

the United States, at least twelve million people have tried meth, and it is estimated that more than one and a half million are addicted to it. Worldwide, there are more than thirty-five million users; it is the most abused hard drug, more than heroin and cocaine combined. Nic claimed that he was searching for meth his entire life. “When I tried it for the first time,” he said, “that was that.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been told that meth is worse than most other drugs. To learn why, I continue my research, traveling to meet with more researchers who study meth. They explain that drug users often binge and increase their dosages in an attempt to recreate the initial high, but for meth addicts, with the depletion of as much as 90 percent of the brain’s dopamine, it’s no longer possible. As with many drugs, the dopamine deficiency causes depression and anxiety, but it’s often far more severe with meth. This compels the user to take more of the drug, causing more nerve damage, which increases the compulsion to use—a cycle that leads to both addiction and relapse.