The first time James Savage used meth it was to avoid shooting heroin. Back when he was 19, working as a baker in the remote town of Beluga, Alaska, Savage fell off a ladder, shattering the bones in his right foot. A camp medic gave him painkillers to cope with the discomfort as they waited for the weather to clear to get him to proper medical care. It was his introduction to opioids, and kicked off years spent rotating through pain clinics, growing more and more dependent on legal pills.
“Realistically, they’re all trying to help,” he says of the clinicians who dispensed greater and greater quantities of meds. By the time he was 24, Savage was walking out of pharmacies with a shopping bag’s worth of pills, trading them in parking lots with other users.
When it became apparent to the clinics that he was doctor shopping, they cut him off, leaving Savage with a choice: turn to heroin to stave off crippling withdrawal symptoms, or grit his teeth through DIY detox.
Instead, he found a middle-ground: methamphetamine. A drug buddy told him that if he stayed awake in a meth-induced mania for a few days, he could crash into two or three days of torpid sleep, bypassing the worst parts of withdrawal. (...)
Alongside epidemic abuse of the grim opioid-heroin-Fentanyl triad, meth use is surging. One crude measure of its prevalence is the number of overdose deaths reported to the Centers for Disease Control: between 2005 and 2015 fatal overdoses involving stimulants shot up almost 300 percent, the vast majority of which were attributable to meth. Its price has never been lower, its purity never higher. More people are injecting it with needles, opening up new frontiers in disease transmission and overdose. And in an effort to eke out a profit amid a glut in supply, transnational criminal organizations are cultivating customers in areas that were spared the last meth scourge — many of them places where there is already an infrastructure for heroin.
In the last 12 years, meth has changed, but not disappeared. Since the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act took effect in 2006, over-the-counter sales of the essential cold-medicine ingredients small-time meth cooks relied on dried up, and with them the small-time cooks. But the market abhors a vacuum, and according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, soon afterwards criminal networks in Mexico stepped in.
The cheap, potent meth arriving in the U.S. is manufactured at an industrial scale by cartels, according the Justice Department and DEA’s most recent Drug Threat Assessment. In fact, domestic meth lab seizures are the lowest they’ve been in 16 years. “Most of the methamphetamine available in the United States is produced clandestinely in Mexico and smuggled across the Southwest Border,” the report states. Professional chemists working in “super labs” have abandoned pseudoephedrine as a key ingredient and gone back to the precursor chemicals. Though a 2015 federal action controlling access to those precursor ingredients in Mexico caused their prices to triple, cartel operators have imported them from China or tried to “self-synthesize.”
The effect of all this for users is that the purity of meth in the United States is now consistently above 90 percent. And according to DEA figures, “domestic methamphetamine purchases analyzed from January 2011 through September 2016 indicate the price per pure gram of methamphetamine decreased 41 percent from $98 to $58.”
Nowadays, potent methamphetamine makes it all the way from Sinaloa and Guadalajara to Alaska, arriving almost totally pure.
Meth is not nearly as front-and-center as it was in American culture even a decade ago. Around the time Breaking Bad premiered, ghoulish mug shots were circulated as drug deterrents, and residential lab explosions were a staple of local TV news. Since then, the opioid epidemic has eclipsed meth as the nation’s most prominent drug threat. But according to health and law enforcement officials in places like Alaska, that does not mean meth has gone away. It not only stuck around, they say, but is getting worse. (...)
Meth’s casualties in Alaska are rising, in part because of how it is being used in combination with other drugs. The rate of meth-related overdoses quadrupled in less than a decade. Between 2008 and 2016, the fatality rate went from 1.4 to 5.8 per every 100,000 residents, according to a report by the state’s Division of Public Health. Of the 193 lethal overdoses caused by meth in that period, 54 percent also involved an opioid like heroin.
“Realistically, they’re all trying to help,” he says of the clinicians who dispensed greater and greater quantities of meds. By the time he was 24, Savage was walking out of pharmacies with a shopping bag’s worth of pills, trading them in parking lots with other users.
When it became apparent to the clinics that he was doctor shopping, they cut him off, leaving Savage with a choice: turn to heroin to stave off crippling withdrawal symptoms, or grit his teeth through DIY detox.Instead, he found a middle-ground: methamphetamine. A drug buddy told him that if he stayed awake in a meth-induced mania for a few days, he could crash into two or three days of torpid sleep, bypassing the worst parts of withdrawal. (...)
Alongside epidemic abuse of the grim opioid-heroin-Fentanyl triad, meth use is surging. One crude measure of its prevalence is the number of overdose deaths reported to the Centers for Disease Control: between 2005 and 2015 fatal overdoses involving stimulants shot up almost 300 percent, the vast majority of which were attributable to meth. Its price has never been lower, its purity never higher. More people are injecting it with needles, opening up new frontiers in disease transmission and overdose. And in an effort to eke out a profit amid a glut in supply, transnational criminal organizations are cultivating customers in areas that were spared the last meth scourge — many of them places where there is already an infrastructure for heroin.
In the last 12 years, meth has changed, but not disappeared. Since the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act took effect in 2006, over-the-counter sales of the essential cold-medicine ingredients small-time meth cooks relied on dried up, and with them the small-time cooks. But the market abhors a vacuum, and according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, soon afterwards criminal networks in Mexico stepped in.
The cheap, potent meth arriving in the U.S. is manufactured at an industrial scale by cartels, according the Justice Department and DEA’s most recent Drug Threat Assessment. In fact, domestic meth lab seizures are the lowest they’ve been in 16 years. “Most of the methamphetamine available in the United States is produced clandestinely in Mexico and smuggled across the Southwest Border,” the report states. Professional chemists working in “super labs” have abandoned pseudoephedrine as a key ingredient and gone back to the precursor chemicals. Though a 2015 federal action controlling access to those precursor ingredients in Mexico caused their prices to triple, cartel operators have imported them from China or tried to “self-synthesize.”
The effect of all this for users is that the purity of meth in the United States is now consistently above 90 percent. And according to DEA figures, “domestic methamphetamine purchases analyzed from January 2011 through September 2016 indicate the price per pure gram of methamphetamine decreased 41 percent from $98 to $58.”
Nowadays, potent methamphetamine makes it all the way from Sinaloa and Guadalajara to Alaska, arriving almost totally pure.
Meth is not nearly as front-and-center as it was in American culture even a decade ago. Around the time Breaking Bad premiered, ghoulish mug shots were circulated as drug deterrents, and residential lab explosions were a staple of local TV news. Since then, the opioid epidemic has eclipsed meth as the nation’s most prominent drug threat. But according to health and law enforcement officials in places like Alaska, that does not mean meth has gone away. It not only stuck around, they say, but is getting worse. (...)
Meth’s casualties in Alaska are rising, in part because of how it is being used in combination with other drugs. The rate of meth-related overdoses quadrupled in less than a decade. Between 2008 and 2016, the fatality rate went from 1.4 to 5.8 per every 100,000 residents, according to a report by the state’s Division of Public Health. Of the 193 lethal overdoses caused by meth in that period, 54 percent also involved an opioid like heroin.
Police in Alaska find meth and heroin in many of the same places. They’re both shipped in through the mail system. Tucked into hidden compartments of cars barged up from the Lower 48. Carried in body cavities on commercial flights. Mid-level dealers frequently have both when they are busted. At the street level the two drugs are sold side by side.
“The problem with cocaine is its got a very short high. Meth’s got a much, much longer high that pairs up with heroin a lot more equally,” explains Lieutenant Jack Carson, who oversees much of the drug crime for the Anchorage Police Department.
Alaska is a small but lucrative market for drugs. Though prices for heroin and meth have come down in recent years, the real change in value has occurred primarily at the bulk level.
On the streets of Anchorage, meth sells for around $100 a gram, according to Carson. Though the clear crystalline shards sold today are consistently stronger than the grainy, red-tinged powder that was churned out by local mom-and-pop meth labs a decade ago, the street prices paid are relatively similar.
But ten years ago, a pound of meth that would have cost $26,000 in Alaska now sells for between $11,000 and $8,000. Those savings have not trickled down to low-level sales, in part because there’s relatively little competition on the supply side in this remote market. It is hard getting illegal drugs into Alaska, and this keeps out newcomers who might undersell established distributors.
But for those who can get drugs into Alaska, particularly rural areas, the profits can be enormous.
Though the state’s population of 740,000 is tiny, Alaska has a large appetite for booze and drugs. By the state health department’s own calculations, the rate of alcohol-induced deaths in 2015 was 140 percent above than the national average. Binge drinking is more frequent, too. Illegal drug use is 35 percent higher. The suicide rate is double the national average.
Explanations abound for why all this is.
“The problem with cocaine is its got a very short high. Meth’s got a much, much longer high that pairs up with heroin a lot more equally,” explains Lieutenant Jack Carson, who oversees much of the drug crime for the Anchorage Police Department.
Alaska is a small but lucrative market for drugs. Though prices for heroin and meth have come down in recent years, the real change in value has occurred primarily at the bulk level.
On the streets of Anchorage, meth sells for around $100 a gram, according to Carson. Though the clear crystalline shards sold today are consistently stronger than the grainy, red-tinged powder that was churned out by local mom-and-pop meth labs a decade ago, the street prices paid are relatively similar.
But ten years ago, a pound of meth that would have cost $26,000 in Alaska now sells for between $11,000 and $8,000. Those savings have not trickled down to low-level sales, in part because there’s relatively little competition on the supply side in this remote market. It is hard getting illegal drugs into Alaska, and this keeps out newcomers who might undersell established distributors.
But for those who can get drugs into Alaska, particularly rural areas, the profits can be enormous.
Though the state’s population of 740,000 is tiny, Alaska has a large appetite for booze and drugs. By the state health department’s own calculations, the rate of alcohol-induced deaths in 2015 was 140 percent above than the national average. Binge drinking is more frequent, too. Illegal drug use is 35 percent higher. The suicide rate is double the national average.
Explanations abound for why all this is.
by Zacharia Hughes, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Ash Adams
