Meth Epidemic by Emily Jones

Emily Jones

Ms. Hammett

ENGL 1301.222

2/16/17

Meth Epidemic

            Have you ever imagined what it would be to have your body slowly deteriorate by constantly getting high? No? Of course not, but millions of people a day choose to do this to themselves. Methamphetamine (meth) has contaminated the citizens of the United States in which people have become addicted to the act of getting high off of strange chemicals that in the end causes serious, difficult to treat, damage to their bodies.  Unlike cocaine or heroin, meth can be produced from regular household products such as cold medicine, which makes the drug so easy to manufacture and possess (“Timeline of Meth” 1). Meth has become an epidemic all over the world by creating an erroneous sense of energy and happiness in a high that tends to push one’s body to a point it wasn’t meant to go to. This causes an absurd crash that breakdowns your body and makes you feel worse than you did before taking the drug. Overall, meth deteriorates your body by overtime collapsing your inner organs and causing loss of important parts such as your teeth and your normal brain function ("Watch Truth about Drugs Documentary Video” 1). Is there a way to combat the meth epidemic? First, let’s review the history to understand the drug a little more.

            Meth began with a group of shrubs named ephedra sinica. Ephedra sinica is found in many parts of the world such as China, Pakistan, India, and the Americas. It has been used to treat asthma and can be used in antidepressants and diet pills. Dating back to 1887, Amphetamine was separated from ephedra sinica in Germany and soon after Methamphetamine was produced in Japan in 1919 using iodine and red phosphorus (Scheve 1). Meth became the drug of choice for soldiers in World War II. Soldiers were injected with the drug to keep awake while Japanese Kamikaze pilots were given high doses for suicide missions (Foundation of a Drug-Free World 1). It wasn’t only the military that started using when the Germans made Pervitin, a tablet form of meth, an over-the-counter product where citizens could purchase it whenever necessary to increase concentration and wakefulness. According to Tom Scheve, “When supplies ran low on the war front, soldiers would write to their families requesting shipments of speed. In one four-month period in 1940, the German military was fed more than 35 million speed tablets” (1). However, in the late 1940s Japan began to ban meth at a quicker pace. Military meth stimulants were relabeled as Hiropon and sold to the post-war, hungry, and miserable population. According to Julian Morgans, when Japan finally banned meth in any production in 1951, the country still had “about 550,000 chronic users, with another 2 million former users- around 3.8 percent of the population,” (Morgans 1). 

In the United States, the 1950s changed the way meth was seen and its purpose was used for something completely different. It became prescribed for a diet aid and to fight depression, mostly used by college students, athletes, motorcycle gangs, and truck drivers (“Timeline of Meth” 1).  Meth was called a range of different names to be seen as a diet pill, including Obetrol. Obetrol was a small blue or orange pill that was frequently abused by the well-known Andy Warhol, which caused him to stay awake all night (Bocicault 1). Products similar to Obetrol were slowly phased out going into the 1960s and were completely banned in the US in 1970 by the Controlled Substances Act (Morgans 1). In 1960, injecting methamphetamine was more common, which worsened the abuse since it was simpler and quicker to use than taking the crystal and breaking it down into the powder form. In 1970, the US government made meth illegal which prompted motorcycle gangs to control production and distribution since most users in rural areas couldn’t afford cocaine. The 70s also included the media separating drugs into the good kind and the bad, such as aspirin being good and meth like drugs being evil (Morgans 1). Even though aspirin has just as many chemicals in it as meth, aspirin is still seen to this day as good since it doesn’t affect your body as bad as meth. It is used to take pain away instead of causing you more of a crash after an enlightened mood (1).

According to a previous meth user, “’I finally had just had enough for one day and I was going to jump off the Smith Bridge in Saint Paul. But the police stopped me and brought me to the psych ward.” Extremely powerful and addictive, [meth] can be smoked or injected to give an intense, powerful ‘high’ - which equates to feeling alert and awake - followed by a very severe ‘comedown’, which brings agitation, paranoia and aggression.” (Mccrum 1)

Since the drug was made illegal, it jump started the Mexican drug trafficking organizations in the 1990s since they believed they could make a lot more money than when meth was legal. These laboratories were able to make fifty pounds of meth within three days (“Timeline of Meth” 1). Even today the Mexican cartel is still a big problem when it comes to the production of drugs. According to the History of Methamphetamine, “…smaller private labs have sprung up in kitchens and apartments, earning the drug one of its names, “stove top.””

The process of manufacturing meth has changed over the years.  While there’s the option to use a lab where the process takes two to three hours, cooks have the option to make a small batch in 45 minutes using a oda bottle, cold medicine, a coffee filter, and cleaning supplies. Ingredients includes red phosphorus, found of the head of match sticks and in fireworks, ammonium nitrate, located in cold packs, lithium metal from camera batteries, sodium hydroxide from drain cleaner, water, and pseudoephedrine (Oswald 1). The easier it became to produce meth, the easier it became to sell it also. Morgans stated, “In 1998, 3.9 percent of people age 14 and older admitted to using the drug, whereas by 2013 that number had fallen to 2.1 percent” (Morgans 1).

According to a blogger by the name of Tweakedork on Thought Catelog,

“The next thing I felt was having the chills, the walls were melting and though the walls were painted a plain off white it suddenly had vague patterns of shadows of things I could not make out which floated and moved. The floral pattern on the curtains started to move and float. I pulled the drapes, the sunlight blinded me. I looked at my hairy arms, the hair moved like sea anemone in a light current, my skin looked like it had tiny bugs crawling underneath it, and my palms were so white. I thought I looked pale but was too helpless to look at the mirror to see; besides my perception was so twisted by now it would not have mattered. I was scared. Never have I been this scared before in my entire life.” (Jensen III 1)

People began cracking down on this big problem in the 1990s. Since motorcycle gangs and the cartel used ephedrine to cook their product, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) placed restrictions on the chemical causing the gangs to use pseudoephedrine which is used in most cold medicines. Some large meth producers would smuggle huge quantities of pseudoephedrine into the country, but most cooks could get the chemical from medicines that you could get from the nearby gas station (Hathaway 1). According to the DEA, “the amount of pseudoephedrine legally imported by the drug companies has increased from 544,227 pound in 1990 to 1,512,782 pounds last year, a 178 percent increase. Hundreds of pills are needed to make even a single addicts weekly supply of meth” (1). This increase is most likely explained by the legitimate growth of cold sufferers or the increase of meth labs over the US.

For example, Melanie confessed on a Drug Free World that, “When I gave my three-year-old son some cheese to eat, I did not know that I was giving him poisoned food. I was too stoned on meth to notice it until twelve hours later, that my son was deathly ill. But then I was so stoned it took me two hours to figure out how to get him to the hospital five miles away. By the time I got to the emergency room my boy was pronounced dead of a lethal dose of ‘ammonia hydroxide,’ one of the chemicals used to make meth.” (Watch Truth about Drugs Documentary 1)

Overall, meth is a huge problem in not just the United States but the whole world. People have assumptions of how certain solutions to the problem might fix everything but that isn’t necessarily the case. There are laws to change and ones that can affect people who don’t even use meth. In the end, people are going to do what they want to do no matter what anyone else has to say. People are affected by the drug differently and some people don’t even want help or much less care about the wellness of the people close to them to change their actions. How can we make this country a safer place for the next generation and how can we transform behaviors to become good?

            To find solutions to this drug problem, you have to get people to begin recovering or to find a way to stop the distribution of the product. Recovering from meth is not an easy thing. Even experts on the matter thought getting over the meth addiction was hopeless, since a high percentage would always relapse. Currently with all the mediation and behavior therapy recovery is possible although it may take years (KQED 1).

            As methamphetamine has grown more common as unemployment rises, more people are urgently trying to find solutions to stop people from ruining their lives. In 2006, Congress required products containing pseudoephedrine to be only sold behind the counter, in which daily limits were set on the amount sold to one customer. It also required pharmacists to keep a log of sales. But meth consumers still found their way around this by making purchases in several different stores-this is known as “smurfing.” (Bovett 1) Most states also began requiring an electronic tracking of pseudoephedrine sales which makes it harder for an individual to get a hold of large quantities. Even though this sounds like an effective plan, in Kentucky the electronic tracking law went into effect in 2008 but it ended up having no effect on the number of meth labs in the state. According to Rob Bovett, “only 10 percent of [meth labs] are found by electronic tracking. The number of police incidents involving meth labs has actually increased by more than 40 percent.” (1) This throws off the solution because it proves when it really comes down to it, it’s not really a solution at all.

In most cases, with the tracking law now in effect meth users will hire simple homeless people or even college kids looking for any way to receive money to go store to store purchasing cold medicine. Once the new tracking began, demand for the medicine increased greatly meaning while most cold and flu medicines cost between $7-$8, buyers could flip it and sell it for $40 to $50. Thus inviting even more criminal activity since the product becomes so much more profitable on the black market. According to Grellner, former president of the Missouri Narcotics Officers Association, "Where else can you make a 750 percent profit in 45 minutes?" (Salter 1) This is a scary thought when it comes down to it. The fact that even with a law in effect people will still find their way around it. Especially when the internet has made it so easy and accessible for basically anybody to do anything illegal in a matter of minutes. Unfortunately, even with the electronic tracking, since 2008 meth incidents rose with Arkansas rising 34 percent, 65 percent in Kentucky, and 164 percent in Oklahoma. Even though the system isn’t perfect, it still has a major impact on law enforcers finding meth labs across the United States and without it, it would set the US back by ten years (1).

In some places like Oregon, the Narcotics Enforcement Association restricted cold and allergy medicines with pseudoephedrine, forcing this important meth ingredient completely unavailable without a prescription. Following this, the indicator of production decreased by 96 percent, this proves that this is a smart decision when it comes to diminishing the meth epidemic (Graham 1).  Gowdy, a state legislator, mentioned during an interview , “But I am vexed a little bit that with the success of Oregon and Mississippi the other 48 states haven’t said, ‘There’s the answer.’” The problem is politics are complicated and even if the Oregon law went nationwide, Mexico still remain the largest source of meth (Oregonian 1).

Albert Camus believed people had the right to choose in life, that we had the freedom whether it was considered right or wrong in others’ eyes. According to Camus, individuality, free will and rebellion  were amongst the highest features that mankind has to offer. In his own words he stated, “The only one I know is freedom of thought and action.” (Kershaw 1) Albert Camus would’ve believed the meth epidemic is something of a personal choice. Even with the fact that it is morally wrong, Camus still had the strong belief that it’s someone’s choice to throw their life away with the hard consequences of meth.

Overall, the meth epidemic has evolved over the years, with different drugs sprouting up, it  makes meth an easy accessible drug since it’s known to be the cheapest. People continue to ruin their bodies just for the act of feeling good for a short amount of time. It’s a serious problem that needs a closer look at so we can educate the the future generations. Make more people realize they’re slowly killing themselves just for a drug. Meth makes people do crazy and stupid things and it’s a shame more people can’t realize the harm they’re causing from getting high, to not just themselves but also the loved ones around them. Following using meth, most people are thrown  out on the street or abandoned by family members just because of the addiction. Together we can build a nation free of meth by teaching the other ways to be happy without a chemical fueled killer running through your system.

 

 

 

Work Cited

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Kershaw, Tom. "Albert Camus’ Religion and Political Views." The Hollowverse. N.p., 22 June 2013. Web. 19 Apr. 2017. <http://hollowverse.com/albert-camus/>.         

McCrum, Kirstie. "Former Crystal Meth Addict Shares Astonishing Images after Getting Clean." Mirror. N.p., 29 Dec. 2015. Web. 11 Apr. 2017.

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Oregonian, Charles Pope The. "Oregon's Meth Law Praised as Solution to National Epidemic." OregonLive.com. N.p., 24 July 2012. Web. 19 Apr. 2017. <http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/07/oregons_meth_law_praised_as_so.html>                                      

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