Introducing: Home Cooked
In 2003, law enforcement discovered 23,000 meth labs within the United States. By 2017 that number had plummeted to 3,000, but more meth than ever before was pouring in across the southwest border. In the years between, people who use meth stopped making the drug in soda bottles and started buying cheaper, purer doses imported from Mexico.
“Meth making a comeback, but it’s not your neighbors cooking it anymore,” reads a 2017 headline from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. According to this story and a wave of others like it, since the mid-2010s, cheap, high-purity meth has dominated American drug markets. Much has been made of the difference between this meth and the “bathtub crank” once produced in haphazard home laboratories. One doctor told the New York Times, “It’s like [meth users] were drinking Mountain Dew and now they are injecting Red Bull.” Today, meth-related overdoses have skyrocketed, while “mom and pop” labs have all but disappeared.
But what brought about that shift? And why was meth seen as a backwoods drug in the first place? To answer these questions, the Daily Yonder team has created a five-part podcast series about the global methamphetamine economy that exists today, and its explosive origins in Small Town, USA. Home Cooked sheds light on a drug crisis that remained quietly dominant in much of the rural U.S., even during the height of the prescription opioid epidemic.
The current methamphetamine crisis claims many more users than did the home-lab era, and intersects with the spread of synthetic opioids in new and lethal ways. The DEA says it seized more than 115,000 pounds of meth in the year 2020, a 55 percent increase from 2018. And between 1999 and 2021, meth-related overdose deaths increased 50-fold, in part due to its increasing combination with fentanyl and fentanyl analogs.
While the chemical effects of fentanyl and methamphetamine are nearly opposite one another, their supply chains and user bases have largely merged. Growing numbers of people who use drugs report addiction to meth and fentanyl. And, as described by treatment court officials in Missouri – once the “kitchen chemistry capital” of the nation – “there are no pure substances on the street anymore.”
To understand how we got here, I’ve interviewed harm reductionists from all over the country (many of whom were once meth users), police officers active in the home-lab surge, and academics studying the origins and effects of growing synthetic drug use. Meth’s 21st-century makeover is a present and deadly crisis, but it’s also a case study in the decimation of rural public services, the failures of the War on Drugs, and the challenges of governing a global economy. Its story is urgent and misunderstood.
Listen to Home Cooked here, on the Rural Remix podcast feed.
~Olivia Weeks, Host and Producer
Episodes
Episode 1: Old Meth, New Meth
In the early 2000s, the “Faces of Meth” were tacked to cork boards in high school hallways and the nightly news was full of meth lab explosions. In this period, the stimulant was stigmatized as a white trash drug, and thought to favor rural trailer parks and farmhouses over inner-city drug dens. Today, however, meth use is growing fastest among non-white populations and rapidly infiltrating big, east-coast cities like New York and Boston. What changed? And why was meth seen as a hillbilly drug in the first place? Learn more about this episode.
Episode 2: Made in the U.S.A.
In the 1950s, meth was available over the counter. In the 1960s, it was still unscheduled by the FDA and widely prescribed by doctors. All kinds of people – among them housewives, truckers, and college students – used the stimulant to induce weight loss, wakefulness, and high spirits. But in 1971 meth was reclassified as one of the nation’s most dangerous drugs and its legal production quickly fell by 90 percent. Demand, on the other hand, persisted, and outlaw biker gangs stepped into the supply vacuum. How’d biker gangs come to dominate the meth trade in the 80s? And why did they eventually lose control of it? Learn more about this episode.
Episode 3: Lab School
In 1999, the state of Missouri destroyed more than 900 clandestine meth labs. Among the officers tasked with carrying out that constant cleanup process, fear reigned. In response, the state trained an astronomical amount of resources on understanding the problem. A slew of state and federal laws were passed to limit access to meth’s precursor chemicals. But meth cooks got scrappy, replacing older recipes with new, soda-bottle scale techniques. What was it like to police meth in this era? What was it like to use it? Learn more about this episode.
Episode 4: The Transition
As the U.S. found ways to successfully limit domestic production of methamphetamine, Mexican drug traffickers innovated new, high-volume production methods. Meth became very potent and very cheap, and began to infiltrate new American drug markets. What does this new system mean for the illicit drug supply? How does it affect people using and policing meth in the U.S.?
Home Cooked, Ep. 5: Meth Today
In the series’s fifth and final episode, the narrative links back up with the present. Synthetic drugs like meth and heroin are being seized in their highest quantities to-date, and deadly overdose rates have reached new heights. What can be done? And what can the newfound popularity of harm reduction offer the debate?
The Team
Olivia Weeks
Host and Producer
Olivia Weeks is a reporter for the Daily Yonder. She graduated from Harvard in 2023. This podcast is inspired by her prior reporting and academic writing on the synthetics crisis, which draws on extensive primary and secondary source research, including more than 40 interviews with criminal justice system officials, public health researchers, and people who use drugs. At the Daily Yonder, she writes a weekly interview newsletter Path Finders. Before that, she was a Reporting Fellow at the Provincetown Independent, where she hosted and produced the “Indie News Hour” on WOMR 92.1 FM. A native of southern Illinois coal country whose early life was profoundly affected by the opioid epidemic, her interest in the synthetics crisis is moral, personal, and intellectual — in that order.
Susannah Broun
Editor and Producer
Susannah Broun is a multimedia producer for the Center for Rural Strategies. She is from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and is currently based in Washington, DC. Before her time with Rural Strategies, Susannah worked in podcasting and video production at NPR, WHYY, and City Cast. She graduated from Swarthmore College in 2022 with a degree in History along with Film & Media Studies and Environmental Studies. You can hear her voice on another Rural Remix show, The Rural Horror Picture Show.
Joel Cohen
Executive Producer
Joel is the Multimedia Director for the Center for Rural Strategies. He has worked with CRS since its beginning creating video and audio pieces. The work has included documentaries about the recovery of rural areas from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, to a “A Place in the Country” a doc that looks at community development organizations in rural areas across the country. Recently, the half-hour documentary “East Kentucky Flood” ran on KET and WYMT in Kentucky. He and his team are responsible for the weekly “Yonder Report,” a weekly 3-minute newscast delivered to radio stations nationally. He has 5 Emmys from his work in Chicago television from 1988-2015.
Anya Petrone Slepyan
Assistant Producer
Anya Petrone Slepyan is a staff reporter and multimedia producer with the Daily Yonder. She grew up in Lexington, Kentucky and studied history at Swarthmore College. Anya reports primarily on rural prisons, environmental issues, and popular culture.
Bea Portela
Assistant Producer
Bea Portela is a mulitmedia fellow with the Daily Yonder. She is a recent graduate of Yale University with a degree in Environmental Studies and certificate in Education Studies. Before graduating, she provided legal services to farmworkers in the South and worked on political and energy transition campaigns. She is passionate about environmental storytelling and documentary filmmaking.
Will Wright
Press Contact
Home Cooked is available for free for interested radio outlets and podcasters. If you would like to publish this series or wish to schedule interviews with the team, contact Will Wright at will@ruralstrategies.org.
Related Coverage
‘Home Cooked’ – You Haven’t Heard Much About Meth Lately. That’s Not Because It’s No Longer a Problem.
The Daily Yonder’s five-part podcast on methamphetamine in America is a much-needed revision of our out-of-date ideas about who makes, uses, and dies from meth. Reporter Olivia Weeks is your guide.
By Tim Marema, The Daily Yonder
Q&A: Is Meth Really a Rural Problem?
An interview with Anthropologist William Garriott on hillbilly stereotypes and the truth about urban and suburban methamphetamine use.