Home Cooked, Ep. 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?

Home Cooked is a five-part audio series on the 50-year history of meth in America. 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 increasing rapidly among non-white populations in big, east-coast cities like New York and Boston. So what changed? And why was meth seen as a hillbilly drug in the first place?

Home Cooked is a production of Rural Remix, a collaboration between the Daily Yonder and Rural Assembly.

Episode 1 Sources

Cleveland Clinic. “Dopamine: What It Is, Function & Symptoms,” March 23, 2022.

Garriott, William. Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America. New York: NYU Press, 2011.

Garriott, William. “Methamphetamine and Precursor Laws in the United States.” In Dual Markets: Comparative Approaches to Regulation, edited by Ernesto U. Savona, Mark A.R. Kleiman, and Francesco Calderoni, 93–103. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017.

Gilbreath, Aaron H. “From Soda Bottles To Super Labs: An Analysis Of North America’s Dual Methamphetamine Production Networks.” Geographical Review 105, no. 4 (October 2015): 511–27.

Gilbreath, Aaron H. “West Coast Booms and East Coast Busts: Methamphetamine Commodity Chains of the 1970s and 1980s.” Historical Geography 42 (January 2014): 260–75.

Gounley, Thomas. “The Man Who Reinvented Meth.” Springfield News-Leader, May 26, 2017.

History. “History of Meth – Crystal, Bust & Timeline,” August 21, 2018.

National Institute on Drug Abuse. “How Is Methamphetamine Different from Other Stimulants, Such as Cocaine?”

Owen, Frank. No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth. 1st ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

Jones, Christopher M., Debra Houry, Beth Han, Grant Baldwin, Alana Vivolo-Kantor, and Wilson M. Compton. “Methamphetamine Use in the United States: Epidemiological Update and Implications for Prevention, Treatment, and Harm Reduction.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1508, no. 1 (2022): 3–22.

Jones, Christopher M., Emily O. Olsen, Julie O’Donnell, and Desiree Mustaquim. “Resurgent Methamphetamine Use at Treatment Admission in the United States, 2008–2017.” American Journal of Public Health 110, no. 4 (April 2020): 509–16.

Murphy, Mary. “3 Times More Meth Seized in NYC than Prior Year.” PIX11, November 17, 2023.

Peterson, Jeffery Chaichana, Aline Gubrium, and Alice Fiddian-Green. “Meth Mouth, White Trash, and the Pseudo-Racialization of Methamphetamine Use in the U.S.” Health Communication 34, no. 10 (2019): 1173–82.

Drug Enforcement Administration. “2020 National Drug Threat Assessment.” March 2021.

Episode 1 Transcript

Stoecker: “I actually know the story starts in a little town called Highland, which is about half an hour out of East St. Louis in Illinois. I’ve gone through a whole lot, there was physical violence in the house, sexual violence in the house, and my dad had gotten custody of me. And I moved to a little bitty town called Highland the summer before seventh grade. And I was walking one night because my dad worked overnights and bumped into some kids and they called me over started talking to him They asked me if I smoked and I said, yeah, sure because I’ve been smoking my grandpa’s cigarette But what they passed around wasn’t a cigarette, but probably the third Third or fourth time I took a hit off of it. I stopped thinking about The trauma so I met up with the kids the next day. They introduced me to alcohol and cocaine and it was the same thing, you know, the more that I used, the less I thought about trauma. And if I found out pretty quickly, if I stayed intoxicated in one form or another, and not only did I not think about past pain, but nobody could hurt me today.” 

Weeks: “David Stoecker moved around a bit more as a kid and kept trying out different drugs. Eventually it caught up to him.”

Stoecker: “And I got into a bunch of trouble and decided to move. I was kind of given an option. I could leave the state if I wanted to, or I could go to juvie. So the summer before my senior year, I moved to Southwest Missouri to get away from drugs.”

Weeks: “David’s laughing because, in hindsight, southwest Missouri in the 1990s seems like an ironic destination for someone trying to get away from addictive substances.”

Stoecker: “And it was kind of a downhill spiral from there. I ended up dropping out of high school. And it was weird, like, I wasn’t one of those people, like I smoked and snorted, but, I didn’t really sell it. I didn’t really mess around that way. And then when I went to prison, but when I paroled out one of the kids was talking to me, he’s like “Where you gonna go?” and I was like, “Honestly, I don’t know where I’m gonna go.” And he said well, my family lives in Springfield. If you want to hook up with them they can probably get you a job. So I ended up paroling out to his family’s house and little did I know, like the first night I got to his family’s house was the first time I ever injected methamphetamine and within a week I was selling it. So prison may help some people, but it made me infinitely more unhealthy.”

Weeks: “David went on to use methamphetamine for almost two decades. He got sober in 2009 and he’s been working in addiction treatment ever since. Today, he’s a recovery counselor and director of the Better Life in Recovery Community Center in Springfield, Missouri. When David started using meth, the drug was common throughout the rural and rural-adjacent midwest. This was the era of homemade speed, when police in places like southwest Missouri and southern Illinois spent most of their time and resources busting kitchen chemists. That’s because small-scale meth production grew rapidly in the last couple decades of the 20th century. In 1981, cops nationwide found 88 clandestine labs. In the year 2001 they found more than 8,000. Those labs were concentrated in out-of-the-way places, creating an everlasting association between meth and the countryside. But today, meth labs are rare again, while meth-related overdose deaths have grown fifty-fold in the past two decades, showing that we have an entirely new set of meth-related problems. Meth is no longer a particularly rural phenomenon, but we haven’t updated our stories about it. So why was meth ever so explosive in small town America?”

Weeks: “I’m Olivia Weeks, a reporter for the Daily Yonder, and this is Home Cooked: A 50 Year History of Meth in America. This five part series tracks meth’s trajectory from a chemical moonshine to an endemic drug problem, and sheds light on a crisis that remained quietly dominant in much of the rural U.S., even during the height of the prescription opioid epidemic.

Mainstream narratives seem to have registered both the home production era and the current synthetic drug crisis, but there’s a big hole in our national story when it comes to what happened in between, in the years from roughly 2005 to 2018. Today, we’re laying the groundwork for that story, beginning with the 1990s and early aughts – the era when widespread small-scale meth production first took off. In the second half of this episode, you’ll hear more about the present-day meth crisis, which began to take shape around 2018. A solid understanding of both of those periods will help us begin to answer one of the questions at the heart of this series – how’d we get from home cooks in Missouri to trained chemists in Mexico?”

Replogle: “Mom and Pop method came into Missouri and it spread like wildfire.”

Weeks: “Ron Replogle is a retired Missouri State Trooper. He directed the Highway Patrol’s Division of Drug and Crime Control from 2001 to 2006. A major responsibility of that division was tracking down and cleaning up so-called “mom and pop” meth labs throughout the state, which could be set up in kitchens, forests, and cars.”

Replogle: “It created a lot of issues because you had fires, explosions, you had different chemicals that were used and stolen, that began to proliferate, if you will, the problem in Missouri, and it became fairly easy to find those labs, once we figured out how they were cooking and what they were doing. That probably started in the early 90s, late 80s and 90s. And then really exploded into the mid 90s.”

Weeks: “By the early 2000s, the faces of meth users were posted all over high school hallways and meth lab explosions were a regular feature of the local news.”

Newscast: “Just feet from flames, a group of people rushing to get back after this Nutbush area home explodes. They believe people were cooking meth at the house. Something got out of hand, sparking flames.”

Newscast: “Pasco County deputies are investigating what they say was a meth lab explosion.”

Newscast: “So David Carrillo said he ran out of his house to check on his next door neighbors. He said what he saw left him uneasy and terribly shaken.”

Parillo: “They were on the ground kind of smoking and shaking and just trying to get the fire off of them, or whatever. But they were actually, looked like they were melting.”

Weeks: “As those home labs gained attention, methamphetamine got a reputation as the hillbilly’s cocaine. When it comes to the accuracy of that reputation, expert opinions were mixed. But everybody I talked to said there was validity in meth’s rural association. So why was that the case? One factor has to do with certain kinds of labor common in rural areas.”

Gariott: “So for instance, one of the main reasons that people start using meth in many instances is to work more. So there’s this kind of positive association with work in a culture where hard work, there’s a high value put on that.”

Weeks: “That was Will Garriott, an anthropologist who teaches at Drake University and wrote a 2011 book called Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America. You’ll hear his voice throughout this series, alongside more academics, law enforcement officers, and people who’ve used meth.”

Garriott: “For a lot of folks, the way that the economy has changed in their communities, they have to work more and harder to achieve the same level of financial stability that they might have had 30 years earlier, or 40 years earlier under different economic circumstances.”

Weeks: “So wait, you’re saying meth is tied to the rural economy because stimulants help you work long hours?”

Garriott: “it’s a way to work more, to work longer, sometimes it’s, it’s even a way to make really difficult jobs feel less difficult. The area that I did my research in poultry production area, a lot of people working pretty hard, unpleasant jobs, in the poultry industry, and a lot of people were using meth in that context, as a way to do more work at those jobs, but to also make that work a little more tolerable.” 

Weeks: “So that’s part of why using meth was so popular in rural areas. Garriott also has an explanation for why its production so often happened in wide open spaces. He says that one of the key ingredients in bootleg meth is anhydrous ammonia, a chemical that, first of all, used to be available for purchase at farm supply stores, or for theft from local farmers, and, second of all, gives off a rancid smell kind of like cat pee, making the vast expanses of the countryside a particularly desirable laboratory setting.”

Garriott: “Just the fact that there’s space to kind of hide what you’re doing. That was really important for those early cooks of the mid 2000s.”

Weeks: “One of the other people we’ll hear from a lot is Aaron Gilbreath – a statistical consultant at Bowdoin College with a PhD in Geography. He wrote his dissertation on the spatialization of methamphetamine production, and he and Garriott presented similar narratives about the past several decades of change in American meth markets. To the case for thinking of meth as a rural problem, Gilbreath added that meth was seen as distinct from urban drug problems because it had a disproportionately white user base. Obviously that idea relies on the overly simplistic notion that rural places are white and urban places are Black, but people thought about it that way.”

Gilbreath: “It was predominantly used by whites at that point. A lot of people think that’s because when it was controlled by biker gangs, you know, biker gangs have swastikas and shit on their, on their vests. And so a Black person is not going to approach a neo Nazi to buy drugs from them.”

Weeks: “So, biker gangs are at least partially responsible for meth’s reputation as a white drug. They’re also partially responsible for the emergence of really different meth markets in different parts of the country.” 

Gilbreath: “So here’s what happens. So, one thing about that production is that you also have people in gangs or people who are mobile. In a pre-internet world, you start to get the spread of these recipes based upon who has cultural connections, right? So the Midwest has some cultural connections with the West Coast since the dustbowl, really, right? And so there are a lot of people who will travel back and forth. And so recipes are often spread and anecdotally, you hear they’re spread by bikers. So the boom in Midwestern, like Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, methamphetamine production is largely attributed to a biker who comes over from California with this new recipe, and it’s really making high grade methamphetamine and it kind of explodes that, but again, this is all anecdotal, right? We don’t have a perfect record of this. It’s like people interviewing people and speaking thirdhand.”

Weeks: “There are a ton of these tales on the internet. There’s one in particular I’ve come across a lot, the story of Bob Paillet, a man sometimes called “the Johnny Appleseed of meth.” Regional papers credit him for bringing meth to Missouri sometime in the late 80s or early 90s. According to a Springfield paper, Paillet was something of a chemistry prodigy, and he taught his new and improved cooking method to friends. They taught it to their friends, and on and on from there. Gilbreath says these stories are a bit fantastical. While it’s true that individuals were often responsible for the spread of meth recipes in their hometowns, they were all a part of much bigger trends. So that’s what’s going on in the midwest in the early 90s. Tons of little labs are springing up all over the place, driving cops crazy. In the western U.S., where the bikers got the recipe from in the first place, it was a totally different story. Over there, meth production looked a lot more like Breaking Bad. According to Gilbreath, western markets were controlled by Mexican drug trafficking organizations, which have existed in some form or another since World War I. They ran a notably tighter ship than kitchen chemists.” 

Gilbreath: “So these drug trafficking organizations already exist. There’s a large variety of them, but they’re highly organized, and they understand the profit margins of drug production and distribution. And so when it becomes difficult for American producers to get ephedrine, these Mexican drug trafficking organizations step in to kind of fill the void and start producing methamphetamine. And initially, they produced it on the west coast in super labs that are producing like 100 pounds of meth or more at a pop.”

Weeks: “But even this more organized, west coast meth production regime wasn’t divorced from perceptions of rural America.”

Gilbreath: “So the rural association is that idea that labs are like the new, the new still, you know, the new, like moonshine in the woods. So there’s some of that. There’s also just historic association with rural people, you know, the classic tropes of like rural people that are rednecks, and so they’re going to do what, in the early 80s in San Diego, they started calling redneck cocaine. Right, so they start vilifying the drug, they start vilifying the users. And then what you have is you have some classic stereotypes that are being combined with the prestige grading of drugs, and you get them married together, whether it’s true or not. So all of a sudden, Methamphetamine is considered a white rural drug, even though it’s largely used in urban areas in you know, California, which is our most progressive state.”

Weeks: “So there is some real historical basis behind the association between meth and rural areas. But like most popular ideas about rural America, or about drug users for that matter, the idea of meth as a rural drug was often exaggerated. So, according to Gilbreath, a lot of the association with white rural populations was generated and exaggerated by pop culture. Shows like Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock depicted meth use in some pretty stigmatizing ways. And it wasn’t an accident that those spoofs always included southern accents.”

[SNL clip]

Southern woman: “How you doing today, JJ? 

JJ: “I rule this town, I rule!”

Southern woman: “That is true, because until recently, JJ was the mayor. Okay, JJ, now tell us what you’ve got here. It all smells so good.

JJ: “Well I took some perc plus, mixed it with some sudafed, sprayed it through this adult diaper, and it comes out as a paste.”

Southern woman: “When’s it gonna be ready?”

JJ: “Approximately 48 hours.”

Southern woman: “I’ll wait! Okay I’m gonna wait right here”

[30 Rock clip]

“We don’t have a stereo anymore on account of our mayor, who’s a meth addict, took it apart in a field.”

“I’m gonna take the clock apart and put it back together. I want to see how it works! My friend JoJo did it with a toaster, and it’s still good.”

[SNL clip]

“Everybody welcome back to Good Morning Meth, the only talk show dedicated to crystal meth lifestyle. Used to be a morning show, then it turned into a morning and afternoon show, then it turned into a morning, afternoon, and evening show. Now we just leave the cameras on all the time because we don’t sleep, y’all.”

Weeks: Garriott, too, says that in some ways, the idea of meth became more powerful than the reality. 

Garriott: “Methamphetamine plus opioids has completely transformed the way we think about rural America. It’s transformed the way people living in rural America think about themselves. And it’s transformed the way that people throughout the United States think about where our biggest drug and crime problems are located.”

Garriott: “So both meth and opioids, are thought of as uniquely rural drug problems, and more specifically, uniquely rural white drug problems. Within that we have the more sympathetic opioid user who’s often presented as someone who started using through no fault of their own, maybe they were prescribed a drug as they were recovering from an injury. They started out as a regular user, but because of the power of the drugs and what we know now about the aggressive marketing that was done by the manufacturer of the drug, they become addicted to the substances. That is contrasted with the very unsympathetic meth user who typically doesn’t, isn’t understood to get involved with meth use for the same innocent reasons. And more pointedly, meth use is often depicted as a lower class or even ‘white trash,’ and I’m using scare quotes with that substance and So what you end up with are two drugs that really capture the two poles of how people think about rural white communities in the United States. So, on the one hand, we have this kind of salt of the earth depiction, versus a kind of white trash depiction. We’ve used the language of ‘deaths of despair’ to talk about opioids. But we haven’t used that same language to talk about methamphetamine use, even though we have lots of evidence that people are using methamphetamine as a result of challenging circumstances.”

Garriott: “What made it even more interesting is that the methamphetamine problem was being presented in a way that was very different from the drug problems of the past. So if you think about the 20th century, you think about something like crack. It is racialized and spatialized as an urban drug, used primarily by people of color. That is a kind of stereotypical understanding that a lot of people bring to their thinking around drug issues in the United States. Here we are, then in the first decade of the 21st century, and we have a very different racialization and spatialization, of this new drug of concern methamphetamine. So this was seen as a drug that was having a particular impact in rural communities and predominantly white communities.”

Weeks: So, it’s clear that some really specific material realities tied meth to the countryside, but it’s also clear that the emergence of the home meth lab struck a chord with Americans on a deeper and less logical level. This series is gonna tackle those loftier questions, about why meth had such a weird, huge cultural impact. 

Weeks: But before we get there, I think it’s important to understand what the chemical methamphetamine is, and – to some extent – how clandestine cooks make it. Not because I think you should give it a try. In fact, please don’t do that. Just because that process is really important to the story. While drugs like marijuana and cocaine require large amounts of land and have to be grown on a schedule determined by nature, synthetic drugs offer flexibility. The production of methamphetamine is not dependent on any organic crop, so if you have the right ingredients, it can be carried out in any place at any time. We’re gonna discuss early meth supply chains in more detail in episode 2, but for now you should know that meth was available as an over the counter medication throughout the 1950s. 

Weeks: In the 60s, some restrictions were put into place by the government, and, in order to satisfy unmet demand, illicit producers in San Francisco figured out how to make the drug in at-home labs. By the 1980s, almost all the meth up for purchase illegally was manufactured by home cooks, as opposed to being made by pharmaceutical companies and then resold on the streets. Throughout their history, meth labs range widely in scale and sophistication. As Gilbreath told me, some recipes require advanced equipment and a team of cooks, while others can be carried out by one guy in a garage. The recipes used by those first labs in San Francisco and today’s large-scale labs in Mexico relied on an industrial chemical called phenyl-2-propanone, or P2P. In 1980 the American federal government regulated P2P and made it a lot harder to get a hold of. In the wake of that regulation, new, easier ways of cooking meth got popular. 

Weeks: These newer methods used the common over-the-counter decongestant pseudoephedrine, commonly known as Sudafed, or its stronger cousin ephedrine. Chemically, ephedrine and methamphetamine are really similar – the latter just lacks one oxygen molecule. There are a couple of different ways to turn one into the other, both of which require a combination of restricted chemicals and common household products. One method you’ll hear about quite a bit is called “Red P” because it used red phosphorus. 

Another recipe is called the Birch Reduction method – after the Australian scientist who discovered it, Arthur Birch. Some people also call this the Nazi method, though there’s little consensus on where that name came from. The Nazis famously employed methamphetamine to maintain morale in World War 2, but they didn’t actually use the Birch method to make it. One origin story for the Nazi moniker centers on the aforementioned Johnny Appleseed of Missouri Meth, Bob Paillet – some accounts claim that Paillet discovered ephedrine-based production in the library of Missouri State University, on a textbook page that had a swastika stamp. The evidence doesn’t really favor that story, but it’s one that still circulates. Here’s how Garriott describes the routine of a small scale cook using one of these recipes:

Garriott: “That person will have gotten a recipe from the internet or from a friend. They would have gathered together some key ingredients from local stores, or maybe even stolen it from local farmers. It includes substances like cough medicine, or any other medicine that contains ephedrine or pseudoephedrine. It might be anhydrous ammonia that they’ve taken from a farm, and then a bunch of other chemicals that you would find in batteries or in oven cleaner, normal domestic products that are easy to buy and locate at the time. nAnd you would combine them following your recipe, you’d probably be using a few five gallon plastic buckets, you would be using some plastic tubing, maybe you’d be cooking it on the stove in your house.” 

Weeks: Once those small-scale processes became a real problem for law enforcement, federal and state governments started to limit access to the chemicals you need to make meth. The U.S. continued to regulate the precursor chemicals used in these meth recipes all throughout the second half of the 20th century. Consequently, as supply got smaller and smaller, more and more people took extreme measures and learned how to produce the drug.

Garriott: “When we think of small scale, I think we are talking about everything, from eventually people were making it in like small plastic, like Gatorade, Coke bottles, up to a few five gallon buckets.”

Garriott: “And things have continued to evolve and change, as there’s this back and forth between regulatory intervention and, I’ll just say, meth market innovation. We are now at a point where most of the meth that is consumed in the United States is actually produced outside of the United States. So it’s imported, like cocaine, like heroin. And interestingly, that is the result of successful regulatory intervention.” 

Weeks: “Mhm. Right. And so, I know you’re not going to be able to put exact numbers on this, but how much of that commercial-grade manufactured meth was around in the early 2000s and how much of it was this more stereotypical five-gallon-bucket type of operation?”

Garriott: “So both were in circulation at the time and I think that if you were to look at the numbers, you would see that there was more meth being produced outside the United States than you would think, based on the amount of attention that the domestic meth production was getting. So the domestic meth production was really a focus. But there was plenty of meth being made outside the United States at the time as well. And so I think that’s important to keep in mind, because it’s not that people were just making their own meth, and then now they don’t anymore. There were always both sources. It’s just now the crackdown on on people making their own meth has been successful enough that large scale producers outside the United States have mostly taken over the market.”

Weeks: But in recent years, meth has been making the news in new 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 the stimulant’s increasing combination with fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. While the chemical effects of fentanyl and methamphetamine are nearly opposite one another, their supply chains and user bases have effectively merged. Meth use is on the rise in east coast cities where, historically, the drug was always unpopular. 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. Captain Chris Jones works for the federal government as Director of the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, where he conducts research on methamphetamine use in the U.S. For that research, he interviewed people running syringe exchange programs throughout the country. 

Capt. Jones: “One of the things that those folks said to me is that it was different than it had been in the past, as far as the populations who were using methamphetamine. And what folks said is that prior to the mid 2000s, you typically had sort of homegrown methamphetamine in the US. People buying pseudoephedrine or phenylpropanolamine from pharmacies and making it in small laboratories in the US. And there was sort of a certain population of people, largely rural population that were using methamphetamine, but often the people who were using opioids were like a totally separate population. And what they were reflecting to me is that in more recent years, they had seen that really the populations were similar. People who had been using opioids for a long time were starting to use methamphetamine.”

Weeks: The transition to foreign produced meth made using the drug more dangerous. Because production has been so professionalized, meth, which is dangerous in its own right, is much more cheaply and widely available in the U.S than in previous decades. And because meth and fentanyl are now distributed along the same supply chains, it’s increasingly common for meth users to consume lethal amounts of fentanyl by accident. 

Capt. Jones: “We also saw in the treatment data in particular a shift away from smoking to injecting. And that injecting methamphetamine really accounted for much of the increase in treatment admissions. In the community data we saw something similar where more risky patterns of methamphetamine use were more common in recent years as the trends were increasing. So that was either people with a methamphetamine use disorder or people who reported injecting methamphetamine. A couple of things to note about that is that the methamphetamine that’s coming in is of historically high purity, potency and relatively cheap. And we really see that it’s trafficked into all of the United States. And one of the things we saw in the treatment data is that in the northeast, where historically you had more of a cocaine based market, we saw large relative increases in treatment admissions where people were reporting methamphetamine use. And again, that was consistent with DEA data showing that over that same time period, there was this influx of methamphetamine into the northeast, but we saw increases really everywhere. But that was particularly notable in making the connection between the changing illicit drug market and substance use patterns that were changing.”

Weeks: You’ll hear more in episode 2 about how east coast cities avoided major meth problems until recently. For now, know that this change has been really dramatic – New York City police confiscated three times as much meth in 2023 as they did in the year before. 

Capt. Jones: “So really across the spectrum we were seeing that methamphetamine use was increasing. And what we also saw is that in many cases, that increase was happening among people who were using opioids, or the co-use of methamphetamine and opioids was increasing. One of the other pieces that we found is that it didn’t appear to be limited to a particular demographic group, that both in the community data and in the treatment data, we saw that males and females, most age groups, race ethnicity groups, most geographic areas like census region, we saw increases in methamphetamine use. Again, often tied with co-use of opioids. We have also seen an increase in deaths, overdose deaths involving psycho psychostimulants, primarily methamphetamine. So we are getting a pretty consistent pattern across very different data sources that there has been this increase changing patterns of substance use, co-use of opioids and stimulants that are resulting in harms across a much broader demographic group and geographic group than we’ve seen in years past.”

Weeks: “Talking with Captain Jones about the dangers of present-day meth use made me wonder what exactly a meth high feels like. What is it exactly that people are willing to take such big risks for? It feels like a naive question, because we all know addiction is more complicated than doing something because it feels good. But still, I was wondering – what is using meth like at its best? I asked David Stoecker, the guy who was telling us about his teenage misadventures with meth at the beginning of the episode.”

Stoecker: “Just… nonstop energy and confidence, and I mean it’s one of the best feelings I’ve ever had in my life. You know I talk to people about that. That’s part of the problem when somebody stops using, like, I’ve seen both my kids born, I’ve jumped out of a perfectly good airplane before, you know, I’ve done all kinds of things to try to chase that and I know that I will never feel that feeling again. Because I’ll never use again.”

Stoecker: “So to me, it’s just…I remember them showing like a piece of chocolate cake is like a 20 when it comes to releasing dopamine and cocaine is like 100. And oh, or I think an orgasm was 50. Cocaine was like 100. And then meth is like a 1400. I mean, it releases so much dopamine, it destroys dopamine receptors in the brain because your brain isn’t prepared to handle that much dopamine at one time. I mean, it’s just this huge euphoric feeling. And there’s nothing else like it. I mean, I’ve used a lot of other drugs, too, and there is nothing like it.”

Stoecker: “I don’t ever want to glamorize it, and sometimes it’s hard to talk about it and not glamorize it. You know, I tell people like I love drugs, I love the way drugs make me feel, but I hate the person that turned me into over time. And that’s why I don’t ever want to go back. But man, I love that feeling. I love being able to go for days at a time. I love not sleeping, because there’s somebody who’s doing something I could be doing or thinking of something I could be thinking of while I’m asleep, if they’re not.”

Weeks: “As David alludes to here, meth and cocaine are both stimulants, but they act pretty differently in the brain. Both drugs increase levels of dopamine – sometimes called the “feel good” hormone – by blocking its metabolization. Meth, however, also increases the release of dopamine. So they both keep whatever amount of dopamine your brain is producing around longer than usual, but meth also increases the amount. I think most people have a sense that cocaine and meth are similar, but one is stronger than the other. What I think is less common knowledge, though, is how prescription ADHD medications like adderall work in basically the same way as meth. Here’s Captain Jones from the CDC again.”

Capt. Jones: “Methamphetamine is actually an FDA approved chemical for the treatment of ADHD. It’s just not prescribed very often, but it does have a medical indication. And so it works very similarly to things like Adderall. I think the primary difference is that methamphetamine tends to have a longer half-life in the body. It tends to hang around a bit longer and has a little bit more potency, but pharmacologically, they’re essentially doing similar things in the brain. I mean, obviously the effects vary by how much someone is using. So a therapeutic dose for ADHD is going to produce effects differently than an illicitly produced product that’s used at a high dose. But fundamentally, if you gave the same equivalent doses of amphetamine, Adderall and methamphetamine, you get a similar physiologic response.”

Weeks: “So most of the difference between meth and adderall is extremely social and contextual. I’m from a town in southern Illinois where problems like theft and homelessness are regularly blamed on methamphetamine. I’ve long been skeptical of the tendency to blame the drug for all visible forms of rural decline, and fascinated by its politics. I’m also a recent Harvard graduate who often looked around at my classmates and wondered if they understood that the drugs they were using to pull an all-nighter or better enjoy a dull party had such similar effects to meth. Of course, Adderall comes in a controlled form from a pharmacy, where you know exactly how much you’re getting and you’re recommended a specific dose to help you focus. Meth, on the other hand, is usually purchased illegally, so it’s likely to be adulterated, and its potency is almost always unknown to its user. But the chemical similarities between meth and other stimulants haven’t stopped us from stigmatizing meth users, despite the fact that, like adderall, meth has always been used vocationally, not just recreationally.”

Weeks: But it’s not just that adderall and meth have been socially constructed in different ways. Meth itself has been used in many different contexts over time, producing vastly different outcomes and dangers from one era to the next. One of the most present risks of methamphetamine use today is fentanyl-related overdose. In the year 2000, that risk was unheard of. You were more likely to have your eyebrows taken off by a lab explosion. But despite the meth supply chain’s total transformation over the past two decades, the drug still carries outdated cultural baggage. In the rest of this series, we’re gonna follow meth’s transition from an over-the-counter drug, to a code word for “white trash,” and, finally, to a ubiquitous and dangerous presence in all of America’s drug markets, rural and urban.

Weeks: “You’ve heard me mention biker gangs a few times – next on Home Cooked, you’ll hear the unlikely story of how groups like the Hell’s Angels shaped the geography of meth production in the last decades of the 20th century. Home Cooked: A 50 year History of Meth in America is a production of Rural Remix. Original music was composed by Quincy Ponvert and Leo Posel. This series was written and produced by Olivia Weeks and edited by Susannah Broun. Assistant producers are Anya Slepyan and Bea Portela. The Executive Producer is Joel Cohen. Thank you to the staff of the Daily Yonder and the Rural Assembly.”

Broun: You’ve been listening to Rural Remix.