Home Cooked, Ep. 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?

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 2 Sources

Anglin, M. Douglas, Cynthia Burke, Brian Perrochet, Ewa Stamper, and Samia Dawud-Noursi. “History of the Methamphetamine Problem.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 32, no. 2 (June 2000): 137–41.

Bertram, Eva, Morris Blachman, Kenneth Sharpe, and Peter Andreas. Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

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.

Graham, James M. “Amphetamine Politics on Capitol Hill.” Society 9, no. 3 (1972): 14–22.

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

Quinones, Sam. The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2021.

Quinones, Sam. “‘I Don’t Know That I Would Even Call It Meth Anymore.’” The Atlantic, October 18, 2021.

Episode 2 Transcript

Olivia Weeks: Where would you begin the story of methamphetamine in the United States?

Aaron Gilbreath: Well, I would start it in the 1930s. It starts with amphetamines more broadly. But in the 1930s, Smith, Kline, and French starts testing various amphetamine products. They’re initially are hopeful that it will be a something for asthma and allergies and allergy medication. They begin testing it and they find that it’s a strong stimulant and almost immediately it’s being abused. They start tests on college campuses in 1937 and there are articles in 1937 about kids at the University of Minnesota going in to check themselves in because they’ve taken too much of the pep pills that they were given as part of this test, and they’re kind of freaking out. So abuse of amphetamine starts immediately. Immediately! And yet they get approved and they become very popular. They’re initially approved for only a few uses, so they’re approved for they’re approved for narcolepsy, attention deficit disorder in children, I think, but they get prescribed for things like depression, kind of ennui. You know, oh, you’re down, you’re not satisfied with your life, maybe you’d like some amphetamines to pep up your day. 

Weeks: Right, that’s the housewife story, right?

Gilbreath: Exactly. Harry the Hipster Gibson had a song called “Who Put the Benzadrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine,” which was the Smith, Kline, and French brand of amphetamines. And they’re inhalers, they’re everywhere.

Harry the Hipster Gibson: [singing] “Who put the Benzadrine in Mrs. Murphy’s ovaltine? Sure’s a shame don’t know who’s to blame, ‘cause the old lady didn’t even get his name. Where did she get that?”

Weeks: I’m Olivia Weeks and I’m a reporter for the Daily Yonder. This is Home Cooked: A Fifty Year History of Meth in America. This episode is called Made In the U.S.A., because we’re covering the origins of illicit meth production in the U.S. The other voice you just heard was Aaron Gilbreath, a geographer who studies methamphetamine. We heard from him a bit in episode 1, but this episode is really going to be driven by our conversation. Gilbreath’s dissertation was about the strange geography of illicit methamphetamine use and production that developed in the last couple decades of the twentieth century. In 2002, instances of domestic meth labs were near their peak – law enforcement found and destroyed more than 10,000 illicit production setups in that year alone, but nearly 80 percent of them were found west of the Mississippi river. Meth was largely absent from east-coast drug markets. So Gilbreath wondered: if legal amphetamines including meth were once popular nationwide, why would an illicit supply chain only develop in the west? To answer this question, we need to go back to 1971, the moment when amphetamines are classified as controlled substances by the FDA. At that point, legal production fell off, and criminal groups began to dominate amphetamine markets. 

Before we get there I want you to hear another part of our discussion, about the period of time in American life when methamphetamine was one of many stimulants that were legal, popular, and widely available. It was sold over-the-counter as a decongestant, in dosages much smaller than the average illicit meth user would be interested in today. As I mentioned a second ago, abuse of amphetamines – and the harms that came with it – showed up immediately. But Gilbreath says that, for a while, the American public was much more focused on the drugs’ benefits.

Gilbreath: When the drugs first appear, largely it’s marketing, but they’re heralded as like a wonder drug. In all sorts of articles are talking about how amphetamines and methamphetamine can help people keep up with the increasing stress and work demands of the 20th century. And it’s initially, you see a lot of abuse in blue collar professions, but that’s just because people like to target blue collar workers, but everywhere it’s talked about how you’ve got to just kind of keep up in the go-go 20th century.

Weeks: Yeah. So, We started in the 1930s with this legal use and that continues for several decades as I understand it.

Gilbreath: Yeah, decades, yes. The real watershed moment for amphetamine abuse is World War II, because it is in the medical kits of every side of the war. The US troops have amphetamines, the Brits have amphetamines, the German Blitzkrieg is run on methamphetamine, Japan’s forces all are given methamphetamine. Japan has the first methamphetamine abuse outbreak in which they have to just shut it down and then they end up being the first country to really have clandestine methamphetamine labs. The Germans had to remove methamphetamine from the med kit of their troops when they started noticing people acting radically because they were using it too much. US troops who were put in the brig during World War II, there are articles about them abusing the inhalers. They would imprison, they would take the paper wick out of the inhalers, and they would either soak it to get the 250 milligrams of amphetamine out of them, or they would just eat the wick. So World War II really increases everyone’s exposure to the drug as a drug of abuse.

Weeks: But it wasn’t just soldiers who were finding creative ways to use amphetamine products, and the practice didn’t slow down after World War II. Amphetamine use was broadly socially acceptable through the 50s. Speed tablets were available over the counter until they were banned in 1951, and in inhaler form until 1959. But when federal policymakers banned inhalers containing amphetamine and dextroamphetamine, which today are ingredients in Adderall, they didn’t ban the strongest drug in the class, methamphetamine. Shortly after the ban took effect, an inhaler called “Valo” was released to the public. Those devices contained 200 milligrams of high-quality meth. People quickly figured out how to use them for maximum pleasure, dissolving the contents in hot water and injecting the mixture. Time Magazine covered the drug fad in 1959. They documented the arrest of one Kansas City high schooler who made injectable meth using an inhaler and a cup of hot water from a cafe, and then stepped into that establishment’s public photo booth to document himself mainlining the mixture. 

Weeks: So, speed was in an interesting gray area in mid-century America. Anyone who had a slight curiosity could easily get their hands on it. In 1955, the Assistant Surgeon General told lawmakers that amphetamines are not “addicting in the true sense of the word.” In the early 60s, President Kennedy’s personal physician, nicknamed “Dr. Feelgood,” was regularly injecting him with meth. The drug was widely prescribed to housewives, businessmen, students, physicians, truck drivers and athletes to induce weight loss, wakefulness, and high spirits. A lot of amphetamine use was totally within the bounds of the law. And even technically illegal amphetamine use didn’t seem so abnormal – this was a pre-“War on Drugs” America, in which keeping track of the movement of psychoactive substances was not yet a priority of the federal government. By the way – when we’re still talking about the 1950s and 60s, before the federal government put much tighter restrictions on stimulants, we’re gonna talk about meth and other amphetamines pretty interchangeably. That’s because, when the pharmaceutical industry was still producing all these drugs, they were pretty interchangeable. It’s only when meth becomes a primarily illicitly-produced drug that the distinction between it and its chemical cousins is super important. In the 50s and 60s, though, an amphetamine user’s experience didn’t depend that much on which brand or even which chemical they were using. The important questions then were, “how much are you using?” and “how are you administering it?”

Gilbreath: It’s estimated that like 50% of all illicit production in the 60s is just immediately onto the black market. So not even going through a doctor and their prescription. This is just out of the factory those pills or liquid ampules for injections. So the term meth doesn’t come from methamphetamine it comes from methadrine which was the Boroughs Wellcome brand of methamphetamine that they made for home injection with little ampules full of liquefied methamphetamine.

Weeks: And so what you’re saying is that pills in these little injection tablets were not diverted from a prescription-haver to the black market. They were diverted from the factory to the black market.

Gilbreath: All sorts of ways. So there’s direct diversion right out of the factory door onto the truck. There is diversion from people getting a prescription, selling pills or giving them out. There’s diversion from doctors who are selling prescriptions. So there are a million ways that this massive amount of licitly, legally produced amphetamine and methamphetamine can make their way onto the black market. And nobody in the government had any idea in the 50s and early 60s even how much was being produced.

Weeks: Because that just wasn’t a regulatory regime that existed? 

Gilbreath: Exactly. But what we do know is that the amount being produced was probably a hundred times more than what needed to be produced to meet the actual approved, FDA approved uses for amphetamines.

Weeks: An exact statistic on this is hard to come by, but a 1972 article in the journal Society estimated that, before the FDA reregulated amphetamines, the American pharmaceutical industry manufactured enough of them annually “to provide a month’s supply to every man, woman, and child in the country.” I asked Gilbreath what happened in the leadup to the federal government’s crackdown on legal meth. 

Gilbreath: What happens is during the Korean War, we get a number of soldiers who go to Korea, they go to R&R in Japan. They’re historically heroin users, so they’re accustomed to injecting their drugs, and when they’re on R&R in Tokyo or other places in Japan, they can’t find heroin, but they can find methamphetamine. So that’s really the introduction of high dosage injection of amphetamines and methamphetamine. And then those soldiers bring that back to the U.S. And so early 60s, we start to get high dosage methamphetamine injection. Haight-Ashbury becomes kind of one of the centers of this, but basically any urban center with a counterculture beat to it has this going on. And there’s a real clash between what we think of as more traditional hippies and the users of methamphetamine. So they’re called “meth heads” or “speed freaks” is the term they use. “Heads” was just a generic term for drug users, you know, like “pothead” or for “acid head,” and so meth head was just an extension of that.And you get some articles, like some articles where they’ll say that all the meth users are working class and all the hippies are upper middle class and stuff. And then you have others from the same era where they say there is no clear distinction between the two user groups, you know, but there’s already this kind of labeling of methamphetamine as being about a body high, anti-intellectual and kind of violence, and the other users being about expanding their minds and creating peace and stuff. 

Weeks: So, Gilbreath is saying riskier and more fringe types of amphetamine use are becoming common in city centers. People pursuing high doses have to carry out a lot more illegal activity to get the highs they seek than the average weight-conscious housewife does.  

Gilbreath: So San Francisco becomes the site of the first methamphetamine labs in the United States. And sometimes it’s just people taking those ampules and peeling off the labels and selling them. And sometimes it’s people dissolving pills in water and then putting them in ampules for people to inject. But eventually you have full-on chemists making methamphetamine in the Bay Area. And then you get, as the 60s progress, you get more lab-seeds nationwide, but it’s really small. It’s still largely, I’d say 90% or more diverted from legal production.

Weeks: Gotcha. So the illicit production of methamphetamine is an urban phenomenon in the very beginning.

Gilbreath: Yeah, right, yeah, like clandestine labs, totally an urban phenomenon at the start. Absolutely, yep.

Weeks: Gotcha. OK, and then, yeah, what would you see as the next step in the process?

Gilbreath: Yeah, so the next big thing is the Controlled Substance Act of 1970-1971, part of Nixon’s War on Drugs, where they start scheduling substances based on their potential for abuse. But the FDA has given the power to, or the precursor to the FDA, is given the power to reschedule drugs on their own, kind of super legislatively. And so they immediately reschedule anthiamphetamines and make them Schedule II, which means that they do have some medical uses so they can still be prescribed, but their production is tightly controlled and regulated and they’re heavily monitored. So they can’t be sold over the counter. They can barely be prescribed. They start limiting the number of companies that can produce the drugs, and then they set quotas on how much they can produce. And over, like, four years, the quota each year is, like, 90% less than the year before. So by the mid 70s, you have, just the licit amphetamines on the street are basically gone. 

Weeks: So in 1971, meth was designated a schedule II substance – meaning the government thought it presented a high potential for abuse, and from then on its prescription was rare. By 1973, legal amphetamine production was forced down to just ten percent of its peak 3 years earlier. And while, like Gilbreath mentioned, there had been a handful of meth labs in the Bay Area in the 1960s, there was no large-scale apparatus able to produce these drugs illicitly. After decades of indiscriminate prescription, demand was at an all time high when the government staged its crackdown. This meant that the price skyrocketed. There’s a book from 1996 that I really like called Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial. It’s a broad and scathing critique of American drug policy that I recommend to anyone interested, but for the purposes of this series the authors of that book have one really specific concept that I want to introduce. It’s called the “profit paradox” and it basically says that, as a rule of thumb, by arbitrarily restricting the supply of a drug, prohibition strategies drive up prices and thus generate large incentives for producers and distributors to enter the market. It’s a pretty common-sense idea. You take a drug off the street, it gets more expensive, and then because it’s more expensive, the rewards are higher than before for anyone who figures out how to produce or import it, making people more likely to try. In the case of methamphetamine, in the aftermath of regulation, someone has always figured out how to produce or import it. We’ll see this process play out over and over again throughout meth’s history, but this moment when meth first gets scheduled is one of the most important instances. By all accounts, this is when organized crime first attempts to fill the vacuum created by restrictions on pharmaceutical amphetamine production. In the 70s and 80s, outlaw biker gangs like the Pagans, the Bandidos, and the Hell’s Angels drove supply. 

Gilbreath: From a geographic perspective, this is where it gets interesting, because you had a drug that was available nationwide and everybody got a taste for it. And then all of a sudden, it’s no longer available nationwide, no longer easily available. It’s not available to your housewives and your college students and your attorneys and stuff like that. And so this is where it starts to concentrate in the West and become a phenomenon that we know from, like, the last 25 years or so.

Weeks: Wait, so how did bikers get so involved in the meth market to begin with?

Gilbreath: Mm-hmm. So some of this is anecdotal, but the Hells Angels are founded in the 60s around San Francisco, so they’re immediately involved in that methamphetamine scene there. Then you have over time, you have a number of arrests of methamphetamine production on the West Coast that’s being controlled by motorcycle gangs or associated with motorcycle gangs. You have interviews with the gangs where they’re talking about it and how important it is to their business. There’s one great quote about a guy saying, you can’t have a $10,000 bike, a big gun collection, and support three 19-year-old girlfriends just by working in a body shop. You gotta sell crank.

Weeks: [laughs] That’s amazing.

Gilbreath: Yeah, it’s a great quote. And then the nickname crank actually comes from the fact that they used to smuggle it in the crank cases of their bikes. And so there are all sorts of bus nationwide where they are playing an important role. So how much they actually control on the East Coast that may be exaggerated, you know, not just the Pagans that are selling methamphetamine across the East Coast. But in the epicenter of East Coast use, which is like Philadelphia and New York, they’re definitely the primary actors. And on the West Coast, again, it becomes democratized pretty quick, but for a while in that vacuum is created by the loss of legally produced amphetamines. It’s really the Hells Angels that come in and fill that, because they’re perfectly situated for it, because they have a number of kind of nodes, right? So a number of different chapters all over the West Coast, but they still have a hierarchical leadership, and so they have these places that can be distribution points and production points, and they have people who follow the rules of the gang, but not the rules of the government, and they’re also very difficult to police, because if you are mad at them in California and wanna arrest them, they can just go into Arizona, and you can’t go in there.

Weeks: But that biker-dominated equilibrium didn’t last long. In the 1970s, anyone who was making meth was using P2P, a common and unregulated industrial chemical used in perfumes and fumigation. But in the last half of that decade, there was a 1200% increase in lab seizures. In response, in 1980 the DEA made P2P a controlled substance.

Gilbreath: And so what happens on the West Coast is that the Hells Angels aren’t able to keep control of the methamphetamine commodity network because somebody figures out that you can make it without using phenyl-2-propanone. You can make it with ephedrine. And this is important for two reasons. One is ephedrine is totally unregulated. You can buy it in bulk and powder without any kind of legal reason. You can buy it in barrels of pills. So all of a sudden, you have a drug that the precursor is no longer hard to get, and there’s a recipe that starts to spread. This is pre-internet, right? So you just, over the course of kind of the late 70s and early 80s, you start to see more of these, more of this kind of informal spread of information about how to make methamphetamine with phosphorus. So it’s ephedrine, and then it’s a bunch of chemicals you can get at a hardware store. And so essentially, the Hell’s Angels just kind of lose control. They’re still making it. They’re probably making it with red phosphorus. Initially, red phosphorus method is just in California, and then it diffuses like anything diffuses. So it moves into Oregon, and then it moves into Washington, and we start getting a large number of labs seized in those West Coast states. So essentially, methamphetamine is democratized on the West Coast. On the East Coast, that information hasn’t spread yet. And so another thing about the West Coast is that there wasn’t as firmly established organized crime as there was on the East Coast with the Cosa Nostra and the classic kind of organized crime families you used to see in the movies about the 20s. So on the East Coast, the Pagans are interested in distributing the drug and maybe producing it, but they need to get phenyl 2-propanone. In order to do that, they have to go through classic organized crime. And classic organized crime has connections for importing that phenyl 2-propanone from Europe. In forming that alliance, the federal government was already worried about motorcycle gangs, and it was already worried about organized crime, and it was worried about methamphetamine. And so when those two come together, they become major targets for the federal government. And essentially, that network gets wiped out. They just take out all the important actors, and they take out large members of the organized crime. And so the methamphetamine business just dries up. The organized crime moves towards other drugs that are easier to get into and easier to distribute.

Weeks: A point that Gilbreath makes clear in his writing is that – because they could – East Coast meth distributors remained too dependent on P2P for too long. Traditional organized crime on the East Coast knew how to get its hands on P2P, so it did. West Coast meth producers didn’t have those connections, so they got scrappy, and started making the drug with ephedrine. But continuing on with the P2P method turned out to be more conspicuous, and police on the East Coast effectively wiped out any operation doing it that way. On the West Coast, on the other hand, a lot of different types of people were learning how to make meth. In 1988, things got tough for the biker gangs, too. The U.S. government passed the Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act, which restricted the sale of industrial-scale ephedrine. This was a pyrrhic victory for law enforcement. Domestic meth lab seizures fell off, but the availability of methamphetamine on the street quickly rebounded. Drug traffickers in Mexico had easier access to the precursor chemicals becoming increasingly scarce in the U.S., and they learned how to use them. I spoke with Sam Quinones, a journalist and author of several books on American drug crises, about the origins of large-scale Mexican meth manufacture. 

Quinones: Beginning in the late 80s and into the early 90s, Mexican traffickers, principally from the state of Michoacan, discovered that they could make methamphetamine, and they could make it with a chemical known as ephedrine, which is of course a decongestant. They figured out that this way of making methamphetamine was relatively easy. They industrialized it. And with that, they outcompeted the only other producers of methamphetamine in the Mexico-United States area, which were biker gangs, Hells Angels and other gangs like that, who knew how to make methamphetamine but were very inefficient in making it. And so the Mexican trafficking world principally, again, those in Michoacan figured out how to make it. They at first were making it in farm houses and barns, and so on, in central California and or Bakersfield, Fresno, Tulare, places like that, up near Stockton. But in time, local law enforcement, state and federal law enforcement figured this out and began to attack them and attack the glassware that they would buy to cook the stuff and so on. And they began to really make some big, big arrests. And so through the 90s, gradually the methamphetamine industry moved out of California and south to Mexico. The Mexican trafficking world understood something very, very important, and that was that synthetic drugs, drugs that come only from chemicals, are better than plant-based drugs. It’s better to make your drug than to grow it. You don’t need farmland, you don’t need sunlight and irrigation, farmers, you don’t need all kinds of things that expose you to a lot of risk. You just need the chemicals, and they could get this principal chemical, ephedrine, in sizable quantities by bribing off people in the pharmaceutical industry in Mexico, which took in quite hundreds and hundreds of tons of ephedrine every year for its own decongestant pills and that part of their business. And so in time, a significant amount of ephedrine was diverted to the trafficking world in Michoacan and the state of Jalisco and Sinaloa, beginning again, as I said, in the late 80s and certainly into the 1990s. It was really no longer a biker drug by then, it was really a Mexican drug. But they couldn’t really produce more than, say, enough to cover certain parts of the Western United States, which is why into the market that then emerged came the folk craft, the meth cook.

Weeks: So, that’s the story: amphetamines including meth are legal and highly available for a couple of decades after World War II. Concern about their overuse very slowly builds throughout the 50s and 60s, and they get wrapped up in Nixon’s War on Drugs in the 70s. Outlaw biker gangs and other organized criminal groups see the amphetamine market as an opportunity, and figure out how to produce methamphetamine. For a while, their meth dominates the market. But in the late 80s, American organized criminal groups are thwarted again by the government’s regulation of precursor chemicals. After that, the meth market is effectively turned over to the two groups we’ll be discussing in the rest of this series: very small-scale home cooks and more professional Mexican drug traffickers. This matters to our story first of all because it begins to explain why illicit meth production – if not illicit meth use – was so geographically specific. It also matters because it shows how, at every turn, changes in illicit meth markets were the result of government regulation and law enforcement efforts. I spoke about the reign of biker meth with Frank Owen, the journalist who wrote the book No Speed Limit, because he used meth in the era before mom and pop labs – in the 80s in New York City. 

Frank Owen: No, it was meth, but it was the biker meth. It wasn’t the ephedrine meth, which was twice as strong. It was the biker meth in New York City. I mean, New York City in the 60s, there was a lot of speed. I mean, you know, the Velvet Underground

Velvet Underground: [singing] “Gonna take a walk”

Owen: You know, I mean, if you listen to their music, a lot of that music was done on speed. 

Velvet Underground: [singing] “You gotta run, run, run, run, run. Take a drag or two.”

Owen: There was a lot of amphetamines and methamphetamines in New York City. By the 80s, there was hardly any, basically. Cocaine had displaced methamphetamine. I mean, methamphetamine in the 80s was not really a big thing, except on the West Coast. And in order to get meth, I remember my friend used to have to go out to Oakland and meet with these bikers to buy it and bring it back to New York because you couldn’t find it in New York. And when you got it, it was like gold dust. I mean, ironically, the Biker meth was a much smoother high than that ephedrine, pseudo-ephedrine based meth, which was not, you know, I mean, it was sent people frigging crazy. But, yeah, I mean, I fell in love with it. I mean, to me it was the perfect drug. And I still think methamphetamine, um, in small doses is actually a really good drug. It’s great for working.

Weeks: I have to break in here to say a couple things. First, opinions differ on what era of illicit meth provided the best experience for users, and people often mean different things when they say “biker meth.” Here, Owen is referring to P2P based meth, but not the super high-purity stuff that’s for sale today. Second, it should be pointed out that meth in general – and especially meth today – can be super dangerous. In addition to the regular side effects of pharmaceutical-grade meth, high dosage meth use is really hard on the body over time. And maybe most importantly if you’re using today, a study carried out from 2021 to 2023 in 25 US states found that there was fentanyl present in 15 percent of a sample of powder methamphetamine available on the street. But I don’t think that disqualifies the major point Owen is making, that meth can be used in strategic doses, like other stimulants. We already heard that from academics in the last episode, but I think it’s interesting to hear a former user’s take on it. 

Owen: But for a writer, it’s super good because it focuses concentration and and you can stay up all night. I mean I used to stay up all night for like four, five, six days, you know, just writing. The trouble is, there’s several things that are the problem. You know, I see meth is the best drug in the world but only in small doses, right, in large doses it’s a nightmare. 

Weeks: Yeah, if it’s such a perfect drug in small doses, then why would one find themselves taking too much?

Owen: Well, it’s just like, it’s a very American thing. I mean, it’s just like, you know, people have this idea that if it’s good, the more you take, it’s better. You know what I mean? And that’s not true at all. That’s not true of most drugs. You know, it was the government that put the bicarb meth people out of business, you know. It was the government that potentially created the pseudo pseudoephedrine meth because there would be no need to find an alternative chemical route to make meth if they hadn’t outlawed the P2P meth, you know. So, but that’s an old story. I mean, that’s always the case that the government outlaws one thing and then another drug or a type of the same drug comes along and it’s twice as strong.

Weeks: In his own way, Owen is restating the “profit paradox” I mentioned before. By regulating P2P, the government reduced supply of the old “biker meth” he’s talking about, but not the demand for it. With so many users searching for a fix, the incentive to find a new way to make meth was strong. And that’s exactly what happened. In episode 3 of home cooked, we’re gonna talk about what came after biker gangs – imported meth, and the mom-and-pop labs of the 90s and 2000s. 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.”

Susannah Broun: You’ve been listening to Rural Remix. Check out our feed for more podcasts highlighting deeper, richer stories about life in rural places.