CJ Trowbridge
2020-06-26
Drugs and Society
Section 9 Reading Response: Meth
- Frontline: the meth epidemic
- Meth can be made from cold medicines
- Cold medicines are a $3b industry
- Cold medicine industrial complex opposes restrictions on cold medicine
- Meth can also be made from many other things
- Common ingredients found anywhere
- Meth is a major factor in many social problems
- Child abandonment
- Criminal violence
- Oregon conducted an in-depth study of the history of the meth epidemic
- 85% of property crime in Oregon is committed by people who are addicted to meth
- Fences often pay with meth
- Even a small dose of meth is long-lasting
- Over the years, there are huge simultaneous spikes and falloffs in drug use versus people entering treatment across all states despite the fact that these states have radically different systems in place
- This is an effect of neurochemistry
- Researchers examined purity of meth found on the street. It mirrored the curve of addiction versus treatment
- The DEA started focusing on restricting essential precursors
- Meth became a large industrial business
- They sourced precursors from large Asian industrial chemical companies
- In the early 90s, the Amezcua brothers purchased 170 tons of ephedrine, imported it into America, and turned it into 2 billion hits of meth.
- The DEA accidentally interdicted a large shipment from India through the US to Mexico which led to the discovery that the Amezcua brothers even exist and later led the DEA to stop the Amezcua precursor shipments from passing through the US.
- With reduced supply from Amezcua and the supply of ephedrine partially blocked, American meth cooks ramped up to meet demand and simply switched from ephedrine to pseudoephedrine which is basically exactly the same and available at any drug store.
- Just like the Amezcua, these small scale meth manufacturers started importing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from abroad.
- Mexican drug stores started selling much larger amounts of pseudo
- Meth continued to spread across the country with both small suppliers and large suppliers, reaching every corner of the country.
- For decades, every attempt to interrupt the supply with new laws or restrictions has been met with new strategies that led to more supply of even higher quality meth.
- Meth can be made from cold medicines
- the lost world of Benzedrine
- from the 1930s to the 1950s, a good bit of American artistic and scientific energy was generated by this lively amphetamine
- people discovered that it had pleasant, useful, and energizing side-effects, which led to its use by all sorts of people who needed to boost their creative energies
- throughout the mid-century period scientists and mathematicians as well as poets and novelists relied on bennies to give them the strength to go on
- Paul Erdős, who is said to have defined a mathematician as “a device for turning coffee into theorems,” neglected in that aphorism to mention that he relied heavily on Benzedrine as well
- “In 1979, a friend offered Erdös $500 if he could kick his Benzedrine habit for just a month. Erdös met the challenge, but his productivity plummeted so drastically that he decided to go back on the drug.”
- Some believed that because amphetamines did not cause hallucinations, dependence on them was morally acceptable.
- Benzedrine wasn’t made a prescription drug until 1959, but by then the fad was already in decline, partly because people could see the damage that bennies were inflicting on their users, but perhaps even more because artistic and intellectual styles were changing. The high-speed, high-energy way was being replaced by something slower, cooler. Kerouac’s novel On the Road and Miles Davis’s record The Birth of the Cool came out in the same year, but the former was a relic of the recent past, the latter the wave of the future.
- Why caffeine is the perfect addiction
- a new study found that caffeine turns human beings into efficient worker bees
- caffeine “significantly reduced the number of errors” made by workers in a series of 13 trials.
- “One trial comparing the effects of caffeine with a nap found that there were significantly less errors made in the caffeine group,” reads the official report.
- “The results of the trials suggest that compared to no intervention, caffeine can reduce the number of errors and improve cognitive performance in shift workers. … Based on the current evidence, the review authors judge that there is no reason for healthy shift workers who already use caffeine within recommended levels to improve their alertness to stop doing so.”
- caffeine is America’s favorite legal high because it fuels capitalism
- Not that capitalism totally sucks, but still: It’s good to know why you’re being sold central-nervous-system stimulants
- Crack users aren’t good workers. Neither marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin, nor LSD increase workplace efficiency. (Neither does alcohol, yet alcohol is just as cheap and legal as caffeine. But alcohol has been ingrained in human culture for too long to yank it out, as Prohibition proved.)
- I think most of silicon valley would disagree with the claim about LSD not increasing workplace efficiency. That’s the only way to create people like Steve Jobs.
- Many stories were run with headlines about the results of this study
- coffee represents a $60 billion-plus global industry, supported almost entirely by adult consumers, energy drinks comprise a $6 billion-plus global industry whose demographics tilt younger
- According to Simmons Research, 31 percent of American teenagers — about 7.6 million — regularly consume caffeinated energy drinks. Kids with caffeine habits enrich not only companies that sell caffeine but also companies those kids will work for when they grow up
- the National Institutes of Health classifies caffeine as a “poisonous ingredient” and recommends telephoning the National Poison Control Center in cases of suspected overdose
- How much counts to abuse? A standard cup of brewed coffee contains between 80 and 100 mg, but caffeine’s effects depend on body weight. The new London School of Hygiene report gives a thumbs-up to workers “who already use caffeine within recommended levels.” While not recommending any caffeine at all, the Mayo Clinic classifies 200 to 300 milligrams of it a day as “moderate,” warning that more than 500 mg a day “can cause insomnia, nervousness, restlessness, irritability, nausea or other gastrointestinal problems, fast or irregular heartbeat, muscle tremors, headaches and anxiety.”
- Methed up
- Mexican soldiers last month made one of the biggest drug busts in history. They found 15 tonnes of the banned stimulant methamphetamine, which in America retails for more than $100 per gram, seven tonnes of chemicals used to make it, and a laboratory. The manufacturers had fled.
- meth, once primarily a home-cooked drug, has become a mass-produced one
- Unlike cocaine and heroin, imported from the limited regions where coca and poppy are cultivated, meth can be made anywhere
- In 2008 the Mexican authorities identified 21 labs. In 2009 they found 191.
- In 2010 Iran dismantled 166 meth labs, up from 33 in 2009
- officialdom is struggling as the criminal businesses speed up, evading regulations by adapting their behaviour: more like big firms than small onesopioids and methamphetamine: the tale of two crises
- Amid the opioid crisis, a different drug comes roaring back
- while the opioid crisis has exploded, the lull in the methamphetamine epidemic has quietly and swiftly reversed course
- The sheer number of opioid-related deaths has dominated the national conversation. However, that focus could distract from the larger issues of use and overdose across classes of drugs. The methamphetamine and opioid crises were previously considered distinct and affecting different populations. But in states including Wisconsin and Oregon, new patterns suggest they are beginning to overlap as increasing numbers of people use both drugs.
- In 2005, at the peak of the methamphetamine epidemic, the economic burden was placed as high as US$48·3 billion. In comparison, a February, 2018 analysis by the health research firm Altarum estimated the opioid crisis in the USA has cost in excess of $1 trillion, with an estimated price tag of $115 billion for 2017 alone. Individual and private sector costs are enormous, but these are not trivial numbers in the scope of the federal budget. The Trump administration’s 2019 total proposed budget for Health and Human Services is only $68·4 billion, although it is reportedly seeking to expand opioid funding by $13 billion for prevention and treatment. Many experts have suggested that it is too little, too late. Although, the epidemic was declared a national emergency in October, 2017, the President’s Commission on opioids has led to little more than calls for a border wall to impede suppliers and has largely been derided for failing to meaningfully include drug policy experts.
- adderall use rising among young adults
- While the number of prescriptions for the stimulant Adderall has remained unchanged among young adults, misuse and emergency room visits related to the drug have risen dramatically in this group, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests.
- it is mainly 18-to-25-year-olds who are inappropriately taking Adderall without a prescription
- a sizeable proportion of those who use them believe these medications make them smarter and more capable of studying. We need to educate this group that there could be serious adverse effects from taking these drugs and we don’t know much at all about their long-term health effects
- Adderall, the brand name for dextroamphetamine-amphetamine, does improve focus, Mojtabai says, but it can also cause sleep disruption and serious cardiovascular side effects, such as high blood pressure and stroke. It also increases the risk for mental health problems, including depression, bipolar disorder and unusual behaviors including aggressive or hostile behavior.
- generation Adderall
- Adderall, the brand name for a mixture of amphetamine salts, is more strictly regulated in Britain than in the United States
- Adderall is prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a neurobehavioral condition marked by inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity
- In 1990, 600,000 children were on stimulants, usually Ritalin, an older medication that often had to be taken multiple times a day. By 2013, 3.5 million children were on stimulants, and in many cases, the Ritalin had been replaced by Adderall, officially brought to market in 1996 as the new, upgraded choice for A.D.H.D. — more effective, longer lasting.
- Adderall has now become ubiquitous on college campuses, widely taken by students both with and without a prescription. Black markets have sprung up at many, if not most, schools. In fact, according to a review published in 2012 in the journal Brain and Behavior, the offlabel use of prescription stimulants had come to represent the second-most common form of illicit drug use in college by 2004
- In the late 1920s, an American chemist named Gordon Alles first synthesized amphetamine.
- By the 1930s, the drug Benzedrine, a brand-name amphetamine, was being taken to elevate mood, boost energy and increase vigilance
- The American military dispensed Benzedrine tablets, also known as “go pills,” to soldiers during World War II.
- After the war, with slight modification, an amphetamine called Dexedrine was prescribed to treat depression.
- Many people, especially women, loved amphetamines for their appetite-suppressing side effects and took them to stay thin, often in the form of the diet drug Obetrol.
- By the early 1970s, with around 10 million adults using amphetamines, the Food and Drug Administration stepped in with strict regulations, and the drug fell out of such common use.
- More than 20 years later, a pharmaceutical executive named Roger Griggs thought to revisit the now largely forgotten Obetrol. Tweaking the formula, he named it Adderall and brought it to market aimed at the millions of children and teenagers who doctors said had A.D.H.D. A time-release version of Adderall came out a few years later, which prolonged the delivery of the drug to the bloodstream and which was said to be less addictive — and therefore easier to walk away from.
- Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the effect of Adderall on subjects taking a host of standardized tests that measure restraint, memory and creativity. On balance, Farah and others have found very little to no improvement when their research subjects confront these tests on Adderall. Ultimately, she says, it is possible that “lower-performing people actually do improve on the drug, and higher-performing people show no improvement or actually get worse.”
- stimulant-overdose-flyer
- The goal of this booklet is to get us all to take the issue of overamping seriously and to bring attention to it as much as other kinds of “overdoses,” and also to recognize all the smart things people already do to keep themselves and their friends safe.
- Overamping is the term we use to describe what one might consider an “overdose” on speed.
- for too long (sleep deprivation), your body is worn down from not eating or drinking enough water, you’re in a weird or uncomfortable environment or with people that are sketching you out, you did “that one hit too many,” you mixed some other drugs with your speed that have sent you into a bad place — whatever the reason, it can be dangerous and scary to feel overamped.
- Most of the time, when we hear the word overdose, we think of heroin, someone in a heavy nod, turning blue, not breathing. A lot of times people say “you can’t overdose on speed,” but then other people say, “I don’t know, I’ve passed out, or felt like I was gonna have a heart attack…is that an overdose?” The problem is actually with the word itself. “Overdose” isn’t really the best word to describe what happens when tweak turns bad…so we call it OVERAMPING.
- What are the physical symptoms of overamping?
- Nausea and/or vomiting
- Falling asleep/passing out (but still breathing)
- Chest pain or a tightening in the chest
- High temperature/sweating profusely, often with chills
- Fast heart rate, racing pulse
- Irregular breathing or shortness of breath
- Seizure/convulsions
- Stroke
- Limb jerking or rigidity
- Feeling paralyzed but you are awake
- Severe headache
- Hypertension (elevated blood pressure)
- Teeth grinding
- Insomnia or decreased need for sleep
- Tremors
- According to the National Institutes of Health, “Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality that usually includes false beliefs about what is taking place or who one is (delusions) and seeing or hearing things that aren’t there (hallucinations).
- SYMPTOMS OF STROKE are distinct because they happen quickly:
- Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm or leg (especially on one side of the body)
- Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding speech
- Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes
- Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination
- Sudden severe headache with no known cause
- typical signs and symptoms of a general seizure are:
- Drooling or frothing at the mouth
- Grunting and snorting
- Tingling or twitching in one part of the body
- Loss of bladder or bowel control
- Sudden falling
- Loss of consciousness
- Temporary absence of breathing
- Entire body stiffening
- Uncontrollable muscle spasms with twitching and jerking limbs
- Head or eye deviation (fixed in one direction)
- Aura before the seizure which may be described as sudden fear or anxiety, a feeling of nausea, change in vision, dizziness, or an obnoxious smell (not as common with drug-related seizures).
- Skin color may be very red or bluish.
- more people than ever get their drugs on the dark web
- “Despite all of the disruptions from law enforcement efforts and takedowns that have been successful, as well as the exit scams and all of this kind of thing, people are still using these sites to access drugs,” Monica Barratt, a researcher from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at UNSW Australia who is part of the GDS core team, told Motherboard.
- 8,058 GDS respondents out of 101,313 (8 percent) said they had used the dark web to source drugs
- We can see that upward trend there. It’s there for almost all the countries
- a large chunk of those who reported using drugs from the dark web don’t actually boot up Tor and spend bitcoin; someone else purchases the drugs for them.
- The dark web may also be allowing users to access drugs that they typically couldn’t through other means. “Seventy-nine percent said that they did try a drug for the first time through the dark net,” Barratt said.
- iraq faces a new adversary
- Iraq, a country where drug problems have been rare. But growing addiction here is the most recent manifestation of how the social order has frayed in the years following the American invasion in 2003.
- because it is a largely new problem in Iraq, neither community leaders nor government officials seem ready to deal with it other than by putting people in prison.
- Until about seven years ago, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Iraq was essentially a transit country, meaning most drugs passed through on their way to somewhere else.
- The government’s approach is to try to expunge any outward sign of the problem. Almost every night, dozens of SWAT teams fan out across Basra province, targeting users and dealers and hauling in suspects. Almost all those arrested are ultimately convicted, creating a new problem: The prisons have run out of space and the overflow — hundreds of men — is crammed in holding rooms in the province’s police stations and those of neighboring provinces.
- Unemployment is about 20% for youth
- at least 90 percent of those arrested for drugs are unemployed
- Iraq is now producing its own meth which is very popular among fighters
- There are a couple of rehabilitation centers, but they are so small they make little impact. A drug conviction in Iraq makes it difficult to ever get a salaried job because traditional Iraqi culture views drug use as a “dishonorable crime,” which makes employers shy away, said addicts and government officials.
- stop funding s.e. asia’s brutal drug war
- In the fall of 2015, I witnessed a late-night kidnapping. The perpetrators weren’t seeking cash, gold or any kind of ransom. They didn’t bother to wear masks. They belonged to a Baptist vigilante crew sworn to bring wrath upon drug users.
- Sure of their righteousness, the men let me tag along and observe their crimes: home invasions, assaults and the abduction of a gaunt day laborer with a speed habit
- drug lords continue to churn out one of the Southeast Asian underworld’s top-selling products: little candypink pills, packed with methamphetamine, that smell a lot like vanilla frosting.
- The pills are becoming more popular in the region than heroin or even marijuana. Armed syndicates produce roughly two billion of these speed tablets a year — more than triple the number of coffees Starbucks sold worldwide in 2015.
- Consider the rise of Pat Jasan, that vigilante collective in Myanmar’s upcountry. First assembled in 2014, it now claims to have thousands of adherents. In the local language, Kachin, the group’s name refers to “cleansing” the land of drugs. The Kachin are an ethnic minority who were Christianized in the 19th century by American missionaries — and their leaders use church networks to orchestrate this underground resistance to the meth trade.
- Repeatedly, vigilantes told me they hope to draw America’s gaze — to provoke the consciousness of that powerful Christian nation, which once gave them the word of God and might now lend its might to their holy crusade against drugs.
- It’s even scarier in the Philippines, where the police and death squads stalk the slums in search of meth smokers and low-level dealers. More than 12,000 have been killed in just a few years. President Rodrigo Duterte campaigned — and won — on promises to dump so many dealers’ bodies into the sea that the “fish will grow fat.”
- the United States has funded and trained the police engaging in this bloodletting. Moreover, when these killings were in full swing in 2017, President Trump told Mr. Duterte to “keep up the good work — you’re doing an amazing job.”
- In the United States, meth is portrayed as a tooth-rotting gutter drug. Yet in Southeast Asia, those pink pills are often taken not to party but to work harder.
- Stitching name-brand sneakers in a Vietnamese factory, hauling shrimp from Thai waters for export to American supermarkets — all of it becomes more tolerable on meth. This drudge work in Asia fills our pantries and closets. It underwrites middle-class lives in the West, supplying our homes with cheap food, cheap clothes and cheap gadgets.
- While one tentacle of Myanmar’s security apparatus traffics pink meth pills, another receives millions of American tax dollars to fight the spread of those very drugs.
- The army created and oversees militias that are major players in the behemoth meth business
- a new study found that caffeine turns human beings into efficient worker bees