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Cheap, Nasty, Near You. How Crystal Meth Is Spreading

Cheap, Nasty, Near You. How Crystal Meth Is Spreading

(Bloomberg) -- The party drug known as “crystal meth” or “ice,” around for decades on a limited scale, has been turbocharged by globalization into a favored money spinner for transcontinental criminal organizations. The highly addictive, crystalline form of methamphetamine can be cooked up almost anywhere (as seen on the television series “Breaking Bad”) using a variety of chemical ingredients, legal or otherwise. That has enabled gangsters to elude drug control efforts and deliver ever cheaper supplies, often sold surreptitiously online. The results have been devastating: drug dependence, debilitating psychiatric disorders, violent crime and a brutal war on drugs in such places as the Philippines.

1. What’s crystal meth?

It’s a psychostimulant from the methamphetamine group that includes “speed” and MDMA, also called “Ecstasy” or “Molly.” These accelerate the release of the brain’s pleasure chemical dopamine. Crystal meth, also known by the street names “shard,” “shabu” and “Tina,” is the purest, most potent -- and subsequently, most addictive -- form of methamphetamine. Its ice-like granules can be smoked, injected, swallowed or snorted.

2. Where did it come from?

First synthesized more than a century ago, meth was used by both sides in World War II to keep their troops awake. It became a particular problem in Central Europe in the 1970s when a former chemistry student in then-Czechoslovakia, who went by the nickname “Freud,” discovered an easy way to make the drug -- known locally as pervitin -- using an over-the-counter cough medication. In its various forms, meth has also plagued the U.S. for decades. Authorities play a constant game of Whac-A-Mole while drug gangs devise increasingly devious ways to get their product across the U.S.-Mexico border, including flying it in drones or hiding it in fuel tanks, batteries, juice bottles, and cans of hominy.

Cheap, Nasty, Near You. How Crystal Meth Is Spreading

3. What’s changed?

Supply has grown, prices have fallen. It’s also more potent and pushing into new markets. Seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border have increased about tenfold since 2010, to about 82,000 pounds (37,200 kilograms) in 2018. Over the same period meth has also become a scourge across the Asia-Pacific region, largely sourced from the infamous Golden Triangle, where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet. Record tablet and crystal meth seizures were made across those and other countries along the Mekong River in 2018, and prices plunged to a 20-year low. Authorities have captured even more in 2019, preliminary data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime indicate. Criminal networks that used to turn poppies there into heroin are finding it easier and more lucrative to manufacture ice with chemicals from China and India. The UN agency estimates $15 billion of the drug is smuggled within East Asia annually. A dozen countries in the region including China now report methamphetamine as their primary drug of concern, up from five a decade ago. The drug is also luring more Europeans. Germany, for example, reported an almost 20-fold increase in quantities seized from 2008 to 2012. Based on known trafficking flows and seizures, the global market for crystal meth has expanded more than sixfold since 2008.

Cheap, Nasty, Near You. How Crystal Meth Is Spreading

4. Why is it so hard to eradicate?

Globalization and new technologies, for a start. Dealers are expanding their footprint by collaborating with transnational criminal groups, forming global crime rings with the scale, resources and know-how to move illicit drugs and their constituent chemicals across borders. Traffickers also use encrypted phones and darknet markets where drugs are ordered anonymously online, paid for with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoins and shipped in small quantities that are hard to detect. As law enforcement agencies target one chemical, meth-makers tweak their recipes to use alternative, often licit, precursor or “pre-precursor” substances that circumvent controls. Supply routes are also nimble. After seizing more than 18 tons of crystal meth in 2018, Thai authorities announced an intense suppression campaign along borders in the Golden Triangle. That resulted in the rerouting of shipments south through Myanmar to enter Thailand along its western border or out via the Andaman Sea, and overland to Laos and Vietnam, where seizures in the first half of 2019 surpassed 2018 totals.

Cheap, Nasty, Near You. How Crystal Meth Is Spreading

5. What does crystal meth do?

Within seconds, users feel an adrenaline-like rush from a flood of dopamine, followed by an intense, euphoric high that can last for as long as 14 hours, usually ending with a dramatic, fatiguing comedown or crash. By contrast, cocaine is metabolized much faster, with half of it gone from the body in an hour. Crystal meth increases dopamine levels in the brain to about three times higher than cocaine. It also boosts the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine, which can elevate blood pressure and heart beat, and cause a person to be more awake and active, lose their appetite, and become irritable and aggressive.

6. Why is it so dangerous?

The dopamine rush can dis-inhibit users while increasing their confidence, stamina and sense of desirability. That can facilitate prolonged and aggressive sex, which increases the risk of spreading sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. It also elicits a powerful depressive response on the comedown, including a psychosis similar to paranoid schizophrenia that afflicts almost a quarter of regular users. They are also at increased risk of suicide, violence and meth-dependence. Over time, the drug can cause persistent damage to the brain, affecting emotion and memory. Blood vessels can also be harmed, which can trigger a stroke or heart attack. In Australia, amphetamine-related deaths quadrupled between 2011 and 2017, with heart disease and violent suicide the most common causes. The stimulant can also cause skin eruptions and decrease the amount of protective saliva around the teeth, leading to a range of problems known collectively as “meth mouth.”

Cheap, Nasty, Near You. How Crystal Meth Is Spreading

7. Can users overdose?

Yes, when meth is used alone or in combination with other drugs, including alcohol, at toxic levels. Overdosing can cause difficulty breathing, chest pain, seizures, extreme agitation and unconsciousness. It can also cause a sharp rise in blood pressure that leads to hemorrhage, stroke, heart attack or death. Frequent users may develop a tolerance, requiring higher levels to get the desired effect. That increases the risk of harm. In the U.S., the number of overdose deaths involving meth increased 3.6-fold over five years to 6,762 in 2016, and the fatality rate quadrupled in Australia between 1999 and 2016.

8. Are there other costs?

Plenty. Its range of social harms extend from an increase in violence and arrests, to ambulance calls, hospital admissions and the demand for psychiatric services. Most of the people treated in Brunei, Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore for drug-use disorders in 2017 were crystal-meth users. Thousands have been killed since mid-2016 in a brutal crackdown in the Philippines, to questionable effect. In the U.S., meth-related hospital costs reached $2.17 billion in 2015, a fivefold increase since 2003. Ice is also helping to bankroll organized crime, adding to the growing global burden of drug abuse, and combining with other drugs of addiction, such as fentanyl, to exacerbate the deadly opioid crisis.

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The Reference Shelf

  • The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has recent reports on synthetic drugs in East and Southeast Asia, a world drug report and a global update.
  • The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction has charted the darknet markets ecosystem and also tested wastewater around 70 cities and towns to check for illicit drug use.
  • The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s National Drug Threat Assessment for 2018.
  • A teacher’s guide from the National Institutes of Health on methamphetamine.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jason Gale in Melbourne at j.gale@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brian Bremner at bbremner@bloomberg.net, Paul Geitner, Grant Clark

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.