The War on Meth Is Back. Big Time

Today’s Seattle Times reports on the surge in methamphetamine-related deaths, noting more there are more meth-related deaths than at the height of the last “meth wave” in the early 2000s. 

The era of the American meth lab is over a decade gone, yet pure, cheap meth is back and bigger than ever in Western Washington. When Seattle residents point to needles proliferating on sidewalks, they usually say heroin’s to blame; however, a bigger proportion of those needles in recent years is actually from people injecting meth, according to King County syringe exchange surveys.

Death rates in King County have increased four-fold between 2005 and 2017. As I have written here, this is a nationwide phenomenon. In 2005 Congress passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, which moved behind-the-counter the effective decongestant pseudoephedrine (Sudafed), often converted into meth by local meth labs, and limited the amount one can purchase per month. Law enforcement led an all-out assault, often with S.W.A.T. teams, on local meth labs. The Seattle Times report states that the 2005 crackdown dramatically reduced the number of “mom and pop” meth labs in the state of Washington. But this only created an opening for Mexican drug cartels.

Since 2011, there have been just 212 meth-lab sites reported statewide, according to the state Department of Ecology. But drug cartels south of the American border stepped in to fill demand, making more and more meth in “superlabs” in Mexico and shipping it, along with heroin and fentanyl, up Interstate 5 — hidden away in tires, paint cans and hidden compartments in semi-trucks — according to Keith Weis, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Pacific Northwest division.

Shilo Jama, a harm reduction activist in King County, told the Seattle Times that for the last several years harm reduction sites have been treating more stimulant users than opioid users. 

I pointed out in a recent blog post, “The overdose crisis is the byproduct of psycho-sociocultural trends seen among many developed countries intersecting with the dangerous world of drug prohibition—where the content and dose of the substance being sold is never reliable, and where users take otherwise avoidable risks.” 

The War on Drugs is like a game of “Whac-a-mole.” We’ve gone from meth crisis to opioid crisis and now a meth plus fentanyl crisis. If the goal of public policy is to reduce the deaths and disease that result from underground drug use, the solution is to end the war, as Portugal decided to do in 2001, and switch the focus to harm reduction.