First of all, NO ONE who uses speed EVER calls it “meth.”
The resulting effect is as if people who did not drink coffee decided to refer to it as “splornk,” and went around calling you a “splornk-drinker” all day.
In the underworld, if somebody asks if you know where to get some “meth,” you know they’re a cop.
Second, and more importantly, “meth” is a short form of “methamphetamine.” There ARE NO methamphetamines available anywhere! In order to make methamphetamines, you need to have certain precursors (like P2P or ephedrine) which are now virtually impossible to obtain. Anyone procuring an amount of these precursors sufficient to actually produce a batch of methamphetamine is certainly not going to distribute it to the general public.
**THERE ARE NO “METH” USERS! THERE IS FUNCTIONALLY NO SUCH THING AS A “METH” USER! **
(unless they have a prescription for it – and then, we don’t call them “users” – we call them “patients.”)
Anyone purchasing what passes for speed these days is getting “bath salts:” a substance so nasty, so adulterated with God-knows-what, so unpleasantly far removed from anything like a genuine methamphetamine, that it has caused actual (formerly) meth users to give up in despair.
So, in Breaking Bad, what’s the (relatively cheap) crap that Jesse is cooking/selling at the beginning of the series? What’s Walt’s 99.4% pure blue stuff?
Ha ha, three-way Venn diagram: speedfreaks, grammatical pedants, and people who own aprons!
P.S. Gagundathar: Yes.
Mr Shine: Relatively cheap? Definitely bath salts. The blue stuff, I don’t know for sure; but there is a certain solvent which is said to make the dope turn blue when smoked. Nasty, nasty shit!
I’m going to go ahead and guess that you’ve got yourself an undercover cop there. Real meth heads never call it meth - I learned that right here on the boards.
Meanwhile, am I the last person to get the memo that “speed” and “meth” are the same thing? All this time I’ve been thinking meth was some new super drug, and I never even realised people had stopped talking about speed.
All I can say is that, in 30 years of close proximity to the counterculture/ underwlorld or whatever, I personally have never, ever heard anyone call it that, not even once. (Except for police officers.)
Most commonly, they just call it “dope,” because there is no chance of anyone mistaking what kind of dope they mean. Speedfreaks, (heroin) junkies, and other kinds of users rarely hang out together.
Do you by chance see the inherent contradictions in your OP?
Oh, and just by the by, there was a bust here in Melbourne today that netted a haul of METHAMPHETAMINE (in a liquid form) with a street value of circa $200 MILLION bucks.
Yep…no meth out there folks. Well, there’s less now of course, but that’s beside the point.
When someone comes into the Pit frothing and ranting IN BIG CAPITAL LETTERS no less about something so fucking stupid and inconsequential, one has to wonder about the motivations and/or substances aiding and abetting the activity.
In fact, googling “melbourne, methamphetamine bust” yielded an impressive array of technicolor busts.
My advice: Don’t believe everything you read. Although I can’t be certain about the one you mentioned because of its connection to Asia and possibly therefore to marginally easier access to ephedra (long used in traditional Chinese medicine), I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that 9 out of 10 (or better) news reports about “meth labs” or “meth busts” are in fact talking about people who are brewing up some variation on bath salts.
Not only are vast quantities of “meth” (ie crystal methamphetamine, aka N-methylamphetamine) readily available in many countries, so too are the precursors.
The users I knew referred to it as Crystal Meth, or occasionally the local slag, “tik”. None of them were cops.
