Salton Sea is also a pretty good one.
I also live in meth central, the HazMat is out here about once a year. Fortunately the housing boom has made my area a little improved; since the guy across the street moved there’s been less of a scum factor around the neighborhood.
Here in the AV though, you can’t buy more than 2 different types of cold medicine because of this crap. And they don’t care if it’s diphenhydramine or pseudoephedrine. Although maybe my checkout lady was just clueless, hmmm.
I wasn’t really in any danger of picking up a meth habit, but holy fuck those pictures are horrific.
Possibly the main reason for meth users’ dental disasters: Bruxism. That shit will make you grind your teeth like a mofo.
I knew one longtime meth user who is probably more typical than the horrorshow piccies that have been linked to here, which really document the physical effects of (resulting) poverty, homelessness, and roughness on the street than the primary effects of meth. (That ‘progression’ of the street prostitute has been attributed to any number of substances, BTW.) The girl I knew (in spite of using very regularly for years,) was rosy-cheeked, smooth-skinned, and pleasantly plump. I had no idea she was a tweaker until I got pretty intimate with her. She didn’t look worn out, because she was financially secure. She ate regularly, and generally looked after herself pretty well. Meth use itself will not make someone appear cadaverous. There were two effects that were noticible, though: She was often irrational and unreliable, which generally doesn’t make for long-term financial security – and more immediately, that girl’s teeth were a mess. Not so as you’d notice – her smile was fine – but her molars were open pits, top and bottom. Yeccch.
If people can hold their shit together, keep a job, and not focus on getting high to the exclusion of everything else, they’ll likely be fine. The same as alcohol or any other drug.
What makes meth so much more problematic than alcohol is that it doesn’t lend itself well to moderation, by virtue of the illusion of freedom from fatigue that it creates. Exhausted? A little bump and you’ll feel like you’ve got endless reserves of energy to draw on – except of course that you don’t, really. A booze binge ends in unconsciousness – a meth binger isn’t going to sleep until they’re out of crank. “Gee, I feel tired.” As soon as taking meth seems like the thing to do in response to that, instead of going to sleep, the person’s fucked.
Anyway, making it hard for people to get cold medication is stupid. Cookers will always be able to get their precursors, because they’re as common as dirt. Hell, even if governments declared that, in order to combat methamphetamine abuse, pharmaceutical cold remedies containing these precursors were outlawed altogether, it wouldn’t change a goddamned thing. It’s trivially easy to get ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from ephedra. If cold tablets weren’t easily available, people would just clandestinely cultivate ephedra. Square one, except your sinuses are plugged.
I think the insurance companies would gripe. My medical plan subsidizes prescription drugs, but for OTC stuff I’m on my own. I suspect much of the drive towards making these things over the counter comes from medical insurance providers.
Oops, forgot the teethgrinding! Definitely a big contributor.
Count me as another one who doesn’t understand meth addiction.
I’ve done crystal meth a few times in my life, both snorted and freebase (a couple of times, when I was partying with some guys I didn’t know really well and wanted to stay alert). OK, yeah, I liked it, it made me feel pleasantly perky, but I never felt “man, I gotta lay my hands on some more of that shit.”
I’ve also worked with a methhead, his teeth, as far as I could tell, were fine (couldn’t see his molars, but he didn’t have the bad breath that I would expect of someone who had teeth that were rotted away.) The guy was a pathological liar and an assgasket, but I think these traits were inherent in his personality, although when he was jonesing he was more of an asshole than normal.
I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the problem isn’t the drug, it’s in either the psychological or biochemical make-up of the addict, same as with any other randomly selected drug.
But, yeah, I used to work at Wal-Mart, and there was a limit on the number of boxes of Sudafed (or pseudoephedrine-containing cold medications) you could buy. I could never bring myself to believe that this nice, thirty-something mom surrounded by a gaggle of sniffling kids (and telling me she had a sniffling husband at home, and starting to sniffle a bit herself) was operating a meth lab in her basement. And really, putting a limit on the number of packages you can buy is not going to thwart someone who’s determined to lay his hands on a bunch of Sudafed for cooking purposes. Hell, they’d just steal a double handful of the shelf, or watch the store to see what time the trucks came, then grab the entire cardboard boxful when the stockers brought it out to put on the shelves.
BTW, Evil Soulless Mart also has a policy of not selling Liquid Paper, White-Out or similar correcting fluids to anyone under 18. Apparently, they assume that any non-adult is buying it for, ah, recreational purposes. No way they could want it for as bizarre a use as for correcting mistakes on their school assignments.
Would it be callous of me to congratulate you on maintaining your SDMB membership through three years of heavy meth use? Even if I guess they only switched to paid subscriptions shortly after you found yourself with a bit more disposable income.
My mother would have planted all eight of us at the counter - rubbing snot all over the entire world.
Hey, my fellow Hoosier! (another one from west central Indiana)
I don’t know why, but every time I hear of a meth lab bust in these parts, I’m surprised. I guess I’m sheltered, naive, or living in the past… but it just blows my mind how very widespread this has become.
My personal opinion is that all of this “zero tolerance” crap amounts to nothing more than the opposite of common sense. Somehow, we seem to be turning over more and more of the mechanics of discipline at all levels to arbitrary limitations that must be enforced regardless of how much sense it might make in any given situation.
I have a hard time grasping meth addiction too. I’ve partied pretty hard in my past, but even after some of my heaviest tweaking, which was ony a couple of days straight, I couldn’t imagine wanting to do any more for a long time. I needed a coupole of days just to recover and feel normal again. How someone can do that shit every day jsut baffles me.
A lot of truth in this, but it seems meth is more extreme in causing problems than most other chemicals. It seems if there’s any crack in your anti-drug-dependency armor, meth will find it and exploit like few other drugs will. I’m all for making drugs legal, but if I had to pick only one to ban, I would probably pick meth.
Several points: Meth cookers aren’t the careful chemists you’ll find at Merck. Flammables and environmentally injurious byproducts proliferate, and cookers don’t complete hazardous waste manifests for proper disposal.
They cook in the next apartment, the next room, the trailer next door, or go out into bohunk seeking cover for the odors and shipment containers. Point being, a cook could be in the motel room next to where you’re watching Happy Days reruns.
Different products have been banned or restricted over the course of time as cook recipes change, and anything containing ephedrine is the latest hot button.
Sorry, but as the failed 18th Amendment adequately demonstrated, the people will obtain and use recreational chemicals no matter what, and the sooner we accept that as fact, the sooner we’ll be able to make drug usage manageable.
It sucks to have an OTC drug become de facto regulated, no doubt.
BUT
Tweekers suck.
I agree with Cemetary Savior. If non-regulation of this drug is causing the problems, why doesn’t someone simply petition the FDA to re-regulate?
The problem is that prohibition produces proliferation.
Ban a substance that has even marginal appeal, and you create a black market for it. Once it’s a black market item, it’s much more lucrative for people to supply it, and so more people supply it. How does the volume of marijuana use compare today versus 1937? How many high school kids had access to LSD before 1966? How common was ecstasy use before 1985?
Banning a drug doesn’t curb its use, it increases it.
Look at the way the Chinese dealt with the opium problem back in the day. The more prohibitive they got, the worse the problem became. Penalties escalated and escalated, but nothing seemed to deter farmers and purveyors – because there was money in it. Even when running an opium den became a capital offense, it didn’t slow down at all – the people making the money just insulated themselves more carefully, and some poor addict became the proxy proprietor in exchange for a steady supply. His neck on the line. Finally they wised up and starved the profiteers out – by supplying opium to existing addicts as a sort of non-profit venture. No enticement, and no pretensions. Hey, where’d all the opium dens go? Social problem mitigated.
Is the high from meth special at all? What makes someone so gung ho for it that they are willing to turn their house into an explosive firetrap that the Toxic Avenger would fear to tread in?
In my day, all we had was coke and heroin, although some of the overachievers would go for PCP. Even heard tell 'round our parts of folks “hopped up on goofballs”. But that’s all we had, we liked it, and were better for it.
Really, if I was a junkie and someone told me I had to open 10,000 little blister packs of pills and boil them in a Schuck’s fuel additive cocktail, I’d say “Screw that, man, Dave down the street has some blow.”
From what I’ve read, meth’s popularity isn’t so much that the high is so much better then other drugs, but that it’s easy to produce, and thus cheap. It’s all inter-related, of course, but it seems that economics plays a big role in it.
The high is a lot like that from coke, only instead of lasting 30 minutes or so it’ll last for maybe 10 to 15 times as long. Therein lies your economic bang for the buck. Also, you can keep using meth for a couple of days at a time, some people will even stretch that out, and besides being pretty tired and strung out at the end you’re “relatively” okay. You do coke for 2 to 4 days and you’re gonna O.D. There’s some increased sexual benefits like increased libido but I’m thinkin’ the details are probably beyond the scope of this thread.
When you first do meth you get the sense of being able to think a lot clearer, concentrate more. It’s why students have used it to study, that and the fact you’re not gonna get sleepy for awhile. I found that I was able to solve some really complex S.A.S. formulations that I couldn’t figure out while straight.
Like everything though such concentration and extended periods without sleep comes at a price. Pretty soon any gain you might have realized in concentration is shot and far simplier reasoning takes more effort. If you’ve partied for days then it’ll take days to recover. Without a doubt any perceived gain becomes an overwhelming net loss. Bennies are few while the downside is absolutely immense. My experimentation was limited to over a decade ago when I was single and use and recovery time were planned beforehand. To wig while married is in my mind pretty reckless and while a parent is absolutely unconscionable.
Someone mentioned before that some of the abberant behavior being discussed probably has a lot to do with a user’s character and mentality and is more exacerbated by, than a result of, the drug. I think there’s probably a lot of truth to that.