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While efforts to curb the opioid epidemic have dominated public health and policy in recent years, methamphetamine use and overdose deaths have continued to rise. There has been a six-fold increase in positive methamphetamine urinary drug tests since 2013. Nearly one in eight people seeking treatment for heroin use disorder also report methamphetamine use—up from one in 50 a decade ago.
Meth is most likely to cause death through long term cardiovascular and neurological damage. In this way, it is different than opioids, where the overwhelming health concern is overdoses. Opioid overdoses can be treated with the life-saving drug naloxone (“Narcan”), and long-term recovery from opioid addiction can be assisted with medications, such as methadone or buprenorphine. There are no equivalent medications for meth, making leading interventions in the opioid crisis unsuitable for treating meth.
“Some of the lessons we learned battling opioid addiction, like treating the trauma underlying drug use, are applicable to treating those suffering from methamphetamine use disorder,” said Laura Schultz, executive director of research at the Institute. “Unfortunately, many of our other interventions simply won’t work. The federal government expanded funding for countering stimulant addiction late last year and it will be important for states and municipalities to expand their addiction services as well in order to address this emerging crisis.”
A first wave of meth use in the 1990s and early 2000s hit the Southwestern US particularly hard, according to the analysis by Senior Policy Analyst Leigh Wedenoja. The second wave, emerging over the past decade, spread from the southwestern US across the country. It is now in traditional opioid hotspots like southern Ohio and northern Kentucky where opioid users turn to meth as supplies of prescription opioids and heroin dry up or are viewed as “unsafe” when mixed with fentanyl. Other findings from the analysis include:
- Most meth was produced in small batches near its users in the 1990s and early 2000s before federal legislation limited sales of over the counter ingredients used in production.
- Now, most meth is imported from Mexico and is purer, more potent, and cheaper than the meth produced in the 1990s and early 2000s.
- Native Americans, gay men, and people with other drug dependencies are populations where meth use can be particularly high and dangerous.