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Dec. 6, 2022 –  In your book The Least of Us and in an Atlantic piece last year, you wrote about the rise of very pure meth, which is produced in a different way than the variety that used to flow into the U.S. The effects have been devastating, but this still seems like a fairly under-the-radar phenomenon. Has it gotten more attention since you wrote about it?

My book highlighted this problem that people were seeing all across the country, and now people are trying to understand why it’s happening. And I think more and more people are coming to the conclusion that the meth coming from Mexico is being produced with much more potency. It used to be that a lot of the chemicals they couldn’t eliminate from the process were acting as diluting agents, and so people weren’t getting 99 percent meth when they bought this stuff, they were getting 50 percent or something like that. And now what you’re finding is that new ways of making meth get it to almost a hundred percent. That’s very difficult for a human brain to accommodate. I think all of this is coming out now because the book shone a light where none existed before, and showed that people are in fact entering into extreme psychosis. And once they stop using the drug, it takes a long time to move beyond it and for the brain to heal — months, perhaps. It’s not a day-to-day thing.

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