It’s cheap and effective –
November 13, 2019 – “Methamphetamine is becoming more available and in a more potent form, which makes it more dangerous than it has been in the past,” said Peter Reuter, a professor of public policy and criminology at the University of Maryland. “Deaths seem to be increasing quite rapidly but it’s not as if it has uniformly spread across the country. It has spread in a sort of spotty way, and no one has an explanation for why this is the case.” One supervisory DEA agent involved in breaking up meth rings VICE spoke to said he had seen “a spread” of the meth trade, from traditional epicenters like Southern California eastward toward New York and other coastal cities where it can be sold for higher profit.
U.S. health and enforcement officials say it’s hard to get a good handle on the meth problem due to the transient nature of many of its users and other factors. But what is for sure is that the number of people who take meth often is on the rise. Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health found there had been a near doubling of the number of ‘last month’ meth users in just four years between 2014 and 2018.
