Meth

He established himself as a leading voice on the opioid epidemic with the 2015 book Dreamland, which told the story of how prescription-drug companies and a ...

It needs to be made into the issue that it should be, that it can be. But at no point in the history of the so-called drug war have we seen the kind of collaborative efforts that must take place, that can take place, between Mexico and the United States nationally. There’s long been a small group of people who want to go farther and legalize everything, with the idea that it would be a way of reducing suffering and also dealing a blow to sellers. I think we need to keep in mind that keeping people on the street is going to be a death sentence. I’m saying that it doesn’t seem to make sense in a time of fentanyl and methamphetamine. It seems to have graduated to the level of the State Department or a national emergency, where it has to be dealt with via international diplomacy. With the attention from the book, you’re finding people who are in a position to do the kind of research that I am not in a position to do. Fentanyl was really mostly in the Midwest, and it was only by 2018, 2019 that it had really spread to both coasts and every place in between. 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’s easier to send condolences to someone who’s dead than to deal with someone who is out in the streets, out of his mind. Both of those drugs, together and alone, make it so that people will literally refuse treatment, will literally refuse housing even when they’re living in tent encampments, even when they’re living in feces, in lethal temperatures, beaten, pimped out, because they do such a masterful job in potency and in supply of keeping, of thwarting that instinct to self-preservation. So you have methamphetamine that is driving people to homelessness, and becoming incoherent and irrational and delusional and paranoid.