Meth and Fentanyl

[George K]

How Frighteningly Strong Meth Has Supercharged Homelessness

You write a fair bit about homelessness and how it intersects with drug addiction. You’ve observed that this meth renders people shells of themselves very quickly. Does fentanyl have the same effect? And how do those two drugs, in your view, exacerbate the problem of people living on the streets in places like L.A. and Portland, Oregon?
Both of them are intensely addictive, and both of them do a masterful job of what every drug of abuse has always done, and that is to hijack our instinct for self-preservation. These two drugs come in such enormous quantities and have such staggering potency that they do the job far more masterfully than drugs have done it before. So you have methamphetamine that is driving people to homelessness, and becoming incoherent and irrational and delusional and paranoid.

Fentanyl is highly, highly addictive, and it’s basically ridding our country of heroin. There’s very little heroin on the streets of America anymore, which is an amazing thing to say. Fentanyl has essentially outcompeted it. 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.

Are there any places that have taken a particularly effective or ineffective approach to this problem, in your view — dealing with the humanity of these people whose lives have been shattered while getting them off the streets and somewhere better?
This is such a new problem, and we’ve been consumed with COVID for the last two years. 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. Meth has been marching across the country in these staggering supplies since about 2012 or 2013, I would say, but it’s also a drug that really doesn’t create the headlines fentanyl does.

Because it doesn’t kill people as quickly, right?
It doesn’t kill people. It’s also like the pure raw face of addiction — people out of their minds wandering in the streets, screaming naked like some Allen Ginsberg poem. It’s something that people would prefer not to have to face, I think. 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. And so when it comes to meth, there hadn’t been the recognition as a major source of problems in so many parts of the country until my book came out. We’re all still talking about the opioid epidemic. And with fentanyl, it hasn’t reached national proportions until just before COVID hit, and then COVID took up all the conversation for the last two years.

We are just now trying to figure this all out. You’re seeing San Diego, you’re seeing L.A., you’re seeing New York and different places try to deal with it in one way or another. But it seems to me to have surpassed, in some fundamental way, the ability of any town or county to do much about it. 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. Seriously, I mean, when you’re talking about the supply as being the major issue here, and I think it absolutely is, you’re standing in the tide and trying to keep the tide from going out. Since all this has developed, Obama, Trump, and now Biden — none of them has really dealt with this issue the way I think, internationally, the way it needs to be.