Spencer Pratt Is Creating Panic Over ‘Super Meth.’ It’s Not Even Real

Zagorski says this is likely contributing to an increase in meth use, but is a “relatively minor” factor overall, with economic insecurity and housing instability contributing far more to the crisis.

Nicky Mehtani, an assistant professor in the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital who specializes in addiction medicine and does clinical work with the homeless, told WIRED that P2P meth is nothing new. “This has been the dominant form of American supply for almost a decade,” she says. “I’ve never heard of ‘super meth’ in any clinical or scientific context, probably because it’s just the meth we’ve all been seeing for years now. There’s nothing new or ‘super’ unique at this point.”

Mehtani notes that methamphetamine use disorder is notoriously difficult to treat, in part because of the lack of FDA-approved drug therapies, and that “recovery is genuinely difficult.” But she says Pratt’s account misses the root causes of meth use among homeless people. “The most common reason I hear is functional,” says Mehtani. “People use stimulants to stay awake, stay vigilant and survive on the streets in an era of increasing criminalization of poverty and homelessness. »

“Calling it ‘super meth’ obscures all of this and reduces a complex public health problem to a moral panic, which tends to push us toward punitive responses and away from evidence-based interventions that actually help,” Mehtani warns. She considers the phrase “classic drug war language,” describing it as “vague, alarming, and not based on how clinicians or researchers actually talk about meth.”

Ryan Marino, an associate professor in the departments of emergency medicine and psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who specializes in drug addiction and toxicology, says the “super meth” claims are part of a broader propaganda campaign. (Pratt also referred to homeless people as “zombies.”)

“Pratt seems to be trying to use the same right-wing lies about drugs that we’ve seen other politicians use in recent years in areas like San Francisco and Portland, which were lies at the time and have actually led to worse outcomes for those places,” Marino says. In Oregon, recriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs has not reduced homelessness in the city of Portland, where more people are unhoused than ever before, while research in several cities has shown a strong link between police seizures of opioids and increases in overdose deaths.

“Los Angeles does not suffer from particularly worse drug problems than places governed by Republicans or with stricter drug criminalization,” Marino says. Pratt’s statement that homeless people want drugs rather than a bed and shelter “contradicts all available evidence,” he adds, observing that drug use “is not the reason for Los Angeles’ large unhoused population.”

If Pratt is truly concerned about illicit drug use and homelessness, he should advocate for “evidence-based solutions, such as public education, drug testing centers and supervised consumption centers, and regulation of the drug supply,” Marino says, as well as “drug treatment, access to mental health care and housing.”

But the candidate probably won’t take that route. Pratt currently sits second in polls behind Bass after months of demonizing unhoused people and mocking initiatives to help them recover from addiction.

The repeated phrase of “super meth,” as disingenuous as it is, gives the impression that they are dealing with something too powerful to be neutralized by civic or medical means. And perhaps that’s exactly the point: to convince Los Angeles voters that the city’s most vulnerable residents are a hopeless cause.