That the meth is really contributing to the formation of these encampments. I just spoke with a guy in Boston where this is the case as well. And I think, also, you can chart the rise of the tent encampments so common in the West, but also now all across the country in many areas. On the contrary, what it seems to breed is a very sinister kind of schizophrenia, horrible paranoia, great amounts of hallucinations and with that of course comes homelessness. And with that you began to see a whole new experience-very sinister, very lonely people isolating horribly in their own minds. The Mexican government made ephedrine illegal and the trafficking world gradually shifted to a new way of making meth using the precursor known as p2p, phenyl-2-propanone. And then the way of making meth changed down in Mexico because it had to. It decayed you over a number of years and there were famous posters out of Multnomah County or mugshots of people this happened to, but it was a kind of a euphoric drug, a party drug, a social drug, making you want to spend a lot of time around people and so on. With the way that Mexican traffickers were making meth before, using a chemical called ephedrine which you find in the Sudafed pills, the methamphetamine that they were producing is not good for you. Quinones: I think the important thing is to understand that there’s a before and then there’s an after. What do we need to understand as lay people about two different ways to make meth? This is, after all, about people’s lives being devastated by drugs, but the story hinges on chemistry. Miller: So humans are at the heart of your story. Sam Quinones: Thanks for having me again, David, good to talk with you. Sam Quinones, welcome back to Think Out Loud. Part of the new book was adapted into an article for the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine. Quinones connects the widespread availability of this meth to homelessness and to serious mental health crises playing out daily on American streets. It focuses on the latest drug scourges, the synthetic opioid Fentanyl and a new highly dangerous psychosis-inducing formulation of meth. Now he has a new book called, “The Least of Us.” It comes out tomorrow.

In 2015, he published an award-winning book called “Dreamland.” It traced the origins and the devastating consequences of the opioid epidemic in this country. This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.ĭave Miller: We start today with the reporter Sam Quinones. In a new article in The Atlantic magazine, Quinones argues that the way meth is being made currently has changed the chemical structure of the drug and made it much more dangerous to users’ mental health. His newest book, “The Least of Us,” focuses on fentanyl and meth. Journalist and author Sam Quinones has written a lot about the drug trade.

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