This makes it cheaper for someone to start using drugs. The price drop is similar for other drugs, though purity levels have fluctuated depending on the substance. Federal data tracking the street price and potency of the drugs tells the story: In 1986, for example, meth was on average $575 per pure gram and on average at 52 percent purity in 2012, it was $194 per pure gram and 91 percent purity. And in general, illicit drugs have become cheaper and, in some cases, more potent over time. There are now reports of drug cartels producing and shipping more meth than before across the US-Mexico border - a shift from the homegrown market of the 1990s and 2000s.
Some research shows the supply of prescription opioids was a key driver in the rise of the current overdose crisis. That was followed by waves of heroin and fentanyl as traffickers tried to capitalize on the demand for opioids jump-started by painkillers. Starting with the launch of Ox圜ontin in 1996, there was a huge proliferation of opioid painkillers, letting people try and misuse the drugs. “So you have eras when you have a flourishing of a particular drug and then another one takes over.”Īccording to experts, there are many reasons for that. “The drugs are driven by fads, a little bit of fashion,” Volkow said. It’s not clear if the next phase is here yet - opioids are still a huge problem - but the worry is stimulants will start to pick up if opioids plateau and fall. Over the past decade and a half, opioid painkillers, heroin, and then fentanyl became the center of America’s drug problem. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was meth. In the 1960s and ’70s, heroin was the big drug of public concern. And it could require looking at issues that aren’t seemingly drug-related at first, like whether socioeconomic and cultural forces are driving people to use more drugs. It would mean building a comprehensive addiction treatment system that’s equipped to deal with all kinds of drugs. The answers to those questions could require a shift in how America approaches drugs, focusing not just on the substances making headlines but also addiction more broadly and the causes of addiction.
“What has happened that has made it possible for these drugs to take hold in a dramatic way?” “My question: Why are we as a country vulnerable to all of these drugs?” Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told me. That suggests that America’s drug problem is getting worse in general, regardless of which drug is involved. A 2018 study in Science found that, while drug overdose deaths spiked in the 1990s and 2000s with the opioid epidemic, there has been “exponential growth” in overdose deaths since 1979. If you’d like to help our reporting by sharing your story, please fill out this survey.īut there are reasons to believe the crisis is broader than just opioids. We’re crowdsourcing patients’ and families’ rehab stories, with an emphasis on the cost of treatment and quality of care. The Rehab Racket is Vox’s investigation into America’s notoriously opaque addiction treatment industry. (There’s some overlap between drugs in the figures, because overdoses can involve multiple drugs.)
Synthetic opioids excluding methadone - a category that mainly captures fentanyl - were associated with more than double the fatal overdoses linked to cocaine or meth alone. Meanwhile, there were nearly 47,000 overdose deaths linked to opioids. In 2018, there were nearly 13,000 overdose deaths linked to psychostimulants with misuse potential, particularly meth, and nearly 15,000 linked to cocaine, according to the CDC data. The numbers for meth and cocaine are still dwarfed by opioids. “Every opioid epidemic in American history has been followed by a stimulant epidemic,” Stanford drug policy expert Keith Humphreys told me.
That isn’t the only evidence: A recent research letter published in JAMA Network Open analyzing more than 1 million drug testing results from routine health care settings found positive hits for meth were up nearly 487 percent from 2013 to 2019, and positive hits for cocaine were up nearly 21 percent.Įxperts worry that the numbers for stimulants could foreshadow a larger epidemic - a potential “fourth wave” in the overdose crisis that’s killed more than 700,000 people in the US since 1999. Overdose deaths linked to cocaine increased by almost 5 percent. New federal data shows national overdose deaths linked to psychostimulants like meth spiked by nearly 22 percent from 2017 to 2018. But stimulants like cocaine and especially methamphetamine seem poised for a comeback. America’s drug overdose crisis is still largely dominated by opioid overdose deaths.