Fentanyl, 'pure' synthetic meth driving American homelessness

Powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl and a stronger form of methamphetamine are a key factor in America’s spiraling homelessness crisis, saddling users with debilitating addiction and mental illness that make functioning in society near-impossible.

"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," author Sam Quinones, who detailed the opioid crisis in his work, told Intelligencer last week.

"So you have methamphetamine that is driving people to homelessness, and becoming incoherent and irrational and delusional and paranoid."

Homelessness in America has surged in recent years after falling through the early 2000s, reports Fox News. According to a 2022 analysis by the National Alliance for Homelessness said the U.S. homeless population fell from a high of over 647,000 in 2007 to almost 550,000 in 2016. But it has since risen back up to 580,000 in 2020.

Fentanyl has been covered broadly as the primary driver of the opioid crisis because of how easily one can fatally overdose on the drug. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl accounted for 82.3% of opioid-involved overdose deaths in 2020, according to CDC data.

But meth has flown under the radar because users are likely to have their health decay over time instead of dying of an accidental overdose.

"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," Quinones said in the Intelligencer interview.

"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."

This problem gotten worse with the advent of a more powerful synthetic meth that can be made from cheap, legal industrial chemicals. Much meth had been used ephedrine, a drug found in decongestants like Sudafed, whose sale had been restricted over the last decade. Making it with the ephedrine method was also very dangerous and had small yields.

Meth made with phenyl-2-propanone, or P2P, could be made with widely available ingredients but did not deliver the desired high unless it was purified. And according to an article by Quinones in The Atlantic last year, mastering purification has allowed drugmakers to produce meth on an industrial scale.

Quinones said that the ease and scale of P2P meth manufacturing made it cheaper and more widely available. The newer strain also appears to be more harmful to its users, especially to their brains, and has called on more collaboration between U.S. and Mexican authorities on its flow north.