Super Meth Isn’t The Hero We Want, But It’s The Hero We Deserve

Overhype

from the saving-us-from-the-hideous-burden-of...-teeth dept

Our war on drugs began with a simple man with a simple plan. That plan was this: give the government more powers at the expense of civil rights, all under the “leadership” of soon-to-be-deposed president Richard Nixon and known drug enthusiast, Elvis Presley.

While that summary is long on pithiness and short on detail, it’s not that far from the truth. The government wanted more ways to lock people up and take their stuff, and a “war” on drugs was the best way to sidestep constitutional protections that might otherwise prevent the government from locking up as many minorities as possible.

The “War on Drugs” has always been racist. Pretty much the only reason marijuana and opium were originally determined to be illegal was because Black and Chinese people became the convenient scapegoats, even when it was clear whites were far more likely to abuse these drugs, especially the opiates.

Racism and the Drug War have gone hand in hand since the early 1900s. It gained even more traction following the passage of laws protecting the civil rights of minorities, which saw Richard Nixon trying to undo the good Lyndon Johnson had done as perhaps the only redneck-with-a-conscience this nation has ever elected as president.

Since the usual racist shit doesn’t play quite as well as it used to 50 years ago (well, except for at the federal level), cops are now pretending drugs currently on the market are more powerful and dangerous than ever. This should be an indictment of the War on Drugs, but drug warriors are incapable of recognizing their contribution to the purity and easy availability of the same drugs they claim they’re fighting on behalf of America.

Cops like to pretend that the mere presence of fentanyl during busts and arrests is enough to kill officers, even though it’s impossible to overdose on any drug without actually ingesting it. Meth used to be the drug scourge of choice when the government felt like getting its racism on, but that fell out of favor when it was discovered to be the substance of choice of white people residing in the Midwest and southern Bible Belt.

Efforts were made to tie drug use to non-whites, which has resulted in the Trump administration declaring it’s legally in the right to drone strike any boats cruising through international waters south of the US border.

Panic artists continue to pretend every drug is the mass murderer, including former reality TV stars hoping to contain control of one this nation’s largest cities, as Miles Klee reports for Wired.

Spencer Pratt, once the villain of the 2000s MTV reality show The Hills and now an insurgent candidate in this year’s Los Angeles mayoral race, had a breakthrough moment in his first debate performance last Wednesday.

Turning to his signature issue of public safety, Pratt berated his opponents—Mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember Nithya Raman—for not doing enough about unhoused people dealing with drug addiction.

“The reality is, no matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth,” Pratt said, criticizing Raman’s plan to expand addiction treatment. “I will go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with her, and we can find some of the people she’s gonna offer treatment for. She’s gonna get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or super meth.”

SUPER METH. Dang.

Hopefully, it’s as cheap and easy to obtain as regular meth. I mean, it should be.

What is “super” meth, you might ask? Well, if it actually exists at all, it’s a direct result of this nation’s Drug War efforts to prevent regular non-drug users from obtaining stuff like Sudafed without having to get pharmacy staff involved.

Super Meth Is More Potent Than Traditional Meth: After U.S. restrictions on meth precursors in 2006, cartels developed a purer form—often at least 93% pure—that can produce a high lasting up to 24 hours, significantly increasing addiction and overdose risk.

That’s from “rehab” super group Aliya, which helpfully has a “brands” page on its website, along with this statement (no citations included) about the existence and origin of “super meth.”

It would seem the most rational response to US efforts to curtail local efforts to brew up acceptable meth would be to offer a cheap knockoff that undercut US restrictions by giving users what they wanted without generating more expenses on the supply side. I’ll tap the screen again to remind readers that this claim by a for-profit rehab center that — at the end of April 2026 — laid off 80 employees and closed at least two California rehab facilities. This may or may not be related to Aliya’s legal troubles with the federal government:

Not long after Johnson’s appointment, the company found itself the target of a U.S. Federal Trade Commission lawsuit in June 2025. The FTC accused that a former owner of an addiction treatment center that Aliya acquired, consultant groups and others of engaging in deceptive marketing practices. 

A lot of this is neither here nor there. But it’s hardly encouraging that the first few so-called expert sources on “super meth” have been generated by entities in the for-profit rehab business. And so it is for opportunists/political hopefuls like Spencer Pratt. It doesn’t matter whether or not any of this adds up. It doesn’t matter than it doesn’t make sense for international drug cartels to make a stronger product to compete with tepid domestic US meth and then apparently sell it at the same price point.

These are words of opportunists who want regular people to believe a new drug scourge is worth throwing money at. Whether that money is harvested by a corporation that offers for-profit rehab services or a politician who thinks adding the word “super” to something makes them a better candidate doesn’t matter. Both entities are exploiting a knowledge gap to enrich themselves.

Pratt can be forgiven for just being a mayoral hopeful willing to traffic in lies to get elected. Aliya (and others like it) have no excuse. They’re leveraging ignorance to increase profits. They’re both entirely wrong about this supposed new drug plague.

“Thankfully, super meth isn’t real,” says Claire Zagorski, a paramedic, harm reductionist, and PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy. “If there really was a new type of meth, it’d have its own chemical name and we’d be hearing about it from much more reputable sources than Mr. Pratt.”

The reality of the situation is far more mundane than these people are willing to admit. Meth production relied on phenyl-2-propanone (P2P) for decades before it was placed on the DEA’s drug schedule in 1980. The next closest thing was pseudoephedrine (Sudafed, etc.), which meth producers used until the government cracked down on that by treating regular people like drug dealers by limiting their purchases and requiring they turn over their identifying info to obtain what used to be an over-the-counter medication.

Now that pseudoephedrine is about as difficult to obtain as P2P, the drug has undergone iterations depending on what’s more easily available. It didn’t suddenly make meth “super.” All it did was change (depending on what’s available) the end product. And yet, we’re getting another wave of panic led by aspiring politicians and rehab centers who want potential clients to feel that the meth they’re currently using is far more potent than the meth they’ve always been using.

Color me cynical. Everyone knows meth will fuck you up on multiple levels. Meth users aren’t going to be dissuaded just because someone is saying weird stuff about “super meth.” Everything about this is performative and does a disservice to everyone — including the people these entities (public and private) claim to be helping — by pretending whatever meth is currently available is an insta-killer that can only be stopped by (1) oppressive government action and/or (2) paying a whole lot of money to people who would have charged less for services if “super meth” wasn’t currently making national headlines.

In the end, it’s the same old bullshit. People in government want more power, so they’ll use the most convenient excuse to obtain it. People in the business of milking every last dollar out of the victims of the US’s failed Drug War will do the same thing. Meanwhile, no one gets better and the flow of drugs to users doesn’t decrease. But these middlemen will continue to see steady profits, all while they pretend to care about the people they’re using as pawns.

Filed Under: california, death cult, gop, hysteria, los angeles, spencer pratt, war on drugs