Zagorski says this is likely contributing to an uptick in meth use, but that it’s a “relatively minor” factor overall, with economic precarity and housing instability doing far more to drive 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 homeless people, tells WIRED that P2P meth is nothing new. “It’s been the dominant form in the US supply for the better part of a decade,” she says. “I’ve never heard it called ‘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 novel or uniquely ‘super’ about it at this point.”
Mehtani notes that meth use disorder is notoriously difficult to treat, in part due to the lack of any FDA-approved pharmacotherapies, and that “recovery is genuinely difficult.” But she says that Pratt’s narrative misses the root causes of meth use among people experiencing homelessness. “The most common reason I hear is functional,” Mehtani says. “People are using stimulants to stay awake, to maintain vigilance, to survive on the streets at a time of increasing criminalization of poverty and homelessness.”
“Calling it ‘super meth’ obscures all of that and reduces a complex public health problem to a moral panic, which tends to push us toward punitive responses and away from the evidence-based interventions that actually help,” Mehtani warns. She considers the phrase to be “classic War on Drugs language,” describing it as “vague, alarming, and not grounded in how clinicians or researchers actually talk about methamphetamine.”
Ryan Marino, an associate professor in the Departments of Emergency Medicine and Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who specializes in addiction and toxicology, says the “super meth” claims are part of a broader propaganda push. (Pratt has also referred to homeless people as “zombies.”)
“Pratt seems to be trying to use the same right-wing drug lies as we have seen other politicians use in recent years in areas like San Francisco and Portland, which were lies at the time and which have actually led to worse outcomes for those places,” Marino says. In Oregon, the recriminalization of possession of small amounts of drugs has not reduced homelessness within the city of Portland, where more people are unhoused than ever, while research from multiple cities has shown a strong link between police drug busts of opioids and increased overdose deaths.
“Los Angeles is not suffering particularly worse from drug problems than places governed by Republicans or with stricter drug criminalization,” Marino says. Pratt’s line about homeless people wanting drugs rather than a bed and shelter “contradicts all available evidence,” he adds, observing that drug use “isn’t the reason for LA’s large unhoused population.”
If Pratt is truly concerned about illicit drug use and homelessness, he should advocate for “evidence-based solutions like public education, drug checking facilities and supervised consumption centers, and regulation of the drug supply,” Marino says, as well as for “drug treatment, access to mental health care, and housing.”
The candidate, however, probably won’t go that route. Pratt is currently polling in second place behind Bass after months of demonizing the unhoused and mocking initiatives to help them recover from addiction.
The repeated “super meth” soundbite, spurious as it is, makes it sound as if they’re in the grips of something too powerful to counteract by civic or medical means. And maybe that’s exactly the point: to convince Los Angeles voters that the city’s most vulnerable residents are a hopeless cause.
