Methamphetamine: A History

Clinically Reviewed by Matt Hawk ICAADC, CACII, Written by Karen Hadley

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Methamphetamine's Beginning

The world's problem with methamphetamine started with the synthesis of the stimulant ephedrine in Japan in the late 1880s. Before this, ma huang, a rare herb, had been used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years as a mild stimulant. In 1885, Nagayoshi Nagai isolated the stimulant part of the herb and two years later, this stimulant was synthesized in a lab. Then in 1893, methamphetamine as we now know it was born, synthesized in a Japanese lab.

During the same time period, a German chemist synthesized a similar drug that would also be widely used as a prescription drug: amphetamine. German chemist L. Edeleanu synthesized amphetamine, which was originally named phenylisopropylamine.

In 1919, there was another significant milestone for this drug. The first crystallized methamphetamine was created in a Japanese lab. Crystallized methamphetamine is stronger, purer and when it began being abused several decades later, could be smoked. It is very quick to addict a person.

Very little was done with the drug from its synthesis until the late 1920s, when it was seriously investigated as a cure or treatment for nearly everything from depression to Parkinson's, obesity and congestion. Then someone realized that it could be marketed as an over-the-counter inhaler to treat chest congestion and asthma. Its brand name was Benzedrine.

During the Depression, a person who wanted to get intoxicated could remove the drug-saturated strips from the inhaler package and soak them in their coffee. By drinking the coffee, they would get high. Perhaps as a direct reaction to both the Depression and Prohibition, the drug was abused by non-asthmatics looking for a buzz. By 1937, it was available in tablet form and was being prescribed by doctors to treat fatigue and narcolepsy.

During World War II, this new drug found even more widespread use. The Japanese gave it to their kamikaze pilots, Germans gave it to tank drivers and soldiers. Hitler reportedly got injections of methamphetamine every day.

Allied armies mostly distributed Benzedrine tablets to soldiers and pilots. The British Army distributed an estimated 72 million tablets to its military during the war. An estimated 16 million soldiers in the U.S. Army were exposed to Benzedrine during the war.

Post-War Use of Methamphetamine

After the war, the Japanese had huge stockpiles of the drug left over and so dispensed it to the civilian population. The use of injectable methamphetamine grew dramatically after these supplies were released to the general public. By 1954, as many as two million Japanese citizens were using meth intravenously. Abuse spread to Guam and from there to the West Coast of the US.

In Germany, post-war methamphetamine was marketed to the civilian population as Pervitin. In America, Benzedrine could be purchased cheaply over the counter. By 1945, millions of tablets were being purchased and consumed.

During the 1950s and 1960s, methamphetamine was legally manufactured and sold in the United States. It was prescribed by doctors for weight control, an increase in energy or for truck drivers to stay awake during long drives. With the growing drug culture of the late 1960s, amphetamine-type drugs began to see wider use. Additionally, during the Vietnam War, American soldiers used more amphetamines than the rest of the world did during WWII. Amphetamine and methamphetamine continued to be used by the military during Desert Storm.

Methamphetamine and Amphetamine Supplies Are Controlled, Increasing Demand for Illicit Supplies

These drugs became controlled substances with the passage of the U.S. Drug Abuse Regulation and Control Act of 1970. This Act severely restricted the legal production of injectable methamphetamine, causing its use to decrease greatly. Soon, prescriptions for these two drugs dropped severely. However, illicit market production for methamphetamine, which was relatively easy to make in an illicit lab, ramped up. West Coast motorcycle gangs took up the slack, cooking up and distributing injectable or tablet forms of the drug.

In the early 1980s, the federal government imposed strict controls on P2P (Phenyl-2-propane) in an attempt to reduce production. P2P was one of the precursor chemicals for meth. Cooks on the West Coast soon found that a different precursor chemical, the drug ephedrine, was an even better ingredient in meth recipes. Before long, ephedrine and a second drug, pseudoephedrine, were the next chemicals to be controlled. The Drug Enforcement Administration began regulating these drugs in 1988, but the pharmaceutical companies began to fight back. They demanded that finished products like cold pills not be included in these controls. Essentially, these companies found a loophole.

By law, companies that sold pills containing the drug ephedrine had to keep tabs on who was buying their pills but no such controls were placed on those selling cold pills containing pseudoephedrine. So small meth operations began buying cold pills to make their drugs. Soon, when meth labs were busted, they would be littered with blister packs of cold pills.

Pseudoephedrine had to be stripped out of these pills at meth labs, therefore toxic, flammable chemicals were used to perform this step. Meth labs then became very susceptible to explosion. A member of a Central Valley Meth Task Force said, “Before you know it, 60 percent of the labs were dealing with were [having] fires and explosions because they were learning and they were making mistakes.”

Methamphetamine Manufacture Moves to Other Countries

In 1996, the Comprehensive Methamphetamine Control Act of 1996 was passed to control the chemicals needed to make methamphetamine. With each change in legislation, drug manufacturers just shifted their purchasing patterns. Mexican suppliers were buying ephedrine from Germany, Czech Republic, China and India, and supplying Superlabs (large labs capable of many pounds of production in each cycle) in the Central Valley of California. When one of the major supply channels was found and shut down by law enforcement, the purity of the drug on the street went down. It didn’t take long for other labs to take up the slack.

Methamphetamine in the New Millennium

As the drug spread to the Midwest and lives began to be lost, states fought back by enacting legislation that restricted the sale of cold medication. The number of meth labs seized began to drop across the country, falling from more than 23,703 in 2004 to 6,828 in 2007.

By 2007 in the US, there was a new recipe for making meth that was easily available on the internet. This method required much less lab equipment and also much less pseudoephedrine to turn out a batch of meth. It was called the one-pot or “shake and bake” method because the ingredients were all supposed to be combined in a two-liter soda bottle where they could be gently mixed and then would gradually turn into methamphetamine.

The process was so simple that one woman was found wandering in a Tulsa Walmart store for hours, carrying a two-liter bottle in which she was trying to make meth. She had found all the ingredients she needed right in the store. Now using a smaller quantity of cold medication that contained pseudoephedrine, meth cooks could turn out a quantity of finished meth that was worth the work.

The Rise of “Smurfing”

Cooks began to recruit meth addicts and give them money and sometimes false IDs so they could make the rounds of drugstores in the region and pick up as much cold medicine as possible. Carfuls of meth addicts with hundreds of packages of cold medication began to be noted, and meth labs often had huge piles of empty cold pill packages on hand. This method of acquiring precursor chemicals is referred to as “smurfing,” and it was rampant across the West, Midwest, South, and Northeast.

Soon, the number of meth labs seized began to rise again, reaching 11,000 by 2010. States once again began to pass legislation aimed at knocking out these small labs. Oregon and Mississippi made anything with pseudoephedrine available by prescription only and watched their problems with small labs and crime drop as a result.

It was too early to celebrate, however. Mexican drug cartels smelled a profit-making opportunity and they began to construct large meth labs in Mexico and in the Central Valley of California, capable of processing huge batches of meth. Seizures along the border began to increase. By 2011, Mexico had seized a massive lab in Mexico along with 15 tons of finished product. And in 2012, fifty-one pounds of Mexican meth were seized on Long Island, a region that had not seen much meth up to this point.

The Government of Mexico began to fight its own problem by banning the import of pseudoephedrine after whole containers of the precursor drug were found to be headed to Mexico from China, labeled as some other chemical.

Many meth lab operators in Mexico began to use a different precursor chemical that resulted in methamphetamine that was not as strong and was more adulterated with toxic chemicals. Many people in Mexico who used a particularly unrefined form of this methamphetamine suffered severe physical damage, being unable to think or talk coherently afterward. The Mexican drug cartels have a well-established presence in more than two hundred American cities, meaning that within a short drive of any part of the US, a person who craves this drug can find it.

Methamphetamine Manufacture: A Constantly Changing Scene

Of course, methamphetamine manufacturing developments didn’t stop there. In the teens of the new millennium, a powerfully potent new form of the drug arrived in American cities. A new method of cooking meth resulted in this more potent kind of drug. For a while, it was viewed as less risky and it was certainly cheaper. This newest method of cooking meth was once again called “P2P,” short for phenyl-2-propanone, the chemical precursor of pseudoephedrine. While meth abuse had always created mental and physical damage, this new kind of meth accelerated the harm.

This new, highly damaging form of methamphetamine coincided with the arrival of fentanyl in the U.S., a drug that scared so many opioid users that some switched to meth. This new form of meth resulted in a much higher incidence of meth psychosis that strained the mental health services of various states. Oregon in particular struggled with high levels of mental illness that started with meth abuse. These mental phenomena may resist treatment, compounding the problem. Those hospitalized with these problems often needed hospitalization lasting two to three months. More people who were not hospitalized ended up homeless, increasing the burden on society.

The Fourth Wave of the Opioid Crisis Involves Stimulants

America is now in the fourth wave of the opioid crisis. The first wave involved prescription opioids, and this was followed by a switch to heroin when pills became less available. The third wave showed up when the synthetic opioid arrived on American shores. After 2010, there began to be a gradual increase in polydrug deaths that involved both fentanyl and stimulants like methamphetamine or cocaine. By 2021, the number of these deaths increased 50-fold from 2010 numbers.

Crystal Meth and Methamphetamine: What You Need to Know

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Can Those Addicted to Methamphetamine Recover Their Sober Lives?

Meth is currently destroying families and lives across the US, Asia, Australia, and parts of Europe. Meth addicts can find recovery at some thirty Narconon centers located in South Africa, Europe, North and South America and Asia. These Narconon rehab centers help meth addicts recover from the sharp cravings and build a new, stable life.

To help with the cravings, there is the sauna-based detoxification phase of the overall rehab program, the Narconon New Life Detoxification. This phase of recovery has each person exercise moderately, spend time in a low-heat sauna and take a strict regimen of nutritional supplements. Together, these actions activate the body’s ability to flush out toxic residues and as these residues leave, those on this program say their cravings reduce and their outlooks on life brighten.

By the end of this rehab program, a person recovering from methamphetamine addiction has learned to build themselves a new life to replace the one destroyed by meth abuse. Learn more about this program that can bring new hope for recovery for the methamphetamine addict.

Methamphetamine addiction does not have to condemn a person to lifetime addiction, incarceration or the threat of death. Recovery is possible at a Narconon drug and alcohol rehabilitation center. Talk to a Narconon representative today to learn how soon your loved one can be on the road to recovery.