Despite the lack of conversation, the abuse of methamphetamine remains an extremely serious problem in the United States. According to the CDC Wonder Database, in 2023 alone, over 34,000 deaths were attributed primarily to methamphetamine as a psycho stimulant drug.
I spent over a year in treatment after my overdose in 2021. I had been using drugs the way a lot of people are using drugs now—mixing psycho stimulants and illicit depressants to achieve the so-called “perfect high.” I am now over three years sober but have lost five friends to drug-related deaths and countless others to relapse. Too many of those friends, people in their late teens and twenties, went back to using meth.
In my journey of recovery from a writer’s perspective, I have delved into the data. What percentage of people in the U.S. are addicted to meth? What kind of treatments are most prone to sufficiently helping those with meth addiction? Out of all the people struggling, how many of those seek treatment?
Among us
In some areas of the U.S., meth is an even greater threat than opioids, and because of its detrimental effects, it is the number one illegal drug that contributes to violent crime. According to the 2021 National Institute on Drug Abuse, more than 16.8 million people aged 12 or older used meth at least once during their lifetime. In 2021, an estimated 246 million people reported using meth in the past 12 months.
Institutions
When considering these questions, the first places I went to were the hospitalizations that in some way or another were due to meth use and abuse. There are a number of effects that will land a person in the emergency room—overdose, seizure, dehydration, drug-induced psychosis, withdrawal, and respiratory infections. The National Library of Medicine reports that the prevalence of drug related hospital admission varies from 1.3% to 41.3% with the average rate of 15.4%. Among hospitalized patients, 2.7% died due to drug-related problems.
In the U.S. alone, drug overdose deaths tripled between 1990 and 2013, and in the first year after the COVID-19 lockdown 100,000 Americans died of overdoses.
Even today’s world, where information about almost anything can be found with the click of a button, it takes hours of research with few sources, some almost illegible, to find information about the meth epidemic in the U.S. After digging for a while, I discovered The Wiley Online Library’s statistics about methamphetamine-involved cases in hospitalizations. In 2018 alone, out of 883 drug-related visits to the emergency room, 403 patients tested positive for methamphetamine. These emergency department visits in the United States are increasing yearly and with hardly any notice.
Monster drug
Meth is a different ball game when it comes to illicit drugs. It hijacks the way your mind works, exploding the pleasure receptors and, as writer David Sheff puts it, it makes you feel like a thousand roman candles have been lit inside your brain. It also induces extreme paranoia and for some, hallucinations. It slowly deteriorates teeth and heart valves and the damage done to the brain can be irreversible if you don’t stay clean early enough or for the long term. For a drug that inflicts so much damage, it’s all too easy to get, and for those that have that addictive gene, it hooks you immediately.
When I started going to CMA, Crystal Meth Anonymous, after months of frequenting mainly AA meetings, Alcoholics Anonymous, I saw that they gave out a chip for every month up to two years. In AA, you pick up chips for 24 hours 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 6 months, 9 months, and then a year. From then on you only pick up another chip if you relapse or if you hit an anniversary. CMA was different. That’s because meth is different, it’s considered a miracle to stay off meth for days in a row, let alone years. When you first come into recovery, people in the 12-step recovery rooms of AA, NA, and CMA, will tell you to buy a suit or a black dress. They will tell you that the odds of staying sober for you and those you come in with are slim.
Trouble with treatment
In the United States, there are 994,000 people 12 years of age or older with methamphetamine use disorder, and that number is increasing.When it comes to drug addiction, the choice to go to a treatment center is an incredibly difficult one to make. Many people who need treatment don’t seek it for a number of reasons. I fought hard against rehab and almost died because of it. I didn’t want to go to treatment because I didn’t care that I had a problem, and I didn’t think life could be worth living without drugs. Approximately 40% of people suffering from addiction do not seek treatment because they don’t want to stop using.
That’s 4 out of 10 people.
A staggering 43% of U.S. adults who say they needed substance use or mental health care in the past 12 months were not given the resources they needed in order to receive that care.
This time last year, the Food and Drug Administration stated that we “critically needed to address treatment gaps,” because there is currently no FDA-approved medication for stimulant use disorder. Medication is not always the solution; however, as a lot of medications used for patients with SUD, can further the problem or inhibit a long-term solution.
12-step programs
12-step programs are free and widely available, especially in the U.S. Working certain programs like 12-step meetings during periods of sustained sobriety have been proven to increase a person’s chances of staying sober long-term. Studies have shown that people with one year of remission from heavy using were 41% more likely to remain in remission at five years if they had received addiction treatment after their first year of sobriety. Continuously working a 12-step treatment program through the fifth year of sobriety was also shown to improve the odds of staying clean long-term.
Bridget B. Hayes at ScienceDirect talks about how more than 50% of people with substance use disorders in the United States may currently have some months or years of sobriety under their belt. Unfortunately, relapse is common even during periods of sustained sobriety lasting 12 months or more. Just continuing to show up to 12-step meetings has shown me the dire reality of my situation.
12-step recovery programs like AA, CMA, and Al-Anon undoubtedly changed my life. Because I had the privilege of going to rehab and staying in a sober living for almost two years, I was able to focus solely on getting clean and staying clean. I was required by my treatment center to attend frequent meetings, take three weekly drug tests, live with strict rules, and most importantly, get a sponsor. That’s the true meat and potatoes of 12-step work. Working with someone who’s been where you have, now has a life worth living, and is a better person all because they worked with someone else who helped them through the 12 steps. It’s a cycle of life and service and it truly does work miracles.
As effective as 12-step programs can be, more needs to be done for those who have fallen into the abyss of methamphetamine addiction. Whether it be through research or just attention and care, there has to be a solution, there has to be a way forward, there has to be a way out. In just the second chapter of Undoing Drugs by Maia Szalavitz, she talks about our current failing addiction treatment system. She also talks about a possible light at the end of the tunnel.
Sparking a discussion
Dr. Cara Poland, an associate professor at the MSU College of Human Medicine says, “it’s no longer an opioid epidemic, this is an addiction crisis,” in an article for The New York Times.
Overall drug use in the United States is consistently on the rise. Almost 32 million people have been actively using drugs as of 2021 with prescription stimulants, and methamphetamines being the most popular drugs of choice.
All this and yet there has been astonishingly little discussion about the meth epidemic in the U.S.. We see a bit of awareness here and there with memoirs like Beautiful Boy by David Sheff and Undoing Drugs, and very few TV series spotlight addiction in a real way (without going by the harmful stigmas); TV series like Shameless and Euphoria. These stories are incredibly visceral and real. David Sheff talks endlessly about the difficulty with the limited research and the trouble of coming across true and reliable statistics as well as the emotional turmoil and the damage that meth does to a person’s life and the lives of their loved ones. Maia Szalavitz is considered the first author to really delve into the topic of Harm Reduction in a narrative format.
Still, it seems that most of the country, for those not already involved with addiction albeit through a family member or a loved one, or themselves, has gone quiet, out of sight out of mind on this crisis. The fundamentally wrong mindsets, the stigmas, and the idea as Szalavitz puts it that people who are addicted to drugs that are deemed illegal become “a life unworthy of life”, needs to change.
Poe Bertholon
Poe is a creative professional whose art and writing centers around addiction recovery and the beauty of human nature.
