Oregon’s rate of meth use is 76 percent higher than the rest of the country, according to federal data, and that’s led to a spike in deaths. Methamphetamine now kills more people in Oregon every year than do prescription opioids, state data show.
Brent Canode, executive director of The Alano Club, a nonprofit recovery center based in Portland, says that meth is “largely a drug that’s used by a class of individuals that we don’t mind marginalizing.”
That's because meth is largely the drug of choice for low-income people - such as those who've seen their jobs in the timber industries go away. Those people are already marginalized, so they're relatively easy to ignore, other than dealing with the fallout:
Meth, especially, drives up crime rates, shatters families, fuels homelessness and taxes social services, experts say. The widespread use of methamphetamine in Oregon has led to soaring deaths. The number of meth-related deaths in the state outpaced those from prescription opioids for the first time in 2016, according to Oregon Health Authority data. That trend continued in 2017, with 162 people dying from meth-related overdoses compared with 115 from prescription painkillers. In 2018, the number of meth-related deaths jumped to 272, according to the drug trafficking assessment report, which has more recent figures than those published by the health authority. Those deaths are more than double the number of individuals who died from prescription painkillers -- 129 -- and accounted for 45 percent of overall drug deaths in Oregon in 2018, the report showed.
Methamphetamine is readily available from Mexico. The quality is pure and potent and it’s dirt cheap. According to the drug trafficking assessment report, the price of meth in Oregon between 2017 and 2018 fell by 18 percent, with a 25 percent drop in the Portland metro area.
In 2007, Mexico also moved cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine behind the counter. But that didn’t stop drug traffickers, Bovett said. They import precursor agents from China, manufacture the drug in illicit labs and then ship powder or liquid to the United States. It’s turned into crystal in California and sent up the Interstate 5 corridor where people buy it on the streets.
These days, it's so easy to get that it's become a huge issue - and unlike opioid addiction, there are no medical treatments to address meth addiction; if addicts want to get off the drug, it's cold-turkey only.
And most of them don't want to quit, so providing "services" to them is largely an exercise in futility - and a money-pit as well.
