Meth, ‘the devil’s drug,’ is back and killing more people than ever

 By Joshua Sharpe, St. Lous Post-Dispatch

Posted Jul 14, 2018 at 5:00 PM

Tori Holcomb knew the dangers of addiction. She got addicted to painkillers after a softball injury, then heroin and meth. This is her story:

Before news of an opioid crisis tore through national media, Tori Holcomb knew the dangers of painkillers. She got addicted after a softball injury and saw others around her struggling, too.
Before the resurgence of heroin caused alarm, Holcomb knew it was getting more popular. She fell into using the drug, and the bleak new world that came with it, when doctors stopped writing her prescriptions for an opioid.

It is the afflicted who are first to know about every epidemic.

Now, Holcomb knows something else most people don’t: Methamphetamine, a drug that lawmakers fought with success in the 2000s, is back — and it’s more popular, plentiful and lethal than ever.
While the opioid crisis takes the spotlight, prosecutors and police say they also have been coming to grips with the devastating rebound of meth, which is killing more people in America today than in the mid-2000s when it was the national drug problem that got the most attention.

Deaths related to stimulants — mostly meth — were up nationwide by more than 250 percent from 2005 to 2015, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The reason for the resurgence is maddening.

Experts say lawmakers, police and prosecutors got better and better at curtailing the country’s meth manufacturing in the 2000s, until they drove most production out of the U.S. and into Mexico. There, cartels make a more potent and cheaper version of the drug. In America, their product is now so widely available that a drug once mostly used by working-class white people is spreading to every demographic.

“It’s the devil’s drug,” said Jason Prince, a user turned dealer turned federal inmate, who is serving a 10-year prison sentence in South Georgia.

And while the nation was busy watching one epidemic, another was regenerating.

At North Gwinnett High School more than a decade ago, Holcomb saw friends broken by meth, a drug with awful side effects. Her friends picked at sores on their faces compulsively, and their behavior was erratic. Some had bouts of psychosis. This isn’t all meth can do. It can rot teeth. It makes the user gaunt and look like death. Over time, it can even lower a user’s IQ.

Holcomb considered it a filthy drug. She tried to help her friends and talk them through it, partly because she’d watched her grandfather die of cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol abuse.


Holcomb said she understood having a void to fill. She’d always had a nagging feeling of being “less than,” especially in high school, and addiction had blighted her family tree for generations. But she didn’t yet understand addiction. She wondered why her friends couldn’t just stop.

Most people didn’t understand meth.

It’s a highly addictive, supercharged cousin of amphetamine. Amphetamine, developed in Japan in 1919, greatly energizes users, so Japanese and German soldiers took it to power through World War II. It also induced euphoric feelings. By the 1980s, biker gangs on the West Coast were using meth after they found that it could be made with household products, including the key ingredient ephedrine, or pseudoephedrine, which is found in many cold medicines.

In the ensuing years, labs appeared in houses and trailers and garages across America.

By 2005, news of meth’s ravages was on display in the national media.

Holcomb was more concerned with opioids, which hadn’t yet been declared an epidemic. She learned about addiction when her doctor stopped giving her Percocet, the opioid prescribed for the softball injury. The doctor, she said, never told her how bad the pills were, or rather, how good they would make her feel, how they would grip her.

At least I’m not doing meth, Holcomb told herself as she turned to heroin.

Meth was so widespread that newspapers used the term “Meth Capital of the World” to describe no less than 70 locations across the country, according to Nick Reding’s book “Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.” Labs, which use volatile chemicals, seemed to be exploding everywhere and burning people to death. Cookers showed up at pharmacies and plunked huge amounts of cold medicine down at check-out counters.

Pak was an assistant prosecutor in the Atlanta U.S. attorney’s office and said he watched meth become “king” in the district, displacing cocaine.

Congress and state lawmakers across the U.S. set out to legislate away the epidemic by making it much harder to buy cold medicine, especially in large quantities.

“The legislation worked,” Pak said. “It worked.”

In the next few years, the national conversation died down as the number of domestic labs plummeted. For the most part, the only American cookers left were making small batches, prosecutors said.

But the industry was building back up, this time in Mexico. The government there also made the ingredients harder to get, only to have the cartels import them from China and India, authorities say.
Soon, a flood was coming for America.

By 2010, Holcomb had been a heroin addict for several years. She worked at restaurants and frequently got fired, she said, because she always seemed to be late. She felt dragged down by the drug. She needed more energy.

So she turned to meth.

The first hit had the desired effect: euphoria, energy pulsing through her body. She rose from lounging endlessly in her recliner and felt she could live again.

But after a few days, she was ashamed. She’d done the dirty drug; she felt dirty. She turned on the faucet, took soap in her hands and scrubbed. Her eyes told her there was nothing there, that chemicals bounding in her brain couldn’t be washed away with soap on her hands. But she couldn’t stop scrubbing.

As time passed, more consequences came. She felt rage, had too much energy. She screamed. She started shoplifting. Once, she thought she’d slip in and out of a store undetected, but got caught and later discovered she’d never left. She’d been wandering around the store for hours.

When she found out she was pregnant, she faced a choice.

Holcomb said she managed to sober up to have her son in early 2014. But she had never dealt with the self-doubt that had facilitated her drug use. She faced postpartum depression. She went back to meth to cope. She thought the energy would help her be a better mother.

Meth was getting cheaper and more plentiful, fast.

Back in 2005, her friends from school might’ve paid $200 for a gram. In 2015, a user could get about seven grams for that amount in Gwinnett County, as Holcomb remembers. But she was friendly with dealers and got it even cheaper.

The cartels were shipping the drug out in liquid form, which is easier to conceal during smuggling — in water bottles, fire extinguishers and Mason jars.

The liquid goes to “conversion labs,” often run out of houses, where it’s turned into crystal. Metropolitan Atlanta has most of the state’s conversion labs, said Jamie Jones, special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Southeastern Regional Drug Enforcement Office in Statesboro. He says dealers from across Georgia and the Southeast get supply from these labs.

“It’s everywhere,” he said.

In Middle Georgia, for example, crack cocaine, which used to be popular, has become extremely hard to find, Jones said. But meth, a natural replacement since it’s also a stimulant, abounds.

Jones’ agents see it wrecking countless lives.

In Holcomb’s case, it nearly ended hers.

Opioids are still involved in more deaths than any other drug type in Georgia. But data suggest that meth, even now at its new historic height, is a growing crisis.

From 2011 to 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency found that the average price per gram in the U.S. fell from $98 to $58.

Both meth and heroin can cause heart failure, and Holcomb was testing the limits in February 2015.

Her boyfriend kept threatening to keep their son away if she didn’t stop using. Sometimes, he would find Holcomb passed out in her recliner. Sometimes, washing her hands over and over, her knuckles dry and cracking.

On Feb. 24, she’d been up for five days on meth and heroin when she dozed in the chair. She hardly had a pulse when her boyfriend found her.

Paramedics gave her Narcan, which can reverse opiate overdose, and she came to. At the hospital, drugs fell out of her clothes and staff told police. She ended up at the Gwinnett County jail.

She entered the county’s drug court program and moved into a halfway house. Nine months after her overdose, she and a friend from the halfway house relapsed.

Three months later, the same friend overdosed and died.

Holcomb knew it could’ve been her.

The path forward to combat the latest meth crisis is hazy.

Pak, who became the Atlanta U.S. attorney in 2017, expects it to get worse before it gets better. He looks at the American meth problem not as a disease that can be cured, but one that must be managed.

The way to do that, he and other officials say, is to cut the supply by going after high-level distributors and their organizations. People ask him if it’s hopeless, because the supply comes from outside the U.S.

“If there was no enforcement, this problem would be 100-fold,” Pak said.

After Holcomb’s friend’s death, she didn’t use again. She confronted that “less than” feeling. She prayed. She dieted and got healthier. She went to Narcotics Anonymous. She and her boyfriend are raising their son together.

Holcomb refers to her drug period as “death” and her sobriety as “life.” She knows she is among the lucky. She knows many die from meth or stay addicted for decades.

She works for Navigate Recovery. One of her duties is to go to emergency rooms to talk to overdose patients, to tell them of her experience.

“There is life after death,” she tells them.

The program focuses on opioid overdoses. She knows the temptation to go back to escaping with pills, that it is easier. She knows if the patients feel slowed down by painkillers, they can easily find meth to reinvigorate themselves.

She tells them to keep in touch, even if they aren’t ready to stop yet.