The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

by Sam Quinones

“Meth reminds me of what alcoholics go through,” said the director of a Los Angeles treatment center I spoke with. “There’s alcohol everywhere. Meth is now so readily available. There’s an availability to it that is not the case with heroin or crack. It’s everywhere.” Yet something else was different about this new meth coming in. Ephedrine meth was a euphoric, social drug, a party drug—the kind Eric Barrera remembered from his first years of using. P2P meth, made with toxic chemicals, was more sinister. As unprecedented amounts of it found their way to every part of the United States, so, too, did the mental derangement Dillon had seen in his customers and the violent delusions Eric Barrera had felt. This meth quickly drove users to symptoms of schizophrenia—violent paranoia, agonizing hallucinations, and fantastical conspiracy theories—as well as horrible dental infections. “I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore,” one director of a drug-rehab center told me. “Meth was meant to keep you up,” said one Kentucky truck driver, who saw the change as he used it for many years. “You was able to concentrate on one thing. This meth now, though, you’re hallucinating. It got so bad with the new meth, I screwed my windows shut, my doors shut, because I didn’t want nobody around me. I locked my family in the house with me.” All this was noticed only by users, paramedics, cops, and drug counselors. The rest of the country was focused on the opioid epidemic. The funding an...