Use of ‘Speed’ Regional, Study Finds

WASHINGTON — In parts of Los Angeles, methamphetamine has become more popular than cocaine. In San Diego, 31% of all arrested criminals test positive for it. In some areas near San Francisco, police say, it is involved in nine of every 10 domestic dispute cases.

Yet more than a decade after methamphetamine began to ravage California, cities like Chicago, Miami and New York still have not begun to see the problems associated with its use, according to a new Justice Department report.

“Right now it’s a West Coast and Southwestern phenomenon,” said Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department.

Experts say they are unsure why the regional discrepancies exist, but they are searching for answers.

Traditionally used by members of motorcycle gangs, methamphetamine (“speed,” “crank” or in its smokable form “ice”) has become the drug of choice for high school students, college students and cocaine users who have decided to make the switch to something new.

Addicts say they can enhance the effect of heroin by combining it with methamphetamine. And because methamphetamine usually is not injected, it does not turn away the squeamish, first-time drug user.

“That’s always dangerous, says Jon Caulkins, a researcher at Rand Corp.’s drug policy research center and at Carnegie Mellon University. “If a drug has a reputation as a dangerous and dirty drug, its long-term use won’t be as widespread.”

There are numerous factors that point to why the drug has become so popular.

Once it is ingested, users say they feel full of energy, a sense of well-being, even elation--although depression, delusion, paranoia, belligerence and sometimes aggression soon follow, creating a cycle of addiction and withdrawal similar to that experienced by crack cocaine users. And new forms of the drug are more potent, offering more euphoric highs--and posing greater risks.

The drug is also relatively inexpensive--ranging from $50 to $100 per gram, about the same as a gram of cocaine, which produces a much shorter high.

But these reasons do not explain why some parts of the country have witnessed its effects and others have not.

“The answer is proximity to Mexico,” Caulkins says, and many experts in the field agree.

Nearly all the raw materials necessary for production, known as “precursors,” flow from Mexican chemical warehouses to manufacturing sites in California.

But given that many other drugs also come through Mexico and manage to reach throughout the United States, other factors must be at work.

Eric E. Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, said he believes another reason is the complex production and distribution process involved. A certain amount of expertise is required to manufacture methamphetamine, he said, and so far it is almost exclusively Californians who learn the procedures as apprentices in labs or while in prison.

Sterling also notes that drug dealers in California have done more to create a wide customer base and a solid distribution network than have dealers in other states. “They know their customers and they make them feel comfortable with the new drug,” Sterling says.

Still, few are willing to predict how widespread methamphetamine use will be in the future.

“We don’t know where this drug is going,” Caulkins said. “Maybe it will be a brief fad, for the most part in the West. . . . Or, it could turn into something really bad for the rest of the country.”