GoKawiilSpencer Pratt, once the villain of the 2000s MTV reality show The Hills and now an insurgent candidate in this year’s Los Angeles mayoral race, had a breakthrough moment in his first debate performance last Wednesday.
Turning to his signature issue of public safety, Pratt berated his opponents—Mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember Nithya Raman—for not doing enough about unhoused people dealing with drug addiction.
“The reality is, no matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth,” Pratt said, criticizing Raman’s plan to expand addiction treatment. “I will go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with her, and we can find some of the people she’s gonna offer treatment for. She’s gonna get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or super meth.”
The viral attack on Bass and Raman was not some anomaly: On the campaign trail, Pratt, a registered Republican running as an independent, has routinely conjured dystopian visions of LA’s urban sprawl, nearly always punctuated by the watchword “super meth.” It’s a term that suggests a drug crisis beyond anything the average voter had imagined, a terrifying new tide of ultra-potent methamphetamines flooding the streets. There’s just one small detail that undercuts Pratt’s message: “Super meth” isn’t a thing.
“Thankfully, super meth isn't real,” says Claire Zagorski, a paramedic, harm reductionist, and PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy. “If there really was a new type of meth, it'd have its own chemical name and we'd be hearing about it from much more reputable sources than Mr. Pratt.”
Zagorski explains that while some have used the phrase “super meth” to differentiate phenyl-2-propanone (or P2P) methamphetamine from meth made with pseudoephedrine, “it's all still meth at the end.” (You may recall that Breaking Bad’s Walter White preferred the P2P process for cooking meth because it allowed him to scale up his operation.) P2P meth is the molecular mirror-image of the meth that was once more common in the US, but that doesn’t make it a distinct drug.
P2P-produced meth, as Zagorski wrote in a 2022 article for Filter magazine, actually emerged in the 1970s, with suppliers shifting to the pseudoephedrine found in the decongestant Sudafed when P2P was federally scheduled in 1980. Then, after the government cracked down on pseudoephedrine in 2006—restricting and tracking pharmacy sales—meth manufacturers went back to P2P. Which, as Zagorski noted in her piece, shows no signs of being “any more or less neurotoxic” than the alternative.
Notions that this wave of meth was particularly harmful may trace in part to journalist Sam Quinones’ 2021 book The Least of Us and accompanying article in The Atlantic, each mentioning a “new meth” that supposedly had far more extreme and debilitating side effects than the pseudoephedrine version. (Quinones did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Following the LA mayoral debate, he penned a Los Angeles Times op-ed acknowledging that super meth “isn’t exactly real.”)
Pratt’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment on their definition of “super meth” or where the candidate picked up the term.
“What has changed in the past several years is purity and price,” Zagorski says. That’s because a new refining process developed in Europe in 2020 and exported to Mexico has “allowed drug manufacturers to lower prices and ensure a more pure product.” The method separates and recycles the less desirable molecular form of meth included in product yield—typically about half the total—into the kind users want.