Methamphetamine has a scary reputation as one of the most addictive and dangerous drugs out there. But at the same time, it's an FDA-approved drug — and can even be used to treat ADHD in children. So just how dangerous and addictive is meth? And what’s going on in your brain when you use it? We hear from Science Vs listeners who’ve used it — and the scientists who study it, including neuroscientists Professor Martin Paulus and Dr. Jennifer Hsieh, as well as Dr. Kate O'Malley and Dr. Krista Siefried. Find drug use resources here: spotify.com/resources Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsMeth In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Methamphetamine: The Scariest Drug (03:44) Super Meth? (04:35) What it feels like to take Meth (05:57) What meth does in the brain (09:20) Can Meth break your brain? (21:51) Meth Mouth: Is it real? (25:55) How Meth Breaks your Heart (26:52) How addictive is Meth? (36:42) New research to help people with Meth Dependence (38:08) Meth: The Most Misunderstood Drug This episode was produced by me Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bobby Lord. Music written by Bobby Lord, Bumi Hidaka, So Wylie, Emma Munger and Peter Leonard. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to including, Dr Heather Barkholtz, Professor Nadine Ezard, Dr Nicole Lee, Dr Samantha Brooks, Dr Steph Kershaw, Professor Steven Shoptaw, Dr Susan Calcaterra, Professor Harriet de Wit, and Professor Edyth London. Also thanks to the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is methamphetamine and why is its reputation so scary?
Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, methamphetamine. More and more people in the US are trying it, and it's got this reputation as being one of the scariest and most addictive drugs out there. Is that true? I feel like basically every message that we get about meth is that it's this uniquely dangerous drug, almost in a category of its own.
Like in this government PSA, you see a normal teenager whose life is ruined by it.
I wish my tire had blown out that night. I wish my car had skidded off the road. I wish I'd broken my neck, but I didn't crash. I drove to that party, and I did meth for the first time. I did meth, and now this is my life.
And that's the idea, right? That meth is so addictive that if you try it just once at a party, you won't be able to stop. And in the meantime, it'll destroy your life. We hear that meth will rot your gums, make your teeth fall out. I mean, ever heard of meth mouth? And even worse, apparently after using meth, your brain will never be the same again.
Some people, they just lose it. Stop! Research shows that taking methamphetamine, even just a few times, can impair your brain and movement for life.
And I should say that not all meth PSAs went for the scare the hell out of you approach.
I do have to play this bonkers ad that my editor remembers hearing a lot when she grew up in the Midwest.
Look at me, busy as a bee. Where'd I get all this energy? Oh man, mm man.
But even this busy bee, who's frantically cleaning her house with a toothbrush, ends up in bad shape. And if all that wasn't bad enough, watching the news, it seems like we're in a meth epidemic with this super addictive drug only getting more powerful. This month, the New York Times wrote that meth is more dangerous than ever.
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Chapter 2: Is 'super meth' really a new, more dangerous version?
Hey there. Do you like learning wild and wonderful new things about science? Well, have I got a show for you. I'm Rachel Feltman, the host of Scientific American's podcast, Science Quickly. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Science Quickly offers bite-sized deep dives into the latest breakthroughs in science and tech.
Whether you're into sexual health or supernovas, quick news roundups, or immersive narratives, we've got you covered. Check out Science Quickly on your favorite podcast app today. We promise we'll make it worth your time.
Welcome back. Today on the show, meth. So right off the bat here, there's this idea that the new meth on the street is like meth on steroids. It's sometimes called super meth and headlines are screaming that it's a monster. It's actually not a new drug. Meth is still meth. But for a while now, it's been produced in a different way. And a big thing is that it's cut with less crap.
An analysis of meth samples in the US done by the Drug Enforcement Administration found that in the late 90s, the purity of meth that you'd buy on the street was about 20%. Fast forward more than 20 years. On average, it's almost 97% pure. That is Walter White-level pure. So now let's find out what meth, just meth, is doing to our brain.
And I really wanted to understand just what it felt like to take meth. So I reached out to our listeners who had tried it and had these awesome conversations about the highs and the lows of using meth. So here's how they described what meth can feel like.
Meth makes your whole body kind of tingly instantly in like a nice way. Almost like glistening. Almost like Edward in Twilight. You know, he's in the sun and he's just like kind of glistening. That's kind of how you feel on meth.
And I felt very on alert. I, you know, everything was sort of heightened. I was wide awake, probably not blinking as much as a regular person.
I remember just being like really horny, really horny. You know, wanting to be like touched and like...
kiss and like you know all of this like really intense kind of like feeling of like me wanting to be with this guy um in every in any way possible oh wow like it just felt like it unlocked everything every pathway in my head i remember feeling socially perfect no anxiety it just makes like all of your best parts better it feels like it's just turning on the happy in your head
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Chapter 3: What does it feel like to take methamphetamine?
And so the dopamine system turns up the knob a little bit and you say, oh, wow, you know, this is really, this is really something. Time passes, and then... The dopamine is sucked back up into the nerve cell, and it's basically gone, right? And so you get the little blip, and it's gone.
What methamphetamine does... Is it floods parts of your brain with dopamine, but then... It stops that sucking up. And the fact that then it stops it getting sucked back, so the dopamine will hang around for longer as well?
That's right. That's right, yeah. And so literally you get this flood of dopamine that comes out of nowhere and everything seems like great. People who, even the first time they do that, they say it's like 100 times an orgasm.
Studies in rats have found that meth increases dopamine in a part of their brain by more than 1,000%. Compare that to cocaine, which bumped up dopamine by a measly 350%. Meth also crosses the blood-brain barrier really quickly, so if you're snorting, injecting or smoking it, it means you can get high super fast. Plus, that high can last for hours, some eight times longer than coke.
So that is part of the reason that meth can give you this incredible high, because it's flooding your brain with dopamine. Dopamine also helps you focus and pay attention to things, which is why a little bit of meth can work as a medication for ADHD. But feeling that huge happy in your head, it doesn't last forever, because like other drugs, your brain builds up a tolerance.
Dopamine works by binding to all these little receptors on your brain cells. But as you keep using meth, your brain takes some of those receptors away. So here's Martin, our neuroscientist again.
So you get the dopamine, but there's nobody listening on the other side or fewer receptors listening. So you don't get the same effect after a while. Right? It's no longer like this roof, this incredible hit. But now it's like a little poof.
So that is why you might not keep twinkling as bright as a teen heartthrob when you keep using meth. But then our next question is, what are the risks here? Because people say that meth can break your brain in all kinds of ways. And one thing that a lot of our listeners were worried about who had used meth was how the drug had affected their memory.
And it is true that when you're using a lot of meth or soon after you stop, it can screw with your cognition and memory. One paper said it was similar to what you might see in folks with alcohol use disorder. You can even see abnormalities popping up in brain scans of heavy meth users.
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Chapter 4: How does methamphetamine affect the brain chemically?
But what a lot of the scary meth news articles out there don't tell you is that if you stop using meth, your brain can at least partly recover. Studies show that even after long-term heavy use, once users stay off meth for, let's say, six months, a year, their scores on cognitive tests improve, including their memory. Over time, some areas of the brain itself even start to look more normal.
Martin told me that this is good news here.
The point being is there's enormous regenerative capacity in the brain. I mean, there are limitations, but there's a tremendous amount of regeneration that can happen.
In the longer term, there are some other things to worry about, though, like meth might put you at an increased risk of Parkinson's disease, which is a disease related to dopamine. But the big thing that you hear a lot about when it comes to meth is that it'll make you go basically psycho, where you start seeing things and hearing things.
One of our listeners, she asked me to call her Tina, started off just taking meth with friends to go dancing on the weekend. She'd party all weekend on this big binge, and on her way home, sometimes she'd start to see things.
What? What would happen is when I was driving home, out of my peripheral vision, I would swear that I saw someone walking up out of the woods and like walking towards the road. And then as soon as you shift your vision over and you look directly at them, they're gone because they were never there in the first place. But yeah, I saw many shadow people. Did you have any other hallucinations?
Oh, yeah. There is a video of me somewhere that a friend took trying to catch bugs. They were not there. There were no bugs there.
For another listener, we'll call him Theo. After he was using meth for a couple of years, when he was high, he would get into this really creepy headspace.
You know, I couldn't leave the house or drive because I was so paranoid. You know, I had like blankets covering all of my windows and I would just like stand there.
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Chapter 5: Can methamphetamine cause long-term brain damage or psychosis?
She was actually never that worried that taking a bit of meth a handful of times would stop her from finishing her thesis, largely because of that research that shows the brain can recover. Anyway, we got to talking about why meth can cause psychosis. And she told me that some of what's going on here is probably from sleep deprivation.
Meth can keep you up for days if you take enough of it, and that can make you go loopy in all kinds of ways. But something else is happening here too. So right now, you are probably not on meth, and your brain cells are communicating, sending signals to each other in this orchestrated dance that allows you to listen to this podcast and not to think about other stuff swirling around your brain.
But because meth has these powerful effects on different chemicals in our brain... Jen says that it can scramble that dance.
Right. And if you're not communicating properly, the signals get crossed.
For example, a really important thing that your brain does is that it inhibits or shushes certain signals. But meth stops some of that from happening. So all of a sudden, you're seeing things and thinking things that you wouldn't normally be.
Like, what about these satellites that might actually be, you know, controlled by the FBI or CIA? Thoughts of, like, I'm a pretty cool person, like... You go from I'm a very cool person to I'm God and why wouldn't I be God? And you start creating those stories and their brains just can't inhibit them and stop them at a point. Everything is allowed to just...
And so studies find that quite a lot of people who use meth, we're talking maybe one in three, one in two, will get meth-associated psychosis. But this is an experience they'll have while they're high. Those thoughts should go away pretty soon after meth is out of their system. So Tina, she only saw shadow people while she was taking meth.
And Theo only got paranoid like that when he was using heavily. It is worth pointing out, though, that there are some unlucky folks who still get psychotic episodes even after they've stopped using meth. and they can actually end up with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. What's frustrating is that we don't know the chance that this will happen to you.
Researchers told me that it's rare, but your risk goes up the more meth that you use. Now, if you are worried about getting schizophrenia, some research suggests that cannabis might be even riskier than meth. So where does this leave us? Will meth break your brain? Well, while you're using it, it can give you psychosis and make you go a little bonkers.
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Chapter 6: Is 'meth mouth' a real condition caused by meth use?
Somehow it's made me like loosier, goosier with my oral hygiene.
Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy. Today's Ask Me Anything was brought to you by Amazon. Thanks to Amazon, healthcare just got less painful. Welcome back. Today on the show, methamphetamine. Next up, meth mouth. There's this idea that meth is so bad for your teeth that it'll make them fall out and your gums will turn black.
And for one of our listeners, we'll call them Fallon, they said that after smoking meth for just a couple of years, a few of their back teeth were pretty messed up.
Chapter 7: How does methamphetamine affect heart health?
They were so bad. It was horrendous. I was like, this can't be real. It was like... Like the back ones, there was no white on it and it was gum. Wow. Just from decay. Wow. Yeah, they were horrible.
And a study of more than 500 heavy meth users found that just under a third of them had six or more missing teeth, which is quite a bit higher than the general population. Meth users also have higher rates of holes in their teeth and gum disease. And this all makes sense based on everything we've heard about meth, right?
Chapter 8: How addictive is methamphetamine really and can people recover?
Math is bad. It's going to rot your teeth out of your head. Don't do it. And this is... Hi, my name is Kato Mellie. I'm a researcher at Columbia University Department of Psychology and at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
And then just tell us how many times you've tried math. So I asked Kate... Does meth eat away at your gums and teeth?
No. You know, it's very unlikely that methamphetamine itself is eating away at your teeth.
There's this idea that the smoke from smoking meth is acidic and eats away at your teeth, which is why you lose them. But a study of 300 folks who were dependent on meth found that IV users were actually way more likely to be missing teeth than those who smoked meth... which the researchers said belies the common notions about the corrosive effects of meth. So what is going on here?
Well, Kate told me that meth can make you grind your teeth and also some people get a really dry mouth from using meth, which could be bad because saliva helps protect your teeth from tooth decay. But Kate, as well as some other researchers, have suggested that there could be a much simpler explanation for what's happening here.
Which is that when you get high a lot, you just might not take good care of your teeth. And research has found that chronic meth users tend to drink a lot of sugary drinks and sometimes aren't so great at dental care.
Here's Kate. Perhaps they're not brushing their teeth and flossing twice a day. Are you surprised by this? I mean, there's Occam's razor. Sometimes the simplest answer is the most likely.
Looking at the research, it just doesn't seem like meth is uniquely bad for your teeth. Like a study of almost 60 drug users found that the teeth of heroin users was just as bad as the teeth of meth users. And researchers found that when meth users do brush their teeth, they're less likely to have crappy teeth.
Quite a few of the folks that I spoke to who had used meth were actually so paranoid about getting so-called meth mouth that they made sure that they took care of their teeth. Like Tina.
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