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Meth: Scope and Severity
Methamphetamine is a dangerous, highly addictive drug that can be manufactured with commonly available, inexpensive chemicals. With a street price of $3,000 per pound (per half kilogram), making and selling methamphetamine can be a lucrative, albeit deadly, industry. While methamphetamine abuse has been a problem in California for decades, it was not the 1990s that it began to be a nationwide problem.
There have been numerous studies over the past few years trying to gauge the extent of methamphetamine use. According to the 1998 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, an estimated 4.7 million people had tried methamphetamine at some point in their lives. That same survey, done again in the year 2000, showed that the number of methamphetamine users had grown to8.8 million.
The Drug Abuse Warning Network, which collects information on drug-related episodes from the nation's emergency rooms, showed that methamphetamine-related visits to emergency rooms more than tripled between 1991 and 1994, rising from 4,900 to more than 17,000. That number stayed the same until the late 1990s, and actually decreased somewhat (to 13,500) by 2000.
The Treatment Episode Data Set collects usage data from drug treatment centers around the country. Between 1993 and 1999, it was reported that methamphetamine addicts made up about 5% of the 1.6 million admissions to publicly funded substance abuse treatment center facilities. The survey also showed that in 1993, most methamphetamine users were concentrated in three Western states—California, Oregon, and Nevada. By 1996, the treatment rate for methamphetamine abuse had increased 79%. By 1999, high methamphetamine admission rates to treatment centers were seen in most states west of the Mississippi River.
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