Spencer 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.
Zagorski says this is likely contributing to an uptick in meth use, but that it’s a “relatively minor” factor overall, with economic precarity and housing instability doing far more to drive the crisis.
Nicky Mehtani, an assistant professor in the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital who specializes in addiction medicine and does clinical work with homeless people, tells WIRED that P2P meth is nothing new. “It's been the dominant form in the US supply for the better part of a decade,” she says. “I've never heard it called ‘super meth’ in any clinical or scientific context, probably because it's just the meth we've all been seeing for years now. There's nothing novel or uniquely ‘super’ about it at this point.”
Mehtani notes that meth use disorder is notoriously difficult to treat, in part due to the lack of any FDA-approved pharmacotherapies, and that “recovery is genuinely difficult.” But she says that Pratt’s narrative misses the root causes of meth use among people experiencing homelessness. “The most common reason I hear is functional,” Mehtani says. “People are using stimulants to stay awake, to maintain vigilance, to survive on the streets at a time of increasing criminalization of poverty and homelessness.”
“Calling it ‘super meth’ obscures all of that and reduces a complex public health problem to a moral panic, which tends to push us toward punitive responses and away from the evidence-based interventions that actually help,” Mehtani warns. She considers the phrase to be “classic War on Drugs language,” describing it as “vague, alarming, and not grounded in how clinicians or researchers actually talk about methamphetamine.”
Ryan Marino, an associate professor in the Departments of Emergency Medicine and Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who specializes in addiction and toxicology, says the “super meth” claims are part of a broader propaganda push. (Pratt has also referred to homeless people as “zombies.”)
“Pratt seems to be trying to use the same right-wing drug lies as we have seen other politicians use in recent years in areas like San Francisco and Portland, which were lies at the time and which have actually led to worse outcomes for those places,” Marino says. In Oregon, the recriminalization of possession of small amounts of drugs has not reduced homelessness within the city of Portland, where more people are unhoused than ever, while research from multiple cities has shown a strong link between police drug busts of opioids and increased overdose deaths.
“Los Angeles is not suffering particularly worse from drug problems than places governed by Republicans or with stricter drug criminalization,” Marino says. Pratt’s line about homeless people wanting drugs rather than a bed and shelter “contradicts all available evidence,” he adds, observing that drug use “isn’t the reason for LA’s large unhoused population.”
If Pratt is truly concerned about illicit drug use and homelessness, he should advocate for “evidence-based solutions like public education, drug checking facilities and supervised consumption centers, and regulation of the drug supply,” Marino says, as well as for “drug treatment, access to mental health care, and housing.”
The candidate, however, probably won’t go that route. Pratt is currently polling in second place behind Bass after months of demonizing the unhoused and mocking initiatives to help them recover from addiction.
The repeated “super meth” soundbite, spurious as it is, makes it sound as if they’re in the grips of something too powerful to counteract by civic or medical means. And maybe that’s exactly the point: to convince Los Angeles voters that the city’s most vulnerable residents are a hopeless cause.
