Contributor: 'Super meth' isn't exactly real, but the drug is a real factor in L.A. homelessness

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In last week’s mayoral debate, candidate Spencer Pratt said “super meth” was driving homelessness in Los Angeles.After several years reporting and writing a book on this topic, I can say that Los Angeles, indeed the United States, doesn’t necessarily have a “super meth” problem.Meth is meth.Like aspirin is aspirin.

What matters is how much is in each dose.Today, Los Angeles does have a hyper-pure methamphetamine problem.It is a major driver of homelessness and mental illness here and in many other parts of the country.But it’s not new.Twenty years ago, what was sold on the street as meth was 40% to 50% meth, the rest being cheap filler that dealers used to expand their supply.Today, meth made in Mexico and sold on U.S.

streets routinely measures more than 90% pure — and has for more than a decade.The catastrophic results have been visible on L.A.

streets for some time now.Here’s what happened: For many years, the Mexican trafficking world used a decongestant called ephedrine as the principal ingredient in its methamphetamine.Ephedrine is difficult to make.

Traffickers never could get enough ephedrine to make meth in quantities sufficient to cover more than parts of the western United States.In other parts of the country, local meth cooks used Sudafed pills to extract ephedrine to make small quantities of low-quality, high-priced meth.In 2008, the Mexican government reduced the allowed amounts of imported ephedrine, which traffickers had always siphoned for their illicit uses.They switched to another method — old but new to them, with a central ingredient called phenyl 2 propanone, an industrial chemical called P2P for short.The P2P method has one huge advantage over the ephedrine method: ease of access to the key ingredient.P2P can be made many ways, using a variety of legal, cheap, widely available industrial chemicals.

Unlike the ephedrine method, traffi...