In case you were thinking of picking up some ice tonight and staying up 'til monday........



Faces of Meth




why do so many people get hooked on this stuff? makes you feel, look, and behave like shit.

Good grief!! That's unbelievable...wow...does meth make you scratch at your face or something? They all appear to have sores on their faces in the latter pictures. Holy moly, that's some spooky sh*t right there...

I believe it makes you feel like your skin is crawling. Like bugs are on/under your skin.

Who the hell is looking for that kinda' high!?

yikes.

bottom dude on the left...

shit if doing meth for a year makes my hair & beard grow like that, i'm in!

I think this part is after the good part. Kind of like when you are coming down/wanting another fix.

I went through this with a friend several years ago. Meth has been big on the red neck circuit for years. Way before it hit the cities/suburbs.

He lived in a house where they cooked the shit up. Total wacko scene. They were all living in an old funeral home south of Indianapolis.

He is clean now, though. Has been for several years. I went down there and dragged him away from it with his folks. Crazy shit.

OK that is some fucked up stuff right there. The one lady who's after picture was taken 4 years later freaked me out the most. I'm going to have nightmares now.

...thats horrible

On the bright side, it looks like it worked as an effective weight loss program for some of those folks.

it's so bad. if it makes the outside of your body look like that, it has to do the same to your brain and the inside of your body.

She made me think of Requiem For a Dream. This shit is creepy.

Well, now.. that was a very educational and thoroughly depressing moment. And yet, I couldn't stop myself from viewing every picture. Now I see why meth is so nasty. Granted, I've never touched the stuff (speedy drugs just never seemed that interesting to me), but Goddamn is that fucking horrid. I was a meth virgin when I walked in here... I'm twice as virginial after seeing that action.

http://www.drugfree.org/Portal/DrugIssue/M...ces/index.html#

This guy must've been shooting up propecia.

Anyone notice how "faces of meth" rhymes with the infamous documentary series "faces of death"?

I think that's not a coincidence.

Frontline just did an episode about meth that was really interesting. In fact it was on last night. The trouble started when two mexican drug financers spent millions of dollars on tons of ephedra from Krebs in India, singlehandedly creating the epidemic that started raging in 1994. The purest meth in existence was being passed around at those times. Later down the road the government caught wind of this and started regulating it half assedly. At the store where I work we lock up all of our robitussin and stuff that contains ephedra. And we have to card people, if they are under 18 they can't buy cough syrup.

Instead of DARE programs in schools they just need to show stuff like this.

I think these are faked and photoshopped.




It hits the dopamine receptors hard and fast. Dopamine is the pleasure center and it overloads that more than nearly any drug that has been manufactured. One hit will keep you high all day. The problem is that once you come down you will never be the same. It screws up your brains emotional functions and you can no longer feel pleasure or pain in the same way as common human beings. It takes years of strict counseling for addicts to maintain sobriety.

The "METH EPIDEMIC" is bullshit.

It's horrible stuff, but it's nowhere near as prevelant as they're making it out to be. Just more exaggeration to ramp up support for the never ending war on drugs. That said, it doesn't make the pictures any less gross.

why wasn't i surprised when i opened somb and saw ryan's name on a meth thread.

Dude, shut up. I've never touched the stuff!

So did they round up a bunch of random street people, give them a backpack full of meth, strap on an ankle bracelet, and let them loose? This sort of seems like bullshit to me. Oh well, like I said, it's still gross and entertaining.

You couldn't be more wrong. Where do you live? I live in Kalamazoo, and southwest Michigan has a HUGE problem. I personally know a couple people who were "normal" average joes who had lucrative professional jobs and got hooked on the shit. Cost them marriages and careers, and it all happens in a matter of months. Last fall, a home in a nice downtown neighborhood exploded from the meth lab inside. It starts in rural areas, because it's easier to keep a low profile. But then it works it's way into the cities where the users are.

One of my best friends was addicted to crack for four years, and he said Meth still scares him more than crack.

That's horrible man -- I have a couple very similar stories (very close to me, I promise you), but these are all individual stories on a personal level. I'm not in any condition to produce the numbers that I've seen about usage, production, and just how widespread (or not) it really is. Gimme a chance in the next couple of days, unless someone else beats me to it.

Yeah, I realize that it's pretty lazy to defend to notion that something is widespread through personal stories, but the fact that there are so many personal stories out there speaks volumes. I don't know anyone who has a problem with heroine, coke, X, or anything else. It's pretty much meth that has become the drug of choice for real addicts. And I read about meth busts more than any other drug. It could be that the media is reporting more meth busts and ignoring other drugs, but I don't think so. Combined with the fact that meth is more destructive than just about any other drug, and this is definitely a big problem. A disgusting problem too, those pictures were awful.

I remember renting Spun based on the recommendation of a friend of mine (who happens to be a drug dealer), and I couldn't make it though 30 minutes. BUT, I thought that the Salton Sea was very underappreciated. Hardly anyone saw it, but it's pretty interesting. (See, we can return any conversation to music or movies)

Meth is/was huge in SE ohio and WV...an area I've lived in...just huge. Fairly often has the lead story on the local news been about a huge meth bust. It is a very big problem.

i learned from my friendly local pharmacist that meth gives you "balls of steel" and that there's a pretty big problem in chicago. i knew that was true for boystown (there are anti-meth signs all over the place), but not the rest of the city. i know some pretty heavy drug users and none of them have ever seen meth around.

is it cheap to purchase? it seems like such a junkyard drug, just bits and pieces of other crappy drugs used to make one big stupid drug.

F U. I have a huge heroine problem right now and you and your smartass wife could give a rat's ass.

Yeah, no thanks.



I felt dreadfully sick a few months ago and couldn't sleep so I got up and drove down to Meijer at 3am hoping to pick up some cold pills. But too bad all they had on the shelf were cards and the pharmacy was shut down for the night! I went home defeated and feeling worse than ever.

I don't know if they're extracting the same chemicals from pills or not or if those were off the shelves for a different reason. But if you go there to get some because you really need it, it's going to be a pain.

It costs a fraction of what coke costs, and the buzz lasts 20x longer. There's nothing subtle about it. I've known lots of casual to heavy users, but nobody who injected it. It made some of them psychotic, no doubt.


Three of us were sick as dogs so I went to the drug store to stock up. They made me put back all but 2 boxes! Totally stupid, because if I were an addict I could've just driven to another store and bought 2 more boxes.

Ehhhhhh, I'm telling you man, it's really just the new crack as far as the media goes. They need a new epidemic every few years or so. I realize that crystal meth is a problem, but it's not some social disease that's taking down our nation. It's cheap, it's strong, and it's easy to produce in rural or outlying areas due to the lack of attention. Needless to say, that leads to an offering to the locals first, and in turn, a bigger problem, in a smaller town, which produces a reaction that is far from relative. Nobody's calling it pretty or any less addictive than crack, but you have to take it all with a grain of salt.


Exactly.


Yup -- another example of chaos over...what?


This is completely legit. Stores are pulling medication off the shelves due to the "meth scare."


See above. It's such a fucking crock.

This board is so quick to call the post-9/11 fear mongering, but falls hard for this stuff. I don't get it.

I am somewhat in agreeance with Ryan on this one. The " War on Drugs" is very similar to " The War on Terrier" in that it is never-ending, completely ineffective, and a great way to get rich if ya got the right buddies. The DARE program is notoriously worthless, having only a VERY temporary effect on kids' drug use; as in, it has a slight deterent effect on middle-schoolers, but they make up for it later in junior and high school. Still, the program is immensely popular with local PD's, mainly cuz it's easy, non-dangerous work with a big cash cow behind it.
Meth is a widespread problem, especially in the homo and hillbilly world, but so are prescription drugs, and you don't see Searle and Upjohn being called on the carpet to clean up their acts.
As Ry-Ry pointed out, meth makes a great ad campaign, and you can use people who are the cast-offs of society already (homos and hillbillies) as wonderful, toothless, craggy-faced poster children.
Problem is, the biggest, most popular, most damaging drug in the USA is this one:

ALCOHOL


Ask any cop or social worker. 90% of domestic/family abuse calls have alcohol as a factor. Liver damage, DUI fatalities, broken homes, lost jobs; the list goes on. And yet I have yet to see a " Frontline" episode or a newspaper/ magazine article dedicated to "Alcohol: The Silent Killer". One would think it was a cornerstone of the economy or something....

1. CR is right about his point on alcohol. No doubt.

2. But, so what...this is all some big scam to keep cough syrup under lock and key? Give me a break.

I don't doubt that maybe, just like other drug epidemics, the expanse of hte problem is blown out of proportion at times. But the fact is that meth IS a problem in rural america, and is starting to make its way in to the cities. Real problem with real consequences for real people.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/

this site has some info. It should be noted that considering Meth as an epidemic is controversial.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

no....its not that youre skin feels like its crawling..its more like you see a pimple and you pop it but you just keep messin with it and then you see another bump and you just tweak on it....i havent actually done that but ive caught myself almost doin it before.

I can't speak for these pictures, but I know of at least one case where a meth addict entered into a plea agreement (I can't remember what she was busted for), where she agreed to let her before and after pics be used in anti-drug meth campaigns. Of course, she really didn't know what she bargained for because it became a hugely popular marketing campaign and her pics were plastered everywhere, and she basically became a joke. I think she tried to get the plea agreement rescinded or modified, but I'm pretty sure it was to no avail.

I think her before and after pics were the impetus for all the others were seeing. Anti-drug folks realized it's a lot more effective to appeal to teens' vanity rather than there good sense.

Edit: I didn't even realize how old this thread was...just assumed it was a new topic.

Dude, my ex had a trucking business and crank was practically considered overhead. One of his suppliers was a high school math teacher/heavy user who became so paranoid that one night he phoned at 3 a.m. & begged my husband to go over & check out his attic because he was convinced someone was living up there. He never got busted but eventually did lose his teaching credential (and stopped using). We saw lesser degrees of this among friends & acquaintances over the years. I'm not saying that recreational use is any worse than alcohol, but for addictive types it's kind of insidious.

edit: I never saw anyone who looked like those pictures, though.

Ace is back and bumping ancient threads.

Awesome.

I can contribute nothing new to this debate other than saying, meth is extracted chemically... Does one need to do that with many other natural allies such as Mushrooms, Diviners Sage, Tobacco, Mary Jane, Kava Kava, Harmala, Opium, Khat, Coca(raw leaf form) Cocoa, Peyote, SanPedro, Mescal Beans, Datura... I COULD GO ON ALLL DAY!!!!! The point is, all of these plants have had thousand year histories, enough time to see the good and bad in the palnt, whereas meth has had like a 50 year history and that idea in itself says a lot about the drug and its problems. The concept of meth probably comes from a nasty combination of the above listed plants. I'll say The deleriant intoxication of datura mixed with Coca chewings duration.