During a recent debate, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt argued that drug abuse has been largely ignored as a factor when attempting to address the city’s homelessness crisis.
While both his opponents on stage, Mayor Karen Bass and Councilmember Nithya Raman, touted progress addressing street homelessness, Pratt said neither of them is addressing the crux of the issue, which he believes is drug addiction.
“The reality is no matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth, they are on fentanyl,” he said during Wednesday’s forum.
While a link between drug use and homelessness has long been noted, the term “super meth” may have raised some eyebrows. Experts, however, say not only is it real, it’s become increasingly common in recent years.
What they’re mixed on, however, is whether the substance is particularly overlooked or prevalent in Los Angeles.
What is super meth?
Methamphetamine is a stimulant that increases a person’s heart rate, respiration and body temperature when used, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. High doses can cause convulsions, cardiovascular collapse, stroke or death.
“Super meth” is P2P meth, short for phenyl-2-propanone methamphetamine.
Meth has traditionally been made from ephedrine and pseudoephedrine — substances that can be found in over-the-counter cold medications that address nasal congestion and runny noses, said Terry Church, director of the Institute for Addiction Sciences Education Committee at USC.
This potential for abuse is why such medications can only be purchased by adults, and only in limited quantities.
What researchers have found in more recent batches of meth, starting around 2021, is that ephedrine and pseudoephedrine were swapped out for phenyl-2-propanone, Church said.
With this new ingredient, “super meth” became cheaper and easier to produce — so it started being made in larger quantities.
“Unfortunately, it’s much more addictive because it’s about 97% pure methamphetamine, whereas the old model was roughly about 75% to 80%,” he said.
That means the high users experience can last up to 24 hours, roughly twice that of formulations with ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, Church said.
The side effects of super meth are similar to regular meth.
“There is a lot more brain damage, liver damage and cardiovascular damage that occurs because it’s so potent,” he said. “People who become addicted to it and become long-term users, they’re using more and more of it.”
Does L.A. have a super meth problem?
In 2021, methamphetamine accounted for nearly three-quarters of drug seizures by the Los Angeles High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, according to the most recent data from the county public health department.
The number of reported methamphetamine doses seized increased gradually from 2011 to 2020, then spiked notably in 2021.
While those data do not specify a prevalence of super meth, the L.A. County Department of Public Health officials said they are not “seeing significant amounts of phenyl-2-propanone methamphetamine in the drug supply through the available drug checking data.”
“We can indicate that this is not a common form of methamphetamine here in Los Angeles,” public health officials wrote in an email to The Times.
Church said the data may not be entirely complete because it can be difficult to distinguish super meth from regular methamphetamine when it metabolizes in the body.
“We can track some of it if [a person has] done phenyl-2-propanone within the past two hours,” he said. “If it’s on their 12th hour of being high, [it’s] not as easy to track because they have already metabolized it and it started to change chemically.”
A majority of methamphetamine seizures in the United States occur at or near the southern border, particularly in the Southwest, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment.
What’s been seized and tested, “has reached the highest purity and potency ever recorded, with average purity levels reaching nearly 97% in 2025,” according to the report.
Church added that there may be more cases of super meth than health officials can track because the drug is coming from labs in Mexico.
“The other set of data that you would want to look at is the statistics on what has been confiscated at the border through the DEA,” Church said. “And obviously, what the DEA gets is just a small proportion of what actually makes it through.”
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