This app provides up-to-date measurements of the purity of methamphetamine from samples analyzed by the UNC Street Drug Analysis Lab.
🏷️ Three Things of Note. First, we are not differentiating between l- and d- isomers of meth. Second, we get more more samples from NC, WA, NY, CA, and MI than other states. Geographic data below should not be construed as prevalence. Third, people may preferentially send us samples because they caused unusual reactions. There is no possible data source on street drugs that is fully generalizable. Got it? Okay!
Timeline of methamphetamine purity
Geographic distribution of meth purity
This graph and table shows which of the samples we get, by state, have higher impurity of methamphetamine. In the graph and table "adulterated" means that at least one substance other than methamphetamine was detected along with meth. Again, this isn't interpreted as pure prevalence, but provides a relative comparison between states.
Does crystal vs. powder meth have more adulterants?
In our published analysis we found the adjusted prevalence of fentanyl was 12.5% (95% CI: 2.2%, 22.9%) in powder methamphetamine, with notable geographic variation. Crystalline forms of methamphetamine (Chisq=57, p<0.001) were less likely to contain fentanyl: less than 1% of crystal methamphetamine (2/276).
The live data below show the number of substances detected in crystal vs. powder methamphetamine samples. The red dashed line at 1.0 represents if methamphetamine was the only substance detected in that sample. Crystal meth rarely contains adulterants.
What else is found with methamphetamine?
Where do samples come from? How are they analyzed?
We obtain drug samples from 160+ harm reduction programs, clinics, hospitals, health departments, and drug user unions from 34+ states across the US. Mailed-in samples are analyzed using GCMS, with untargeted search, and reference (pure) standard comparison. See Laboratory methods and codebook for full details. Samples analyzed as "methamphetamine" are those samples where methamphetamine was detected in primary abundance (e.g., excluding only trace meth); an alternative way to analyze the data would be to use 'expected substance' (e.g., what it was sold as). Sometimes methamphetamine is intentionally and explicitly sold in conjunction with other substances, such as fentanyl, to make pre-mixed speedballs.