Fentanyl's Hold on Portland Eased. Then Meth Arrived

When patients started missing appointments at one Maine addiction clinic, staffers braced themselves for a wave of opioid relapses—only to discover a different drug was taking over the city's streets. As Jan Hoffman reports in a lengthy piece for the New York Times, "cheap and plentiful" methamphetamine is rewriting the crisis in Portland and leaving responders searching for solutions—just as "the city's drug treatment community was starting to taste hope." Fentanyl overdoses had begun to ease thanks to methadone (which dulls cravings) and Narcan (which reverses ODs). There are no such options for meth, and as Hoffman writes, the psychotic episodes and violence that meth can produce can be more wearing on communities as compared to fentanyl, which is a sedative.

One 26-year-old meth user illustrates that point: Police have responded to 85 calls about him this year, with offenses ranging from public masturbation and exposure to interrupting traffic and punching a health clinic staffer. As Courtney Pladsen, a nurse practitioner at a homeless health clinic puts it, "The meth problems blossomed so fast, beyond anything anyone could grasp, and our tools are so inept and so few." As for why the drug has taken hold, Hoffman explains that as fentanyl became more expensive and less potent, meth began flooding in, "not the home-cooked biker party drug from the '90s, but a far more dangerous concoction, mass-produced in Mexican cartel labs." (Read the full story for more, including how one 38-year-old woman got hooked.) (This content was created with the help of AI. Read our AI policy.)