Meth Addiction: Causes, Risks, and Treatment

There’s ongoing research into the health effects of secondhand meth smoke. Still, you may test positive for the drug if you’re around the smoke. Some people swallow it in a pill form or smoke it by heating up crystals in a glass bowl or pipe and breathing in the vapors. Meth contains chemicals that are similar to amphetamine, a drug used to treat ADHD and narcolepsy. Find out the differences between Adderall and methamphetamines, as well as amphetamines vs. methamphetamines.

Signs of an overdose

Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as a Schedule II stimulant, which makes it legally available only through a nonrefillable prescription. Substance use disorders and addiction aren’t choices you make — they’re mental health conditions that can have meth addiction long-term effects on your health and well-being. You can’t take medication specifically approved to treat meth. But substance use treatment with medical detox and behavioral therapies for addiction can help you recover from meth use disorder.

• “He picks and picks and picks at himself, like there are bugs inside his face,” the mother of one meth addict told The Spokesman-Review.
• Also known as ice, crank, or crystal, meth can be cheaply made by simply mixing together a number of chemicals, many of which are interchangeable.
• If you’re found with less than 2 grams of meth in your possession, you now get a Class E violation instead of a felony.
• Their speech may also become rapid and scattered, jumping from topic to topic.
• Heavy usage can weaken and destroy these vessels, causing tissues to become prone to damage and inhibiting the body’s ability to repair itself.

Admissions & Insurance

How you’ll feel off the drug depends largely on how often you use it and at what doses. A national survey on people aged 12 or older shows that 0.6% of the U.S. population, or about 1.6 million people, may have a methamphetamine use disorder. That means more than half of people who use meth go on to misuse the drug. Some of the negative effects of meth use, including hallucinations or movement issues, may go away in the weeks or months after you stop using the drug. But some changes may take years or longer to resolve or never get better.

Meth Addiction And Co-Occurring Disorders

About half (52%) lived in a rural county, with 85% reported to have a GED or higher. Most (70%) had legal employment or were enrolled in school in the past 3 months. Although 87% reported no injection substance use in the past 3 months, 68% reported feeling a need for methamphetamine treatment. About half (57%) had a history of an overdose, and 76% had a history of injection substance use. Nearly all had health insurance in the last 3 months (95%) and considered themselves to be in recovery (93%).

Dangers of Methamphetamine Abuse

• There are some tell-tale signs of meth addiction that you may be able to spot right away or which may become more prevalent as time goes on.
• Participants viewed tobacco use differently from other drugs with 89% feeling it can be part of recovery.
• These changes may include irritability, paranoia, mood swings, decreased sleep, or anger episodes, to name a few.
• Although 87% reported no injection substance use in the past 3 months, 68% reported feeling a need for methamphetamine treatment.

The danger of meth is that, unlike opioids, there’s no fast-acting antidote like Narcan to reverse an overdose. That’s quite scary, especially given how many people are using meth today. It’s not at all surprising when you consider what meth does to the brain. Paranoia, sleep deprivation, and chemical imbalances can really turn anyone into someone completely unrecognizable.

Meth Addiction Treatment

If a drug is so dangerous, so addictive, and so debilitating, why do people use it? Primarily, crystal meth is easy to get and cheap for how long the high lasts. For instance, a small amount of crystal meth that costs maybe ten dollars could allow one or two people to stay high and keep partying for a full day or longer.

• Meth is typically “cooked” or produced in makeshift home laboratories, often referred to as “meth labs“, located in abandoned or rural areas.
• The joint taskforce tracked the 32-tonne consignment for three months after its departure from Iran, ultimately seizing the illegal drugs upon arrival in Australia.
• This makes it more and more difficult to simply stop taking the drug.
• Unfortunately, some of the severe complications of meth use, such as depression and severe paranoia, do not go away quickly and are often lifelong effects of having used this dangerous drug.
• You may grind your teeth, get dry mouth, or skip good dental hygiene practices when you use meth.
• One of the first symptoms of meth abuse is a sudden loss of interest in areas of life that were once important to the person.

How long do the effects last?

Meth addiction can be harmful to health, to the extent that it can even be fatal. It’s important to recognize this addiction and seek help for it as soon as possible. Behavioral therapies have proven effective in treating meth addiction and can help you live a substance-free life.

The serious health risks of using meth are widely known, yet many people still experiment with the drug. The euphoric rush that causes so many to use methamphetamine is caused by the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Meth is more dangerous than other stimulants because a larger percentage of the drug remains unchanged in the body and stays present in the brain longer.

What’s more, combining meth — a stimulant — with depressants like alcohol, opioids, or benzodiazepines can have a tug-of-war effect on your bodily functions. In everyday language, that means most of the meth will leave your system before the day is done. Taking meth typically produces a rush of pleasurable feelings. For instance, you might feel energized, confident, and more alert than usual. Healthline does not endorse the use of any illegal substances, and we recognize abstaining from them is always the safest approach.

It is not indicative of a character defect or moral shortcoming and a person cannot manage the condition through sheer willpower. According to a 2018 review of studies, people who have had adverse childhood experiences are more likely to develop methamphetamine-related psychiatric symptoms (MAP). After the acute phase of withdrawal, a person may still experience low mood, anxiety, and cravings for the drug for several months. Syringe-services programs, which provide clean injection equipment to people who inject drugs, are highly effective harm-reduction measures, greatly reducing the spread of infectious disease. For instance, your heart rate may speed up, slow down, and then speed up again, because your body metabolizes each drug at different rates.