美国国家公共电台 NPR A Surge In Meth Use In Colorado Complicates Opioid Recovery

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

And as the U.S. wrestles¹ with the opioid epidemic², the use of one stimulant³, methamphetamine, is surging. And it's one of the hardest addictions⁵ to overcome. From Colorado Public Radio, John Daley has this on the stubborn presence of meth, especially out West.

JOHN DALEY, BYLINE⁶: At a drug treatment center in Denver, counselor⁷ Melissa McConnell huddles⁸ around a computer screen with her client Sara Florence.

MELISSA MCCONNELL: Just look where you were. Look where you were in November, and look where you are in March.

DALEY: On the screen, the pair look at Florence's urinalysis results. A few months ago, McConnell says, it lit up like a Christmas tree with positive tests for multiple drugs. Now, it's all clear. Florence says she stopped using heroin⁹ in the fall. She takes methadone to deal with that. She stopped using meth, Jan. 2, 2018.

SARA FLORENCE: Yeah, I got pretty bad on it. I was shooting it, smoking it, snorting it. It just made me feel like crap, you know? But I still did it, which makes no sense, you know? It's just really addicting¹⁰.

DALEY: And unlike opioids, there's no federally approved medicine that treats meth addiction⁴. Florence says meth is particularly insidious¹¹ because it's cheap and easy to get.

How common is it now? I mean, is there...

FLORENCE: It's very common. Everybody does it.

DALEY: State drug overdose numbers confirm that trend. Meth was found in the systems of 280 Coloradans who died of overdoses in 2017. That's up sharply from the year before and more than heroin. Denise Vincioni directs the Denver Recovery Group. She says many who come to the treatment center use multiple drugs along with meth.

DENISE VINCIONI: We're still seeing a rampant¹² use of methamphetamine - very difficult to treat outpatient.

DALEY: Even with treatment, the majority of users relapse within a year. Vincioni says, once, users mainly seemed to stick to one drug - opioid pills or heroin or cocaine¹³. Now, she says they're using those in addition to meth.

VINCIONI: You know, it decreases their chances of the continued sustained recovery.

DALEY: Counselor Melissa McConnell says it can be a vicious cycle.

MCCONNELL: People come in, they start to get off the opiates, but their meth use increases.

DALEY: Most meth in the US is not cooked up in home labs, says Tom Gorman. He directs the Rocky Mountain High Intensity¹⁴ Drug Trafficking Area. He says it's mainly coming from one direction - south.

TOM GORMAN: So I would say, almost 100 percent of our methamphetamine comes from Mexico.

DALEY: Sometimes, via southern California and Phoenix¹⁵. And in Denver, arrests for possession of meth nearly tripled last year compared to 2013.

GORMAN: We've had a meth problem in this area for a long time. So are we having more people use meth? Maybe. But it's always been our No. 1 problem.

DALEY: In the U.S., stimulants¹⁶ - mostly meth - claimed almost 6,000 lives in 2015. That was more than triple the number from a decade earlier, according to the CDC. At the Denver Recovery Group, Sarah Florance can tell you all about the dangers of meth. She's struggled with addiction to the drug for eight years. The turning point came after she became homeless. She stole a Subaru so she could sleep in it, but got caught and ended up in drug court. Florence says that led her to treatment.

FLORENCE: It's just so much better quality life, now that I'm not doing any of anything, you know? This is the cleanest I've been since I was 15 years old.

DALEY: And her counselor, Melissa McConnell, says she knows every month Florence can stay drug free, the better her chances of never going back. For NPR News, I'm John Daley.

MONTAGNE: This story is part of a reporting partnership¹⁷ with NPR, Colorado Public Radio and Kaiser Health News.