“Where did crystal meth come from?” 

It seems like a simple question, but the answer becomes more complicated as the drug's uses have changed over the years. 

When Rom Jukes joined the Moose Jaw Crystal Meth Strategy Committee, he always assumed that the drug was a 1960s biker gang phenomenon that came into pop culture with TV shows like Breaking Bad.  

When he realized that that didn't’ seem right, he decided to look at scholarly literature to learn more about the history of the drug. 

“People are responsible for their actions, but it doesn't necessarily address the problem and so giving people some context for what we're dealing with I think is really, really important,” Jukes said. 

He found in the late 1800s, the chemical compound Ephedrine was found as a derivative from the Ephedra shrub that had been used for centuries to treat ailments such as hay fever, asthma, and fatigue. 

In 1919, a derivative an Ephedrine was discovered by scientists that become known as Methyl-Amphetamine (or Methamphetamine), a drug that was dissolvable in water, which made it injectable, more potent, and faster-acting. 

The drug remained as a lab experiment in the scientific world until 1937 when scientist Fritz Hauschild experimented with over 50 derivatives of Ephedrine and rediscovered Methyl-amphetamine. 

Jukes' research showed that in the 1930s and leading up to the Second World War, the drug became popular among the military, the manufacturing sector, and students as a stimulant to keep people working for long periods of time with pseudo-scientific positive reviews about the drug with little critique. 

Jukes said following the Second World War was when the negative social impact began to show as addictions came to light. 

In countries like Japan in the 1950s, they identified Methamphetamine as a serious issue and even to this day, there are severe legal penalties for using it. 

Meanwhile in the United States, according to Juke’s research, Methamphetamine remained in mainstream medicine throughout the 1960s. He said in 1958 you could get an over-the-counter methamphetamine inhaler without a prescription. About 31 million legal prescriptions for Meth were written in the U.S. in 1967. 

Meth remained legal in the United States until the 1970s at the earliest. The German company Temmler held the patent for Methamphetamine since the 1930s for a drug called Pervitin, but abandoned the rights in the 1980s. 

“When we're asking the question ‘where did crystal meth come from?’ It's a multi-variant answer,” Jukes said.  

“It's like a perfect storm of different interests and different activities culminating into something that has this incredible impact on society.” 

Jukes found it interesting that there was a rapid demonization of Meth addicts in the 1990s and into the 2000s, a striking change from how the drug was presented in the 1950s and 60s. 

Jukes says one of the more interesting aspects of his research was the fact that the literature doesn’t distinguish between the stimulant crisis of Meth and the opioid/narcotic crisis. 

"It's a really excellent comparison to the opioid crisis that we are facing now, wherein in a similar fashion, there was widespread use in the medical world of these substances that were much more positively received than might have been appropriate upon a more rigorous investigation into their negative consequences." 

Jukes said nearly half of the psycho-stimulant-related deaths in the United States in 2016-2017 also involved opioids.  

Of those that tested positive for Fentanyl, the positivity to co-exposure with Meth increased. In 2013 in the United States, co-exposure was 2.2 per cent. By 2019, that number had grown to 30 per cent. 

"They are very interconnected and I was not aware of that. I had never really heard anyone talk about that before,” Jukes said. 

To learn more, you can visit the Moose Jaw Crystal Meth Strategy Committee's Facebook page.