About this episode

Meghan Daum interviews Sam Quinones about the impact of synthetic drugs on street homelessness and the complexities of addiction and recovery.

Meghan talks with investigative journalist and bestselling author Sam Quinones (Dreamland, The Least of Us) about the piece of the homelessness crisis we're often encouraged to treat as secondary: synthetic drugs, especially methamphetamine, and its connection to the rapid rise of street psychosis and encampment life. Sam explains how today's meth is fundamentally different from the "tweaker" era of the 1990s and early 2000s: cheaper, purer, more abundant, and more destabilizing. Known as P2P meth, this new form was perfectly suited to mass industrial production and reshaped street homelessness across the country, including places that historically had little visible homelessness at all. They also talk about the limitations of a single-cause narrative ("it's all housing costs"), the realities of Housing First, and why many recovery stories begin not with compassion-as-policy, but with the unpopular intervention that removes access to drugs: arrest and incarceration. And then for something completely different . . . Sam talks about his delightfully unexpected new book, The Perfect Tuba, and why band, discipline, and collective effort may offer a strange but persuasive antidote to…

People in this episode

Host: Meghan Daum

Guest: Sam Quinones

Topics covered

• homelessness
• synthetic drugs
• methamphetamine
• street psychosis
• Housing First
• addiction
• social breakdown

Keywords

• homelessness crisis
• synthetic drugs
• meth
• P2P meth
• Housing First
• addiction
• recovery
• street psychosis

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Dreamland, The Least of Us, The Perfect Tuba

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