What happens in America usually turns up in the UK sooner or later. The place has had raging methamphetamine use for the last decade - now it's our turn.
Crack cocaine swept America in the mid-1980s but didn't get big here until the 1990s. Similarly with meth, it's starting to appear and develop a street user base a decade or so after the current wave of use started in the US.
Meth is a good fit for our austere, depressing and pessimistic times: cheap, energising and nihilistic. If you're cynical enough find out how to make it - get in early and end up rich.
And again, like with crack cocaine, the UK has done nothing to prepare for the predictable wave of damage the drug will cause. The dominant drug narrative is - bizarrely - about cannabis, a drug effectively decriminalised in the UK since the 1960s. There's been no attempt to consider in advance what prevention, treatment and harm reduction strategies might actually save lives and communities when meth sweeps through.
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