【AI前沿】Spencer Pratt Is Creating Panic Over ‘Super Meth.’ It’s Not Even Real

Miles KleeCultureMay 15, 2026 1:31 PMSpencer Pratt Is Creating Panic Over ‘Super Meth.’ It’s Not Even RealThe LA mayoral candidate and former reality TV star is fueling his campaign with fears about an ultra-potent meth. Experts say it’s drug war propaganda.Photograph: Roy Rochlin/Getty ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storySpencer Pratt, oncethevillainof the 2000s MTVreality showThe Hillsand now an insurgent candidate in this year’sLos Angelesmayoral race, had a breakthrough moment in his first debate performance last Wednesday.Turning to his signature issue of public safety, Pratt berated his opponents—Mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember Nithya Raman—for not doing enough aboutunhoused peopledealing withdrug addiction.“The reality is, no matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth,” Prattsaid, criticizing Raman’splanto expand addiction treatment. “I will go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with her, and we can find some of the people she’s gonna offer treatment for. She’s gonna get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or super meth.”The viral attack on Bass and Raman was not some anomaly: On the campaign trail, Pratt, a registered Republican running as an independent, has routinely conjureddystopian visionsof LA’s urban sprawl, nearly alwayspunctuated by the watchword“super meth.” It’s a term that suggests a drug crisis beyond anything the average voter had imagined, a terrifying new tide of ultra-potent methamphetamines flooding the streets. There’s just one small detail that undercuts Pratt’s message: “Super meth” isn’t a thing.“Thankfully, super meth isn’t real,” says Claire Zagorski, a paramedic, harm reductionist, and PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy. “If there really was a new type of meth, it’d have its own chemical name and we’d be hearing about it from much more reputable sources than Mr. Pratt.”Zagorski explains that while some have used the phrase “super meth” to differentiate phenyl-2-propanone (or P2P) methamphetamine from meth made with pseudoephedrine, “it’s all still meth at the end.” (You may recall thatBreaking Bad’s Walter White preferred the P2P process for cooking meth because it allowed him to scale up his operation.) P2P meth is the molecular mirror-image of the meth that was once more common in the US, but that doesn’t make it a distinct drug.P2P-produced meth, as Zagorski wrote in a2022 articleforFiltermagazine, actually emergedin the 1970s, with suppliers shifting to the pseudoephedrine found in the decongestant Sudafed when P2P wasfederally scheduled in 1980. Then, after the governmentcracked downon pseudoephedrine in 2006—restricting and tracking pharmacy sales—meth manufacturers went back to P2P. Which, as Zagorski noted in her piece, shows no signs of being “any more or less neurotoxic” than the alternative.Notions that this wave of meth was particularly harmful maytracein part to journalist Sam Quinones’ 2021 bookThe Least of Usand accompanyingarticleinThe Atlantic, each mentioning a “new meth” that supposedly had far more extreme and debilitating side effects than the pseudoephedrine version. (Quinones did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Following the LA mayoral debate, he penned a Los Angeles Timesop-edacknowledging that super meth “isn’t exactly real.”)Pratt’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment on their definition of “super meth” or where the candidate picked up the term.“What has changed in the past several years is purity and price,” Zagorski says. That’s because anew refining processdeveloped in Europe in 2020 and exported to Mexico has “allowed drug manufacturers to lower prices and ensure a more pure product.” The method separates and recycles the less desirable molecular form of meth included in product yield—typically about half the total—into the kind users want.Zagorski says this is likely contributing to an uptick in meth use, but that it’s a “relatively minor” factor overall, with economic precarity and housing instability doing far more to drive the crisis.Nicky Mehtani, an assistant professor in the UCSF Division of General Internal Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital who specializes in addiction medicine and does clinical work with homeless people, tells WIRED that P2P meth is nothing new. “It’s been the dominant form in the US supply for the better part of a decade,” she says. “I’ve never heard it called ‘super meth’ in any clinical or scientific context, probably because it’s just the meth we’ve all been seeing for years now. There’s nothing novel or uniquely ‘super’ about it at this point.”Mehtani notes that meth use disorder is notoriously difficult to treat, in part due to the lack of any FDA-approved pharmacotherapies, and that “recovery is genuinely difficult.” But she says that Pratt’s narrative misses the root causes of meth use among people experiencing homele