I recently watched a news report on Austin, Texas TV hysterically warning that drug dealers were now disguising drugs as candy in order to lure kids into unknowingly become addicted. The report placed special emphasis on a mixture of methamphetamine and Strawberry Quik® drink mix that was supposedly gaining in popularity. Similar stories, I soon learned, had appeared on news reports and in newspapers around the nation and even overseas. Police departments and school districts were issuing warnings about “strawberry quick” meth and candy-flavored drugs in general.

Frankly, none of this made any sense to me. For one thing, over the course of my career I have known many drug dealers. Many had no objection to selling drugs to kids but I never met a single adult drug dealer who made any real effort to seek out kids as customers. Children just don’t usually have enough disposable income or purchase enough quantity to make them desirable customers.

For another, flavored methamphetamine makes little sense regardless of who the buyers might be. Meth is smoked, snorted, or injected but only a quite small percentage of meth users take it orally. That minority of users might like their meth to be strawberry flavored or vanilla or chocolate but I can’t see much market advantage to such a product. Certainly no one is likely to take meth primarily for the taste or to mistake meth for candy no matter what flavor it is.

A chemist friend of mine pointed out another objection to this silly story. The addition of sugar to methamphetamine would apparently break down the methyl group and ruin the meth. Any meth maker who really did this would soon put himself out of business.

How did this latest drug myth gain such widespread currency? It all started in Carson City, Nevada, where an informant told sheriff’s deputies that he would purchase what he called “pink meth” from a dealer. When he returned with the drug, he told deputies that the dealer called it “strawberry meth”. Contrary to later reports, deputies reported that the substance had no strawberry scent and any flavor was purely speculation, since no one ever tasted it.

That was the only case of colored meth reported in Carson City. That single report, however, led the Nevada Department of Public Safety to issue a statewide warning, which in turn was circulated nationally via e-mail. The next report of flavored meth came out of Arkansas, but it turned out that police who raided a meth lab merely found empty packages of Strawberry Quik® drink mix in the trash and connected that with the reports of “strawberry quick” from Nevada.

Based on these two reports, the DEA issued a warning in March and the mass media went into their usual full hysteria mode for the latest drug scare. They showed the same gullibility and readiness to stir up the public’s fears that they had shown in the past in reporting on heroin laced lollipops and LSD impregnated temporary tattoos.

Last April, U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) displayed their usual readiness to act on the dumbest of drug myths by introducing legislation to increase the federal criminal penalties for drug dealers who sell candy-flavored methamphetamine and other flavored drugs. Not the first time a drug law has been proposed to deal with a nonexistent danger. In fact, that seems to be how we get all of our drug laws.

After several months of following up on the subject of flavored meth, DEA officials told reporters they "hadn't seen much" in the way of actual seizures of flavored methamphetamine and that the DEA itself had not yet seized any. They now admit that they cannot confirm a single seizure of any flavored meth anywhere. An inquiry on an ONDCP listserv failed to identify any community in which flavored meth had actually been identified. In fact, it seems likely that local drug agencies had simply confused colored meth -- which is quite common due to dyes present in the raw ingredients -- for a new, flavored variety of the drug. The idea that the meth was flavored seems never to have been anything but an assumption based on some logic that said strawberry colored stuff must taste like strawberries.

Now, we are hearing reports out of California of coconut and strawberry flavored cocaine – which is as unlikely as flavored meth but will probably be coming soon to your local news.

Useful References:

Urban Myth: Candy Meth