Spencer Pratt's 'Super Meth' Is Not Real, Experts Say

Super meth isn't real. But Spencer Pratt invoked the term during a Los Angeles mayoral debate last Wednesday, arguing unhoused people are beyond help, and experts tell WIRED it's no distinct drug scientists, clinicians, or harm reduction workers recognize.

The Soundbite That Shocked a Debate

He's an independent. Pratt, former MTV reality villain, attacked Mayor Bass and Nithya Raman over approach to addiction and homelessness, saying, "The reality is, no matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth." He predicted she'd "get stabbed in the neck" if she visited people living near the Harbor Freeway, and then he added, "These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or super meth.

It wasn't a one-off outburst. Pratt has spent months painting Los Angeles as a dystopian nightmare, using "super meth" as a watchword that signals something terrifying and irreversible because the language works by conjuring an image of an ultrapotent new drug that no civic program could possibly counteract. But there's a catch.

What Experts Actually See

Claire Zagorski, a paramedic, harm reductionist, and PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy, puts it bluntly: “Thankfully, super meth isn’t real. 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.”

P2P Meth: Decades Old, Not New

Sometimes the label “super meth” gets tossed at phenyl-2-propanone methamphetamine, or P2P meth. But the substance is far from novel. According to Zagorski, P2P meth first emerged in the 1970s. After the government restricted pseudoephedrine in 2006, manufacturers simply returned to the older process. “It’s all still meth at the end,” she says. Nicky Mehtani, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco who specializes in addiction medicine and works with homeless populations, confirms that P2P meth has been the dominant form in the US for the better part of a decade. “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.”

The Purity Myth

It's purity and price, Zagorski. A refining method developed in Europe in 2020 and exported to Mexico separates out less desirable molecular forms, allowing manufacturers a purer product at lower cost, but that may contribute to an uptick in use.

He already walked it back. But Pratt's campaign didn't return a request for comment about where the candidate picked up the term or how he defines it, and after the debate, he wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed acknowledging that super meth "isn't exactly real" and that the alarm from his 2021 book may have been premature.

Root Causes the Candidate Ignores

Why People Living on the Streets Use Stimulants

Mehtani sees a different reality on the ground. When she asks patients why they use meth, the answer is often functional.

• Staying awake to avoid violence or theft while sleeping outside.
• Maintaining vigilance in an environment of increasing criminalization of poverty.
• Coping with the exhaustion of surviving without shelter.

Meth use disorder is notoriously difficult to treat, in part because no FDA-approved medications exist for it, but Mehtani says Pratt’s narrative erases the practical drivers of use and replaces them with a caricature of addiction.

“Calling it ‘super meth’ obscures all of that and reduces a complex public health problem to a moral panic, which tends to push us toward punitive responses and away from the evidence-based interventions that actually help.”

The Political Strategy of Hopelessness

Pratt calls them zombies. Ryan Marino, an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who specializes in addiction and toxicology, sees this rhetoric as part of a broader pattern and categorizes the "zombies" language as "right-wing drug lies" that have led to worse outcomes in places like San Francisco and Portland. But Oregon's recriminalization of small drug possession hasn't reduced homelessness; Portland's unhoused population is larger than ever. And research from multiple cities shows a strong link between police opioid busts and increased overdose deaths.

Marino argues Los Angeles isn't suffering particularly worse from drug problems than Republican-governed places or with stricter drug criminalization, and he adds Pratt's claim that people want drugs more than shelter contradicts all available evidence. It's not the reason, Marino says.

If Pratt were serious about the crisis, Marino argues, he would push for evidence-backed measures:

• Public education on addiction and drug effects.
• Drug checking facilities and supervised consumption centers.
• Regulation of the drug supply.
• Expanded access to drug treatment, mental health care, and housing.

That's unlikely. But polling shows Pratt in second place behind Bass, a position built on months of demonizing the unhoused and mocking efforts to help them recover. The term 'super meth' may be scientifically hollow, but it serves a campaign purpose to convince voters the city's vulnerable are a hopeless cause trapped by something too powerful for civic life to fix. Experts say it's not real. That hardly matters. The panic is the point.