South Dakota spent around $449,000 on an awareness campaign to address methamphetamine use. Minnesota is grappling alongside our neighbors with the drug as producers have rebranded it in recent years.
Two men were sentenced to prison Nov. 14 for operating a meth business out of the apartment of a downtown Minneapolis luxury high-rise. State officials say a growing presence of the drug from Mexican cartels has led to a record number of seizures. The Star Tribune reported in May that Minnesota saw a nearly two-fold jump in seizures (625 lbs. in 2017 vs. 1,145 lbs. in 2018), nearly 16,000 people entered treatment and 161 people died of overdoses in 2018. Seizures are up 61% for the first half of 2019, according to Forum News Service.
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"The accessibility has changed," Dr. Joseph Lee with Hazelden Betty Ford said. "It's become mainstream. What used to be a rural phenomenon with homemade labs — now it's clandestine labs and organized crime distributing it in cities and suburbs, so the marketplace is different. It's not just rural areas any more."
Lee says the marketplace also includes the dark web with more sophisticated lab equipment to produce meth.
"The people who sell methamphetamine have done a great job of rebranding methamphetmine from something that is stereotyped in a trailer park into something that's more mainstream," he said. "While you hear about it in the Dakotas, in Minnesota, it's happening all over the place."
He says treatment for addiction is available and more awareness is needed.
