Absolutely fascinating.

@1, Its not news to me either. I've known about this for about as long as I've known what meth is. A lot of the street kids in Tacoma in the early 1990's used to talk about this.

Olympia has been flooded with homeless people in the past 5 years. This is largely an effect of gentrification pushing people out of Seattle and Tacoma, where they can no longer afford to live. The city's employment base was never strong enough to absorb this meany people. It's all a bunch of small family owned shops and boutiques, just enough to provide a basic service economy for government employees and college kids, neither of which are particularly rich. There's just not that many jobs at the pizza parlor, you know?

The Union Gospel Mission provides some shelter and food, but they've been way past swamped for a while now. A project called Quixote Village sprang up, tiny houses for the homeless. There's a waiting list.

The state ought to have stepped up and started hiring these folks for small projects years ago. Since nobody's giving them work, and there's no place to live, they've started using meth (which is cheap and readily available in Oly- its easy to get meth than it is a six pack of beer) as a means of dealing with the boredom that comes with destitution.

This freaks out the locals for the very reasons stated in this book review. Meth prevents sleep, and anyone not sleeping for an extended period of time will become violent and irrational.

Olympia's a quiet little town. Great for college students- just enough distractions to blow off steam on the weekend, but not so many to keep anyone from completing a degree. I stuck around there for a good year after graduation and found the place boring as hell once school ended. Its not the sort of place able to handle a meth epidemic. Yet, it has one now.

Meth-addled psychos?

Good thing we don't have to deal with those in our political system, right?

@3, Good reality check to know of re Olympia. Not surprised the state hasn't stepped up for the homeless in any way since those goobers in the legislature don't believe in spending on anything but subsidies for Boeing and Microsoft, and Highway construction. As far as it's concerned, let them all die in the streets and let the localities bury them in the nearest ditch.

There is not any hypocrisy in Hitler's animal product drug cocktails. He was not ever strictly vegetarian and it wasn't about morality but some weird purity thing.

Yeah, the Germans used speed, they're not teaching that in school? Other militaries did too, though the Germans were heavy users. The US military issues amphetamine pills, or did until recently, especially for long plane flights.

Speed used to be widespread and mainstream in civilian use, too. Notably in Japan.

In Vietnam they were called "pep pills" when given to our GIs.