The Devil's Drug: The Global Emergence of Crystal Meth

by Teun Voeten

Methamphetamine, commonly referred to as crystal meth, is one of the most addictive drugs in the world. Heavy users will destroy themselves in a few months. Originally it was given by the Nazis to their troops to fight the Blitzkrieg. Now it has conquered the whole world and is used at sex parties in Amsterdam and Antwerp, by former hippies in Prague, by the underclass in the slums of Harare, Cape Town, and Peshawar, by truck drivers in Thailand and workers in the sweatshops in Bangladesh. The largest production centers are in Mexico and Myanmar. But in recent years one lab after another has been found in the border region of Belgium and the Netherlands.

Researcher Teun Voeten travelled the world for two years to investigate all sides of the diabolic drug. He explored the bizarre history and pharmacological effects, he talked to homeless addicts in Tijuana and Los Angeles, cartels in Mexico, international drug experts in Bangkok and Kabul. He met with the original crystal meth cooks in Prague, participants of gay orgies in Amsterdam, speed dealers in Holland and the world-famous underground chemist Uncle Fester in Wisconsin. Voeten also spoke to numerous authorities, judges and social workers who are trying to stop the meth epidemic.

This book is a wide analysis but above all a strong warning. With a combination of thorough investigative journalism, daring fieldwork, and colorful atmospheric sketches, Voeten draws a very detailed and disturbing picture of a drug that is on a rapid international rise.

Genres: Nonfiction

296 pages, Hardcover

Published February 18, 2025

About the author

Teun Voeten is een Nederlands fotograaf en antropoloog. Voeten studeerde culturele antropologie en filosofie aan de Universiteit Leiden en studeerde aan de School of Visual Arts in New York City. Na zijn afstuderen verhuisde Voeten in 1992 naar Brussel, van waaruit hij internationale conflicten volgde voor de Nederlandse, Belgische, Duitse, Britse en Amerikaanse pers. In 1994 schreef hij het boek Tunnelmensen, waarvoor hij vijf maanden bij een groep daklozen in een ongebruikte spoorwegtunnel in Manhattan woonde. Vanaf 1996 concentreerde Voeten zich op “vergeten oorlogen” en maakte hij reportages in Colombia, Afghanistan, Soedan en Sierra Leone. In dat laatste land verborg Voeten zich op de vlucht voor muitende soldaten twee weken in het bos, een ervaring die zou leiden tot zijn boek How de body? Hoop en horror in Sierra Leone. In de jaren die volgden, richtte hij zich onder meer op de schending van de mensenrechten in Colombia, de “Bloeddiamanten” in Angola, de oorlog in Afghanistan, vrouwenhandel vanuit de Balkanlanden en in 2003 de oorlog in Irak. Zijn meest recente werk (2007) is een fotoreportage over het dagelijkse leven in Noord-Korea.

Reviews

[Gary Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very sobering read! It leaves you wondering how governments around the world will be able to bring things under control and how the fabric of society is being eroded…. The author has done a really good job of hitting the reader with lots of hard facts! My only critique is the snout of times things are repeated, unnecessarily in my opinion, throughout the book.

[Stephen Zanichkowsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book Report: The Devil’s Drug


Disclaimer: I sampled many of the drugs available during my misspent youth: pot, mescaline, acid, heroin, coke, MDMA, downers such as Darvon, not to mention mushrooms and cigarettes and alcohol. I never injected anything and I never became addicted. Back in those days, we never heard of crack, meth or fentanyl. “The Devil’s Drug” by Dutch anthropologist and photojournalist Teun Voeten, caught my attention for several reasons.

First, because I wondered how these later drugs compared to those from my day in terms of the different types and durations of highs. Another reason is that I don’t understand the mechanisms for addiction. The evidence for an “addiction” gene, which I often wondered about, is not conclusive. Yet, according to Voeten, a few experiences with the crystal meth pipe are enough to cause a desire severe enough to lead to addiction. Finally, we used a variety of drugs, including fentanyl, in the cardiac cath lab, and their backstory interests me.

This book is a comprehensive, thoroughly researched, entertaining and somewhat depressing history of crystal methamphetamine, but covers other synthetic drugs as well. Here we learn about the Nazi employment of meth in what could rightly be described as a “drug war” because it allowed front-line soldiers to fight for days at a time with no sleep and little appetite. It turns out, according to the author, that American athletes used Benzadrine as performance-enhancers (legally, at the time) during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. This, apparently, is where Hitler got the idea. “We live in an energy intense time that demands higher performance and greater obligation from us,” wrote one German doctor.

We read about cooking operations varying in size from two-liter soda bottles (for small, personal consumption batches) to thousand gallon tanks for industrial production and mass distribution.

Voeten describes the discovery of meth. Ephedrine was isolated in Japan in 1885, from a shrub called ephedra Sinica. Ephedrine in turn was used to synthesize methamphetamine in 1893, and this was first crystallized by another Japanese guy in 1919. Thus we arrive at the “glass” crystals made famous on Breaking Bad. The author describes the monster labs in Mexico, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, as well as the ingredients, the precursor ingredients and the pre-precursor items necessary for manufacture. The precursor ephedra is found growing almost everywhere in the world, (except Australia for some reason) and is or was the basis for ephedrine and drugs such as Sudafed. The role of these drugs as precursors explains why you can’t buy decongestants in bulk anymore. Still, there are many methods of cooking meth, and many cookbooks and instructions are available online. But cooking meth is not the point here. Voeten is telling how crystal is found all over the world, why certain populations favor it, the cost-per-high benefits and so forth. I am a science nerd, but found the book slightly depressing in terms of just how many people on the planet come to need or want to vaporize themselves on a daily basis.

On the other hand, how could one resist chapter titles such as “Trends In Worldwide Production And Trafficking” or “Chemsex in Amsterdam: Lust Unlimited”? Chemsex: crystal meth injections can induce an eight-hour high and an outlandish craving for sex, while inhibiting erections, and thus introducing sex toys and Viagra into the play. Fifty or sixty hours, with frequent injections, is popular among gay men, and is known as gay slamming. This knowledge was terribly sad for me to read.

Voeten has lived a life that is fascinating, but one which I would not have liked to live. His PhD thesis concerned the drug violence among the cartels in Mexico (The Mexican Drug Violence, 2010); he documented wars in Afghanistan, Sierra Leon, Columbia, Congo (where he was felled by a mosquito and contracted cerebral malaria, but lived to tell about it), Rwanda and Haiti; he lived among the homeless in the Amtrak train tunnels under the West side in NYC (Tunnel People, 1996). “The Devil’s Drug” has extensive notes, bibliography and index. It is not a textbook and does not read like one. Rather, it seems like a series of mis-adventures about crazy people all over the world,

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm struggling a bit to put together my thoughts on this one.

Let me start by praising the author for his apparent bravery and commitment to understanding this incredibly challenging and scary global phenomenon. The author has a storied career in photojournalism. He's travelled the world and put himself in no uncertain danger to access a deeper and more diverse perspective on the plague that is the crystal meth industry.

At the same time, this text is rough. Really rough. I'll try to break it down bit by bit.

The writing stands out first. There was very little of an editorial hand present here, but maybe that's due to the galley copy. If so, I'd advise against sending out non-edited galleys in future. The photos were missing in places, if the captions are anything to go by (but maybe that's a galley copy issue, too). But then there's also the swearing (very classy) and character assassinations, such as people being called "zombies" and "thugs" and so on, even while the author bemoans the experts for overlooking the issue of mere addiction (I'm not sure that's true).

As for the content ... it's all over the place. Peripatetic in every way. There's almost no logical structure to the book. We move suddenly from one part of the world to another and back, with significant repetition in content. On that note, while the author claims to be "as realistic and balanced as possible," this text is anything but. There's a lot of dramatic statements with little hedging and almost no references. Hiropon and Japan, for instance: in one part of the text, the author claims that the cultural tendency of injecting crystal meth in Japan links to the history of hiropon use ... but then later apparently forgets mentioning this while attributing the idea to a "senior member of the UNODC" who "suggested that the Japanese have a penchant for ceremonial acts anyways." This is just one example out of many that pepper the text from front to back. Also, this is supposed to be a text on crystal meth but we also learn a lot about other drugs, notably fentanyl and cocaine and heroin and ... okay, maybe all of the drugs. This just added bulk and confusion to the already twisty narrative.

The author also waxes philosophical about certain topics that are clearly out of his depth, complaining about "woke" critical race theory and "social constructs" without understanding the ideas and, I'm guessing, without engaging in the source material. There's also a lot of random, diary-like expositions that, as mentioned, are more like a fever dream (or maybe a pipe dream) than a compelling narrative.

Another odd point: The author cites a lot of previous work on crystal meth, leaving me wondering what the novelty here is. Perhaps it's the specific stories he found and the people he met. I suppose this might be a good text for someone more acquainted with he lay literature, someone who's looking for fresh material on well-trodden ground, and doesn't mind a provocative and questionable entry.

Thank you to Edelweiss+ and Rowman & Littlefield Publishers for the advance copy.

[Mike Volmar · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Meth cooks popularized in the hit show Breaking Bad offered us a Hollywood-esque understanding of a very complex phenomenon. In this book, Voeten lays out the history of Meth and provides insight into how this chemical compound came about, its appeal and devastation consequences.

The analysis presented in this book, describing the global phenomenon of meth production, trafficking and politics should be required reading for anyone who wants to better understand and address contemporary substance abuse and the myriad problems it entails. No actors or states are given a free pass, criss crossing the globe to develop ideas and data with first person interviews of dealers, users, police, government officials, narco traffickers, and cooks.

Voeten does not pull any punches or pander to any particular perspective to protect the sensibilities of the reader. He draws on extensive experience covering global conflicts for the past 30 or more years. I learned a lot about geopolitics reading this book. The story is complex, as are the conundrum these chemicals pose to individual lives, law enforcement and contemporary governance. This book is sometimes raw and unforgiving - a tell it like it is account - that you will find uncomfortable to read at times. In particular, you should be disturbed by the implications of the scope of the problem, and the international networks revealed by this analysis.

Journalism at its finest. Well done.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark Matter, Light Reading

War photographer, anthropologist and author Teun Voeten explored for two years the deep and dark underworld of crystal meth. It is the ultimate destructive drug that has conquered in a few decades the whole world.

Voeten visits homeless addicts in Los Angeles and Kabul. For these wretched souls, their daily dose of meth is a temporary reprieve that makes them feel king of the world. He talks to participants in the kinky gay scene of chem sex, where meth fuelled orgies sometimes last 72 hours and he travels to Mexico, where he meets with cartel members and visits a local meth lab hidden in the jungle.

His native Holland is a case apart.Voeten calls it a ‘functional narco state’ and it has developed the biggest meth industry in Europe where Mexican cooks are flown in to teach the locals how to make meth. Voeten witnesses the suspects at their trial and talks to authorities that are going after them.

This book is a fascinating read. Although the subject matter is depressing and concerning, Voeten has found an easy writing style that make the book accessible not only for scholars (with many sources and footnotes) but also interesting for lay people who want to go beyond Breaking Bad…