As federal authorities continue to take energetic measures against the propagation of fentanil throughout the country, the drug control administration is warning about an increase in the use of methamphetamine, and DEA officials express special concern for methamphetamine pills that are sold as drugs such as Adderall to adults of university age.
“What we have seen recently here, which scares me,” said the interim administrator of the DEA, Robert Murphy, to the correspondent of the President of the Justice of ABC News, Pierre Thomas, in an exclusive interview.
Murphy said that the DEA hopes that his methamphetamine seizures almost double this year compared to last year.
Until now, the DEA has seized around 70,000 pounds of the drug this year, almost coinciding with the numbers reached in all 2024, Murphy said.
“Methamphetamine is, with much, the most coveted drug,” Murphy said. “This is what people want.”
The DEA has worried so much about the continuous boom of the use of methamphetamine that it plans to hold a press conference on Tuesday to get attention to it.
“In the first six months of this year, we have already seen more than … what we took last year,” Murphy told ABC News. “And we project … let’s double what we take advantage of last year.”
The interim administrator of the DEA, Robert Murphy, speaks with the correspondent of the President of Justice Pierre Thomas at the DEA headquarters in Arlington, VA, on July 14, 2025.
ABC News
Murphy said that one of the most disturbing things in methamphetamine is that “Mexican posters control 100%.”
“They control production, smuggling, distribution in the United States and obviously the real collection of money and returns money to Mexico,” he said.
And the posters are increasingly creative in the way they try to pass methamphetamine on the border between the United States and Mexico, from hiding packages of methamphetamine pills between green onions to disguise the shipments of methamphetamine such as celery loads.
In a place during the week of July 4, the DEA discovered hundreds of cucumber boxes that had been aligned with several hundred pounds of methamphetamine, for a value of almost $ 4 million.
And in May, with the assistance of the Kansas Research Office, the federal authorities arrested six people who supposedly brought liquid methamphetamine to the United States and took it to Kansas when hiding it in the septic tank of a Charter bus.
The authorities suspected after realizing that the bus rarely had passengers.
The methamphetamine disguised as watermelon is seen in this photo of a drug bust of 2024 in California by customs and border protection of the United States.
Customs and border protection of the USA.
“They are only limited by their imagination,” Murphy said on smugglers. “And they have a very wide imagination.”
Murphy called him “a cat and mouse game.”
He said the posters now have a “great approach” in the pills, which according to him has less stigma than injectable drugs.
As a result, Murphy said, converting methamphetamine into the pill form makes it more commercializable and, therefore, it is sold more easily as something that is not, such as Addell False or MDMA false, the active ingredient in ecstasy.
“[It’s] All drugs looking for our children of university age and younger, “he said.” They are actually receiving methamphetamine and do not know this. “
According to the most recent statistics of disease control centers, drug overdose deaths in the United States decreased dramatically by almost 27% last year.
But while fentanyl and other overdose related to opioids fell more, for more than a third, overdoses related to methamphetamine and other psychicos -stimulants fell less, in almost 22%.
“You are buying a pill outside the street today, you are taking your life in your own hands,” Murphy warned, saying that “almost everything” is now taking “false.”
“And as a researcher, our men and women have difficulty distinguishing between what is real and what does not,” Murphy said. “So there is no way that the average user can do it.”
