Methamphetamine Addiction Statistics 2026: The New Numbers, the 2024-2025 Turn, and What They Mean in New England

Methamphetamine occupies a strange place in America's drug crisis. It never generates the headlines fentanyl does, yet it is involved in more overdose deaths than any drug class except opioids, it is the second most common reason Americans enter addiction treatment, and it circulates at near-record purity just as overdose deaths have finally begun to fall.

This page compiles the current statistics on methamphetamine use, addiction, overdose deaths, psychosis, treatment, and supply, drawn only from primary sources: federal surveys, CDC death data, DEA laboratory analysis, and peer-reviewed research. Every number is dated and linked so you can verify it yourself. Because Clear Steps Recovery treats people from New Hampshire and Massachusetts, we also compiled the state-level numbers that national roundups leave out.

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Key numbers at a glance

• 2.4 million people aged 12 or older, 0.8% of that population, used methamphetamine in the past year (SAMHSA, 2024 NSDUH, released 2025).
• About 1.6 million people, 0.5% of people 12 or older, had a methamphetamine use disorder in 2024 (SAMHSA, 2024 NSDUH detailed tables).
• Roughly 639,000 people used methamphetamine daily or almost daily in 2024, and nearly 600,000 reported injecting it in the past year (SAMHSA, 2025).
• Overdose deaths involving psychostimulants rose from 5,716 in 2015 to 34,855 in 2023 (NIDA, citing CDC final data, 2025).
• Provisional CDC data show those deaths fell about 18% in 2024 and a further 12% in the 12 months ending December 2025 (CDC VSRR, retrieved July 2026).
• 59.0% of U.S. overdose deaths involved stimulants between January 2021 and June 2024, 43.1% involved stimulants and opioids together, and 31.2% involved methamphetamine specifically (CDC MMWR, 2025).
• Roughly one in eight methamphetamine samples analyzed by forensic labs contained fentanyl (DEA, 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment).
• The average purity of profiled methamphetamine seized in the U.S. was 95.5% in 2023, and about 86% of samples exceeded 95% purity (DEA Methamphetamine Profiling Program, published 2025).
• 36.5% of people who misuse methamphetamine experience psychosis; the lifetime figure is 42.7% (Lecomte et al., Psychiatry Research, 2018).
• More than 550,000 methamphetamine-related emergency department visits occurred in 2024, 6.7% of all drug-related ED visits in SAMHSA's surveillance (DAWN national estimates, published 2025).
• Methamphetamine was the primary substance in 188,620 U.S. treatment admissions in 2023, 14.2% of the total, second only to alcohol (SAMHSA TEDS, 2023).
• New Hampshire's psychostimulant-involved deaths have fallen by more than half from their 2022 peak of 106 to 48 in the 12 months ending December 2025; Massachusetts fell from a 2023 peak of 216 to 153 (CDC VSRR provisional state counts, retrieved July 2026).

How many Americans use methamphetamine?

The most current national prevalence data come from the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released by SAMHSA in July 2025. According to the 2024 NSDUH annual report, 0.8% of people aged 12 or older, about 2.4 million people, used methamphetamine in the past year.

Use is heavily concentrated among adults. In 2024, past-year methamphetamine use broke down by age as follows (SAMHSA, 2024 NSDUH):

• Adolescents aged 12 to 17: 0.2%, or about 57,000 people
• Young adults aged 18 to 25: 0.5%, or about 161,000 people
• Adults aged 26 or older: 1.0%, or about 2.2 million people

That last line matters: more than nine out of ten past-year users are 26 or older. Methamphetamine is largely a drug of adulthood, and its harms show up in workplaces, families, and midlife health problems rather than in schools. About 104,000 people used methamphetamine for the first time in 2024, at an average age of 31.5 years (SAMHSA, 2025).

SAMHSA's trend analysis found no statistically significant change in past-year methamphetamine use between 2021 and 2024, overall or in any age group. Use has plateaued at a high level rather than growing. The plateau follows a steep climb: peer-reviewed analysis of the pre-redesign survey found methamphetamine use disorder among adults aged 18 to 64 rose 62% between 2015 and 2019, and daily or near-daily use rose more than 92% between 2016 and 2019 (Han et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2021). Because NSDUH was redesigned in 2021, those earlier estimates cannot be compared directly with the 2021-2024 figures.

Heavy patterns of use have not eased. Between 2021 and 2024, the number of people reporting daily or almost daily methamphetamine use ranged from 613,000 to 639,000, and nearly 600,000 people reported injecting methamphetamine in the past year (SAMHSA, 2025).

How many people have methamphetamine use disorder?

Use and addiction are not the same thing, and the 2024 survey measures both. According to Section 5 of the 2024 NSDUH detailed tables, about 1.57 million people aged 12 or older, 0.5% of that population, met criteria for a past-year methamphetamine use disorder in 2024, compared with 1.78 million (0.6%) in 2023, a statistically significant one-year decline. SAMHSA's broader characterization is that the number has held roughly stable since 2021 (SAMHSA, 2025).

The age pattern mirrors use: roughly 1.5 million of those with methamphetamine use disorder in 2024 were adults aged 26 or older (0.6% of that age group), about 96,000 were young adults aged 18 to 25 (0.3%), and about 9,000 were adolescents (fewer than 0.1%).

Put the two figures together and the picture is stark: nearly two of every three past-year methamphetamine users meet criteria for a use disorder. Methamphetamine is one of the most addictive substances tracked by the survey, which is why early, structured treatment for meth addiction matters so much.

Meth overdose deaths: the full trend through 2025

The CDC counts methamphetamine deaths within the category "psychostimulants with abuse potential," which also includes MDMA, amphetamine, and cathinones; CDC analyses describe the category as primarily methamphetamine (CDC MMWR, 2025).

The long arc is a steep climb. According to NIDA's compilation of CDC final death data, psychostimulant-involved overdose deaths rose from 5,716 in 2015 to 34,855 in 2023, a roughly six-fold increase in eight years. The CDC's August 2025 MMWR report on stimulant-involved deaths documents the rate rising from 3.9 to 10.4 deaths per 100,000 people between 2018 and 2023.

The 2024-2025 turn: overdose deaths are falling

Here is what most methamphetamine statistics pages have not caught up with: the trend reversed in 2024, and the decline continued through 2025.

According to the CDC's provisional overdose death counts (Vital Statistics Rapid Release, retrieved July 2026), predicted psychostimulant-involved deaths for 12-month periods ending in December were:

The psychostimulant decline is part of a broader turn. The CDC's National Center for Health Statistics reported in May 2025 that overall U.S. overdose deaths fell 26.9% in 2024, from 110,037 to 80,391, the largest one-year decline ever recorded, and reported in May 2026 that 2025 deaths fell almost 14% further, to an estimated 69,973, noting in both years that deaths involving cocaine and psychostimulants decreased as well.

Yet the decline has a flip side that federal analysts flag: because opioid deaths have fallen even faster, psychostimulants are involved in a growing share of the overdose deaths that still occur, rising from 22.9% of overdose deaths in 2019 to 36.2% in provisional 2024 data (SAMHSA, 2025).

Two more cautions belong next to these numbers. They are provisional, revised as final death certificates arrive. And even after two years of declines, psychostimulant deaths in 2025 remained more than four times higher than a decade earlier. A turn is not a resolution, and the survey data above show that use itself has not fallen.

"Deaths falling is not the same thing as addiction falling. In our Londonderry and Needham clinics we still see methamphetamine appearing in intakes where it rarely used to, often alongside fentanyl. Fewer deaths means more people are surviving long enough to reach treatment, and that is exactly the window worth using."

Dr. Richard Marasa, Medical Director, Clear Steps Recovery

Meth and fentanyl: how often are they combined?

Methamphetamine's death toll cannot be understood apart from opioids. The CDC's 2025 MMWR analysis of overdose deaths from January 2021 through June 2024 found that 59.0% of overdose deaths involved stimulants (a group that includes cocaine as well as methamphetamine). Within that total, 43.1% of all overdose deaths involved stimulants and opioids together, 15.9% involved stimulants without any opioid, and 31.2% involved methamphetamine specifically.

The longer trend shows how tightly the two supplies merged. The share of psychostimulant-involved deaths that also involved opioids rose from 50.5% in 2018 to a peak of 69.4% in 2023, easing to 60.9% in provisional 2024 data (SAMHSA analysis of CDC mortality data, 2025). For several years running, roughly two of every three meth-involved deaths have also involved an opioid, most often illicitly manufactured fentanyl.

The contamination problem runs in the same direction. According to the DEA's 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment, citing national forensic laboratory data, approximately one in eight methamphetamine samples analyzed also contained fentanyl. Many people who use methamphetamine are exposed to fentanyl without knowing it, and drug mixtures are undetectable without laboratory analysis.

This is why naloxone access and overdose reversal training are now relevant even for people who believe they only use stimulants.

Who is most affected by methamphetamine?

The 2024 survey data show methamphetamine use is far from evenly distributed (SAMHSA, 2025):

• Men used methamphetamine at twice the rate of women in the past year (1.1% versus 0.5%).
• Prevalence was highest among adults aged 26 to 49 (1.4%), followed by those 50 or older (0.6%).
• Completely rural areas had much higher past-year use (2.9%) than metropolitan areas, and prevalence reached 3.0% among unemployed adults and 2.2% among people insured through Medicaid or CHIP.

The mortality data tell a parallel story. In provisional 2024 data, men died of psychostimulant-involved overdose at more than twice the rate of women (12.5 versus 4.8 per 100,000), rates peaked at ages 35 to 44 (18.0 per 100,000), and non-Hispanic American Indian and Alaska Native people had by far the highest death rate of any group (28.4 per 100,000) (SAMHSA analysis of CDC mortality data, 2025).

The CDC's 2025 MMWR report adds a distinction that matters for prevention. Deaths involving stimulants without opioids skew older: 66.5% of those decedents were aged 45 or older, compared with 44.2% of decedents whose deaths co-involved stimulants and opioids (CDC MMWR, 2025). People whose deaths involved stimulants alone were also far more likely to have a documented history of cardiovascular disease: 38.7% versus 21.2%. In other words, the stimulant-only death is often an older adult whose heart gave out after years of use, while the co-involved death looks more like the broader fentanyl crisis. Both populations need different outreach, and both are reachable.

Health effects of meth by the numbers

Long-term methamphetamine use damages the cardiovascular system, the brain, and the teeth. The National Institute on Drug Abuse lists cardiovascular events such as stroke and heart failure, severe tooth decay and loss (often called "meth mouth"), and decreased cognitive function, including difficulty with verbal learning and slower reaction times, among the documented consequences of long-term use (NIDA, 2025).

The heart

The cardiac numbers are the best quantified:

• Nationwide hospitalizations for methamphetamine-associated heart failure rose from 547 in 2002 to 6,625 in 2014, a roughly 12-fold increase, according to a 2021 study in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Cocaine-associated heart failure hospitalizations rose 85% over the same period, a fraction of methamphetamine's trajectory (Dickson et al., 2021).
• The trend continued through the 2010s. In California, age-adjusted methamphetamine-related heart failure hospitalizations rose 585% between 2008 and 2018, and annual hospitalization charges for them grew 840%, from 41.5 million to 390.2 million dollars (Zhao et al., Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, 2021).
• Among people whose overdose deaths involved stimulants without opioids, 38.7% had a known history of cardiovascular disease (CDC MMWR, 2025).

The clinical translation: methamphetamine is a cardiovascular disease accelerant, and heart symptoms in a younger adult who uses stimulants deserve urgent medical attention.

Teeth and brain

The dental toll is also well documented. In the largest community study of its kind, 571 people who used methamphetamine received comprehensive oral exams using national survey protocols: they showed high rates of dental and periodontal disease on every measure, with a clear dose-response relationship (heavier use, worse disease), nearly 3% had lost all of their teeth, and 40% reported embarrassment about their dental appearance (Shetty et al., Journal of the American Dental Association, 2015). Neurologically, NIDA reports that chronic use is associated with memory, attention, and decision-making deficits, some of which improve with sustained abstinence (NIDA, 2025).

Emergency departments

Methamphetamine now accounts for a substantial share of drug-related emergency care. SAMHSA's Drug Abuse Warning Network recorded more than 550,000 meth-related emergency department visits in 2024, 6.7% of all drug-related visits in the surveillance system, at a rate of 166 per 100,000 people (DAWN national estimates, 2024 data).

Meth-induced psychosis: the statistics

Nearly every article about methamphetamine mentions psychosis. Very few put a number on it. The best available estimate comes from a 2018 meta-analysis in Psychiatry Research by Lecomte and colleagues, which pooled 17 studies of people who misuse methamphetamine and found:

• 36.5% experienced methamphetamine-induced psychotic disorder (composite rate across studies)
• 42.7% experienced psychosis when measured across the lifetime
• 43.3% among people diagnosed with methamphetamine use disorder specifically

Psychosis here means hallucinations and fixed false beliefs, symptoms NIDA describes among the effects of long-term use (NIDA, 2025). At these rates, psychosis is not a rare complication of methamphetamine addiction; it is an expected clinical feature in roughly one of every three people who need help.

The broader mental health overlap is just as striking: among adults who used methamphetamine in the past year in 2015-2018 national data, 57.7% had any mental illness and 25.0% had a serious mental illness (Jones et al., CDC MMWR, 2020). Our guide to drug-induced psychosis explains how clinicians distinguish substance-induced symptoms from a primary psychotic disorder, and why integrated dual-diagnosis care, treating the stimulant use and the psychiatric symptoms together, is the standard of care.

"When psychotic symptoms are this common among people using methamphetamine heavily, you stop treating psychosis as a rare complication and start screening for it in every stimulant assessment. In our experience most symptoms improve with sustained abstinence and integrated care, but only when both conditions are treated together."

Dr. Richard Marasa, Medical Director, Clear Steps Recovery

Veterans and methamphetamine

Veterans are almost entirely missing from published methamphetamine statistics, which is striking for two reasons: substance use disorders are more common among veterans exposed to combat, and the Department of Veterans Affairs runs the largest real-world implementation of the most evidence-based meth treatment in existence.

On prevalence, pooled 2022 to 2024 survey data show 17.5% of veterans who served in a combat zone had a past-year substance use disorder, versus 15.4% of other veterans (SAMHSA NSDUH veterans spotlight, published 2025).

On treatment, the VA began a national rollout of contingency management in 2011, a treatment that provides small tangible rewards for stimulant-negative urine tests. The published evaluation of that rollout, DePhilippis and colleagues (2018) in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, reported that through December 2015:

• 2,060 veterans received contingency management across 94 VA treatment programs
• Patients attended 55.9% of their scheduled sessions
• 91.1% of urine samples tested negative for the targeted substance

Those results, achieved in ordinary VA clinics rather than research settings, matched what controlled trials had found, and nearly all participating programs targeted stimulants. For veterans in New England, Clear Steps Recovery's VA rehab program works with VA Community Care so that stimulant treatment is accessible close to home; our guide to veterans' addiction treatment through VA Community Care explains how the referral process works.

Meth in New England: New Hampshire and Massachusetts data

National statistics hide enormous state variation, and New England's methamphetamine problem looks different from the West's. Here are the current numbers for New Hampshire and Massachusetts, compiled from the CDC's provisional state counts (VSRR, 12-month periods ending in December, retrieved July 2026):

Four things stand out in this table:

• New Hampshire's psychostimulant deaths peaked earlier and fell harder: from 106 in the 12 months ending December 2022 to 48 in the period ending December 2025, a drop of more than half.
• Massachusetts peaked in 2023 at 216 and has declined about 29% since, to 153, roughly tracking the national turn.
• New Hampshire's overall decline was among the steepest in the country. The CDC's May 2025 release named New Hampshire among the eight jurisdictions with overdose-death declines of 35% or more in 2024.
• New Hampshire's psychostimulant count ticked up in the provisional 2025 data (43 to 48) even as its total deaths kept falling. The numbers are small and provisional, but they are a reminder that the stimulant problem is not simply evaporating alongside the fentanyl decline.

Stimulants also appear inside the opioid death toll. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health's toxicology data (Current Opioid Statistics, June 2024 report) show that among 2023 opioid-related overdose deaths with a toxicology screen, amphetamines (a category that includes methamphetamine) were present in 11%, and cocaine in 54%. Both states maintain ongoing surveillance: Massachusetts through its quarterly opioid statistics reports, and New Hampshire through the Drug Monitoring Initiative, which publishes monthly drug environment reports.

If you are citing New England methamphetamine data, this table is, to our knowledge, the only compilation of these state psychostimulant figures currently published. To cite it: Clear Steps Recovery compilation of CDC Vital Statistics Rapid Release provisional counts for psychostimulants with abuse potential (T43.6), retrieved July 2026 and subject to revision.

Meth supply and purity: what the DEA reports

Purity figures circulating on statistics pages contradict each other, sometimes on the same page: "above 90 percent" here, "97.2 percent" there, usually with no source. The sourced numbers come from the DEA's own laboratory system.

According to the DEA Office of Forensic Sciences' CY 2023 Annual Methamphetamine Report, the average purity of domestically seized methamphetamine samples profiled by the Methamphetamine Profiling Program was 95.5%, about 86% of profiled samples exceeded 95% purity, and potency tracked purity, meaning producers have largely eliminated the weaker, unwanted isomer. The same program's reporting shows more than 98% of profiled samples were produced from the phenyl-2-propanone (P2P) precursor, the method used by industrial-scale laboratories in Mexico. The DEA's 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment describes the resulting supply as high, with cartels trafficking a highly pure and potent product across the country, including into eastern markets that historically saw little methamphetamine.

The practical translation: there is no longer any meaningful "weak" street methamphetamine. Essentially everything in circulation is high-purity, high-potency product, increasingly pressed into counterfeit pills and sometimes contaminated with fentanyl.

Meth treatment statistics: what works

Methamphetamine is now the second most common primary substance in American addiction treatment. According to SAMHSA's Treatment Episode Data Set 2023 annual report, methamphetamine was the primary substance in 188,620 admissions in 2023, 14.2% of the roughly 1.33 million admissions with a known primary substance, behind only alcohol (35.7%) and ahead of heroin (13.3%).

The longer trend is striking: methamphetamine's share of all U.S. treatment admissions roughly doubled between 2012 (6.4%) and 2022 (11.5%), and among primary methamphetamine admissions, injection as the usual route of use rose from 18.0% in 2010 to 28.2% in 2019 (SAMHSA, 2025).

No approved medication, strong behavioral evidence

Unlike opioid or alcohol addiction, methamphetamine addiction has no medication fix. NIDA states plainly that there is no FDA-approved medication for methamphetamine use disorder or any other stimulant use disorder (NIDA, 2025).

What does have evidence is behavioral treatment, and the evidence is specific:

• NIDA identifies contingency management, which provides small tangible incentives for stimulant-negative tests, as the best-studied behavioral treatment for stimulant use disorder (NIDA, 2025).
• A network meta-analysis in PLoS Medicine covering 50 randomized trials and 6,942 participants found that contingency management combined with the community reinforcement approach was the only intervention that increased both abstinence and retention, with an odds ratio of 2.84 for abstinence at end of treatment and 3.08 at longest follow-up compared with treatment as usual (De Crescenzo et al., 2018).
• The VA's national rollout, described above, showed those results hold in real-world clinics: 91.1% stimulant-negative samples across 2,060 veterans (DePhilippis et al., 2018).

Behavioral treatment for methamphetamine addiction is typically delivered through structured outpatient care: an intensive outpatient program that provides multiple sessions per week of group and individual therapy, drug testing, and skills work, often built around cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational approaches. For people in Massachusetts, the same clinical model is available through our meth addiction treatment program in Massachusetts. When someone needs medically supervised withdrawal first, Clear Steps Recovery connects them with trusted detox partners by referral, then continues care in its outpatient programs; stimulant withdrawal is rarely medically dangerous, but the crash of early abstinence is exactly when structured support prevents an immediate return to use.

"There is no medication I can prescribe that treats methamphetamine addiction the way buprenorphine treats opioid addiction. What the evidence supports is behavioral: contingency management and structured outpatient care that reward staying engaged week after week. It is unglamorous, but it is the strongest tool we have."

Dr. Richard Marasa, Medical Director, Clear Steps Recovery

Recovery and relapse: the longer view

Stimulant addiction is a chronic condition, and returns to use are common in the first months of recovery, just as they are for other chronic illnesses. In a five-year cohort study, 61% of people treated for methamphetamine use relapsed within the first year after discharge, but ongoing participation in treatment or self-help after discharge cut the relapse hazard by 71% (Brecht and Herbeck, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 2014). Continued engagement changes the odds dramatically, and every year of sustained recovery lowers the risk of return. We cover the numbers, the timing, and what actually reduces risk in our companion guide to relapse statistics.

No treatment program can promise a particular outcome, and any that does should be treated with suspicion. What the evidence supports is longer, structured engagement: treatment that continues past the first weeks, screens for co-occurring conditions like psychosis and depression, and rewards people for staying connected.

Methodology and source notes

Prevalence figures come from the 2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (data collected in 2024, released July 2025); use-disorder figures come from Section 5 of the 2024 NSDUH detailed tables, and additional NSDUH breakdowns come from SAMHSA's August 2025 statement to the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Because NSDUH was redesigned in 2021, post-2021 estimates are not compared with earlier cycles except where peer-reviewed research analyzed consistent pre-redesign data. National overdose-death trends through 2023 are final CDC/NVSS data as compiled by NIDA; 2024 and 2025 figures are provisional CDC Vital Statistics Rapid Release predicted counts for 12-month periods ending in December, retrieved July 2026, and subject to upward or downward revision as death certificates are finalized. State counts for New Hampshire and Massachusetts are reported provisional VSRR counts, which can undercount recent deaths. Stimulant co-involvement and decedent-characteristic data come from the CDC MMWR report of August 28, 2025, covering January 2018 through June 2024. Treatment admissions are from SAMHSA's Treatment Episode Data Set 2023 annual report and count admissions, not unique individuals. Supply and purity data are from the DEA's Methamphetamine Profiling Program CY 2023 annual report and the 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment. Emergency department figures are from SAMHSA's Drug Abuse Warning Network 2024 national estimates. No statistic on this page is sourced from a commercial website or another treatment provider; where a widely repeated number could not be traced to a live primary source, we left it out. This page is medically reviewed, and the last-reviewed date above reflects the most recent verification of every figure.

If methamphetamine has a hold on you or someone in your family, you do not have to figure this out alone. Clear Steps Recovery provides outpatient treatment in Londonderry, New Hampshire and Needham, Massachusetts, and our admissions team answers confidentially at (603) 769-8981.