Most of what is written about methamphetamine online is recycled from other websites that were themselves recycling something else. Claims drift, statistics lose their origin, and myths harden into facts. This page sets out where our information actually comes from.

Our source hierarchy

Tier 1 — what we build articles from.

  • Peer-reviewed journals indexed in PubMed — for example the Journal of the American Dental Association
  • National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
  • Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
  • National Institutes of Health (NIH)
  • Professional bodies such as the American Dental Association
  • Named government datasets, cited with their collection year

Tier 2 — used with attribution, never as the sole basis for a health claim.

  • Established news organisations with a corrections process, for reporting on events and policy
  • Academic institutions and teaching hospitals
  • Court records and published legal documents, for legal content

Tier 3 — what we do not use.

  • Other treatment-marketing and rehab websites
  • Content farms and AI-generated aggregators
  • Forums, social media and anecdote presented as data
  • Any statistic we cannot trace to an original, named source
  • Press releases treated as findings

How we handle statistics

Every figure on this site should be traceable to a named source, with the year the data was collected — not merely the year it was published. Where a study has meaningful limits (a small sample, a single city, a self-selected group) we say so in the text rather than presenting the number as universal.

Where sources disagree, we present the disagreement instead of picking whichever number sounds worst.

Correcting widely repeated claims

Sometimes the primary evidence contradicts what nearly every other site says. When that happens we follow the evidence and explain the discrepancy. The clearest example on this site is the popular claim that meth “burns” teeth with corrosive manufacturing chemicals — the research does not support it, and we explain why on the meth mouth page.

Currency

Health content is reviewed at least every 12 months. Where a field is moving quickly, we prefer sources from the last five years, and we say so when we are relying on an older study because nothing better exists.

Found a source problem?

If a citation is wrong, missing, or does not support the claim attached to it, tell us through the corrections policy. That is exactly the kind of error we want reported.