Hacker News Reader

I spent a month driving around the country last year. Be warned that entire counties have been decimated by meth and fentanyl. Low income doesn't always translate to violent crime and theft, but meth absolutely does. When looking at crime maps, always filter by overdose response and not posession arrests. https://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/meth-lab-map/ Absolutely stay away from Tulsa, OK. Greenville, SC is very nice though.

View on HN

Yeah, as much as small towns are treated as some panacea to the problem of large cities, in last small town I lived in, half the people I know were selling coke or heroin on top of working shitty minimum wage jobs.

The entire town felt propped up by the existence of a single military base.

I've read in multiple places how most meth in the USA today is Mexican cartel meth. The bans on pseudoephedrine have succeeded in stopping home-brew meth.

So not sure how valid that map is anymore.

Based on my "anecdata" of driving through many of those areas, I would say the problem is much worse than the map shows. Also, it is one of the few maps that showed meth activity by county, in a national context. Recent DEA and CDC reports are all PDFs filled with statistics and not mapped out as well. But, the numbers are only climbing and these areas are still centers of the consumption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com