Spencer Pratt, once the villain of the 2000s MTV reality show The Hills and now an insurgent candidate in this year’s Los Angeles mayoral race, had a breakthrough moment in his first debate performance last Wednesday. Turning to his signature issue of public safety, Pratt berated his opponents—Mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember Nithya Raman—for not doing enough about unhoused people dealing with drug addiction. “The reality is, no matter how many beds you give these people, they are on super meth,” Pratt said, criticizing Raman’s plan to expand addiction treatment. “I will go below the Harbor Freeway tomorrow with her, and we can find some of the people she’s gonna offer treatment for. She’s gonna get stabbed in the neck. These people do not want a bed. They want fentanyl or super meth.” The viral attack on Bass and Raman was not some anomaly: On the campaign trail, Pratt, a registered Republican running as an independent, has routinely conjured dystopian visions of LA’s urban sprawl, nearly always punctuated by the watchword “super meth.” It’s a term that suggests a drug crisis beyond anything the average voter had imagined, a terrifying new tide of ultra-potent methamphetamines flooding the streets. There’s just one small detail that undercuts Pratt’s message: “Super meth” isn’t a thing. “Thankfully, super meth isn't real,” says Claire Zagorski, a paramedic, harm reductionist, and PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin College of Pharmacy. “If there really was a new type of meth, it'd have its own chemical name and we'd be hearing about it from much more reputable sources than Mr. Pratt.” Zagorski explains that while some have used the phrase “super meth” to differentiate phenyl-2-propanone (or P2P) methamphetamine from meth made with pseudoephedrine, “it's all still meth at the end.” (You may recall that Breaking Bad’s Walter White preferred the P2P process for cooking meth because it allowed him to scale up his operation.) P2P meth is the m