The problem with meth exposure is it’s hard to ethically study. A good scientific study would be methodical. It would have a control- one group would be exposed to low levels the toxin, the others to baby powder or something equally inoffensive. Simple enough to lay out a study. So why not do it?
Because it would not be ethical to expose test subjects to increasing doses of a known toxin just to see at what point they started to get sick.
So- what do we know? We know the symptom profile to expect of a short term exposure- it’s basically the same as any other stimulant chemical. We don’t know what, if any, long term symptoms there are. We don’t know much (concentration) is required to trigger a reaction or how long the exposure time needs to be. And no one is going to study it because doing so would expose the test subjects to far too great a risk of harm. There are a few studies- limited in scale and scope, but they’re what we have to work from.
Having established that we know very little, where do the guidelines for meth remediation come from?
Limits vary by state. There’s little guidance available for remediation. The EPA publishes guidelines. The standard throughout the US comes from a detection standard. What that means is essentially, ‘if we can find it, it has to be cleaned’.1
Why default to that? It’s basically the only available number- we just don’t know what the safety threshold is. It is almost certainly overly cautious. The rule on poisons, of any kind, is that the dose determines how dangerous it actually is. Since we don’t know, we default to an abundance of caution.
Current (extremely limited) research indicates that existing remediation standards are probably 5-10 times more conservative than necessary.2 Remediation models do not make any allowance for exposure time. For example, remediating a crawl space may be of limited utility if reminding people to dress appropriately and decontaminate after working there is sufficient to prevent injury from exposure.
It’s worth knowing that drug testing companies have the same host of perverse incentives as pest control companies. People are scared of meth (and rightfully so) and cockroaches. In either case, an unethical company can overinflate (or, notoriously in the case of pest control companies create) a problem and sell an expensive solution. It’s an easy sell to a scared customer who doesn’t know anything about the danger and just very much wants everything to go away.
Additionally, with the limited data available, it’s almost guaranteed that even a 100% honest company is going to be selling solutions that are more expensive than necessary.
Whatever steps the school decides to take going forward (see previous article on Trego Teacherage), they’ll need to make sure to be well educated, thoughtful customers. Additionally, available information on dosage levels suggests that there’s no immediate safety hazard to spending time in or around the teacherage. School board members going in to look at the situation shouldn’t be in any danger.
- Kuhn EJ, Walker GS, Whiley H, Wright J, Ross KE. Household Contamination with Methamphetamine: Knowledge and Uncertainties. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2019 Nov 23;16(23):4676. doi: 10.3390/ijerph16234676. PMID: 31771211; PMCID: PMC6926576. ↩︎
- Dennison JE. Tiered remediation standards for methamphetamine in residences. medRxiv 2025.03.23.25324483;
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.23.25324483 ↩︎
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