Meth, extremely combustible to manufacture, is cooked up by amateur chemists in illegal makeshift meth labs.

It’s also known as speed, chalk, ice, crystal, glass, and Tina. Call it what you like, you’re teeth will call it the last thing they see before they rot and fall out.

Sure, dentists are close to public servants. It’s hard to mentally group them in with those “Look here, buy this” merchants you see down in Tijuana, but they both have one thing in common—they need the red, juicy blood of consumers to keep air in their business’s lungs. Call them patients or customers, dentists need people with teeth issues.

Dr. Scott McMahan is a Dentist in Ocean Beach who has treated patients with meth mouth. “I thought a lot of it was poor lifestyle,” he said of first seeing the condition. “Recently, I attended some classes and read some articles and that put a finger on it for me.”

Meth mouth patients often require multiple visits and thousands and thousands of dollars to be treated. Getting ahead of the problem can be like making a sand castle too close to the waters’ edge. Teeth turn black at the gums and disintegrate faster than they can be saved. “It’s really kind of a multiphase problem,” he said.

Instead of trying to save the teeth via drilling and filling, the normal surgical route, Dr. McMahan said he encourages patients to rinse with Betadyne and fluoride to keep the mouth moistened. He even prescribes a special mouthwash, Biotene, to help combat dry mouth. He also encourages them to chew gum with Xylitol.

Dr. Snider, a Dentist at Pacific Beach Dentistry in Pacific Beach, said he’s noticed more buzz about meth mouth in his industry in the last five or six years. In fact, he recalled seeing a trade publication with meth mouth as its cover article in the last six months. “Here in P.B., I really haven’t seen it,” he said. “I have seen it when I worked in L.A.

Dr. Snider recalled working on a woman, approximately 38 years old and an obvious meth addict. He said the state of her teeth was so irreversibly decayed that he had no other choice but to extract them all and give her dentures.

Although he’s not really sure why they do it, Dr. Snider explained that meth users tend to grind their teeth, sometimes down to the gum line, causing little cracks in the enamel, further worsening the already grim situation.

According to the Journal of the American Dental Association, www.ada.org/prof/resources/pubs/jada/index.asp, “Often, there is no hope of treating the methamphetamine-damaged teeth, and they are extracted.”

The Methamphetamine Strike Force has established a hotline in San Diego for those who have a problem and need to get clean or for someone who wants to report a drug-related crime. The number is 1-877-no2meth. Clever, aye? In a media release on www.no2meth.org, Supervisor Dianne Jacob said, “The strike force isn’t just about arresting drug dealers and users. We’re attacking the meth problem through prevention, intervention, treatment and interdiction.”