WHAT MAKES METH SO BAD

Pioneer Press ^ | February 22, 2004 | Amy Becker

[small_l_libertarian]

What is an ED physician?

[goldstategop]

It also sounds like a good way to get premature Alzheimers. Talk about punishment fitting the crime.

[Outlaw76]

Legal Meth is still in existance and is fed to our children, mostly male children, in unimaginable quantities.

Ritalin and other ADHD medicines are very, very similar to the homebrew versions sold on the street - just cleaner

[Outlaw76]

"Same as person on Atkins keeps no ice cream or cookies in the house. "

LOL! I sometimes wish that was possible. As an Atkins dieter and father of 3 I am often tempted by the snacks and foods my kids get to eat. This morning it was those little doughnuts covered with confectionary sugar that made me slap my stomach to prove that though the battle isn't over, the front has moved back significantly.

[TKDietz]

"I reluctantly think we still need to wait for the drug-user to harm someone other than himself, just as we do, or should do, with other crimes. Preemptive arrest sure seems like a steep slippery slope into a police state which, by the way, is coming. Thanks largely to the do-gooders of the WoD."

Do you believe in arresting people for driving while intoxicated, firing guns in crowded residential neighborhoods, or possessing nuclear weapons? Obviously the government does not wait and should not wait before people engaged in all sorts of dangerous and unjustifiable conduct hurt someone before these people are arrested. It is a slippery slope though. You are right about that. It's hard to have a bright-line rule for when conduct is too risky or dangerous for society.

In my opinion I think that in a free society people should have the right to do whatever they want to do as long as they don't hurt other people or create a substantial and unjustifiable risk of significant harm to others. For instance, knocking the stuffing out of someone out on the street would usually not be justifiable, doing it on the field in a football game would be because it is sanctioned, consensual conduct. Driving while intoxicated is considered by a majority of people to be unjustifiable and too risky to condone. Many people, myself included, also feel that way about using drugs like meth and heroin. The risk of addiction leading to substantial problems for those around the addict and society in general is too high.

I do believe that punishments should fit crimes and should be similar for similarly risky or harmful conduct. I can't see how just using or possessing a small amount of any drug is worse than something like driving drunk, for instance, so I think it is wrong to give people felony records and send them to prison and so on for nothing other than using or possessing a drug society doesn't approve of.

[mabelkitty]

Profit motive.
My concern is the young urban poor kids who get sucked into selling this, and may or may not use it, because of the money involved.
Until you take the profit out of it, you will never solve the problem. Demand will be there, but suppliers would dry up.

[Atlas Sneezed]

My concern is the young urban poor kids who get sucked into selling this, and may or may not use it, because of the money involved.

---

If it were legalized, don't you think that the distribution channels might opt for the services of people other than desparate urban youth with nothing to lose?

[TKDietz]

"Demand will be there, but suppliers would dry up."

No way. As long as there is sufficient demand, it will be met. If prices go down and it puts many suppliers out of business, then the few remaining suppliers will sell more product with smaller profit margins but still make a healthy profit because of the higher quantities sold.

[Bluntpoint]

Meth is not that bad, I hate speling and sciense worse.

[TKDietz]

"That's all true, but the real question is whether legalizing these poisons would cause more people to take them. Would you start up a habit because it was legal?

And even if there were a slightly increased usage rate by free adults, don't you think that the added societal costs of these users would be more than offset by the benefits to our liberties and pocketbooks by ending the War On (some) Drugs?"

I agree that if the increase would only be slight then it's silly not to legalize. But would the increase only be slight? I am not convinced of that. Let's say for instance that cocaine was legalized and adults could pick it up $5 a gram at the corner convenience store. Now, cocaine is pretty fun stuff and I would imagine that substantial numbers of the 32,000,000 or so people in this country who have tried it but don't do it anymore would find the temptation too great. They'd feel compelled to pick up a gram when they buy that twelve pack of beer on Friday night. You'd also start seeing people picking up a gram in the morning to kick start the work day. People who have used it in the past and new folks alike would be interested in dirt cheap cocaine that they could just pick up at the store.

As of 2002 the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimated from their National Survey on Drug Use & Health that less than two million Americans over the age of 18 used cocaine in the month before the survey. According to the survey that was less than 1% of our 18 and older population. I'd bet big bucks we'd see substantially higher than 1% using coke if it was selling for $5.00 a gram at convenience stores. And the more people who use it, the more who will develop hardcore addictions.

[Atlas Sneezed]

You'd also start seeing people picking up a gram in the morning to kick start the work day.

---

Sounds like caffeine and cocaine have more in common than being traditional Coca-Cola ingredients.

Incidentally, back when it WAS legal, do you recall the usage rate? It would seem that making it illegal has done more for the allure of drugs than anything else.

[Clinging Bitterly]

I've been following this thread the last couple days. Looks like a couple here have had personal experience with the stuff, and some others have close relationships with current & former users. I fall into the latter category.

We have two high school age girls at our house because their mother is on the stuff, and just too tweaked out and paranoid to deal with them anymore. She left them with us a few years ago and they are away from the fear and neglect that they suffered in their earlier years, and that's good. They still go visit their mom and get along with her for short periods, but she and they know they couldn't live together full time (at least she is sane enough to realize that, but not sane enough to give up making the most flimsy rationalizations for why she keeps doing the stuff).

If you look at the series of pictures of the woman upthread, you will see the girls' mother in spades. That's exactly what it did to her, she's been on it for about 20 years, her face is distorted in the same way, her teeth are gone, and she has the temperament to match the pictures. She's about 43 years old now, so she has just a few years left.

A younger coworker recently had to put his mother, about 50 years old, into a nursing home for the rest of her life, because she was doing the combination of meth and crack. Health problems related to her drug use started taking their toll years earlier, but she eventually had a stroke that left her paralyzed and unable to speak, and she's not likely to get better.

Both of these women have had brushes with the law over their drug use. The girls' mom was found walking down the middle of the highway in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, because she had parked her car by the side of the road and ripped apart it's wiring, convinced that it had been bugged (and yes, she had dismantled VCRs for the same reason). She was hauled in for DUII, had fines and rehab imposed and cheated her way through, none of it did any good.

The coworker's mother had a string of convictions for possession and related things like burglaries, and had done some prison time as well, and none of that did any good.

I don't know what the answer is, meth is old news in the rural areas of the west coast, and if there was an answer, it seems like we'd have it here. But the traditional methods we are using, letting the law impose the sanctions that are currently prescribed haven't touched it. The key is to get people to just not use the stuff in the first place, but how? Public skools aren't getting the message across, that's for sure. I don't know if they are showing the pictures, but they need to be showing them, and telling some of those life stories, this stuff is severely crippling, physically, mentally, and socially.

And the violence is there, the girls' mom had close ties to some of the people involved in a particularly grisly murder that played out in their hometown a few years back. That was, in fact, what triggered the paranoia that started with the dismantling of the home electronics and graduated to dismantling the car that night she got picked up. Her and her boyfriend (actually now married) have had numerous physical fights over the years, and they have the scars to prove it, along with those pesky domestic violence convictions now that forever keep them from owning gunz (maybe a good thing in their case but there's plenty of room to argue that it isn't in general).

Now I'm a libertarian sort, I think that in general, with regard to the war on drugs, the cure is worse than the disease, but this meth is as nasty as they say, some of the newcomers out in the heartland haven't seen anything yet, and there's no propaganda here, plenty of us real folks have seen and experienced the reality. I didn't always, but I do now advocate pot legalization, and would maybe even look at some of the other stuff out there (about which I admittedly know less), but I don't think meth should be legalized or decriminalized. The law is going to have to deal with the violent and neglectful among it's users, and hopefully education and science with save the others before they get to that point < /my .02 >.

Dave in Eugene

[FITZ]

We need to be educating people, finding out who the addicts are, getting them clean and teaching them how to stay clean.

Who has to pay to rehab the addicts? The working, taxpayer types? Or would the addict at least pay their own rehab? Some addicts have too high a failure rate --- something like 90% for meth addicts --- it's too futile, too expensive to teach them --- they aren't teachable.

[FITZ]

I've known cocaine and alcohol addicts who were only able to start their rehab after going to jail --- it gave them a time out on their drug, allowed their minds to clear for once and think about rehab --- plus the fear of being locked up without the drug seemed to motivate them to clean up --- and none had signed up for a voluntary program until there was jail time. It seemed like they must have thought if they keep on the way they were going they were going to be locked up without their fix -- and being locked up is horrible so they might as well try to get some control.

[FITZ]

I don't know what the answer is, meth is old news in the rural areas of the west coast, and if there was an answer, it seems like we'd have it here. But the traditional methods we are using, letting the law impose the sanctions that are currently prescribed haven't touched it. The key is to get people to just not use the stuff in the first place, but how?

Around here the drug of choice seems to be silver aerosol paint --- the hardware stores lock up the spray paint and you have to be over 18 or 21 to buy it. Sometimes there doesn't seem to be a good answer --- maybe some people are just doomed to self-destruct. It's like they want a slow suicide.

[Kozak]

What is an ED physician?

I work in an Emergency Department, also known as the ER.

[bc2]

If your solution to the drug war and our problem with methamphetamines is to kill dealers because that will stop the desire of people to do meth, let me offer you some advice.

1- please take a simple class in economics. Supply depends on demand, without a demand the supply will dry up, and if there is a demand there will always be people to supply. This is a fact of life and killing people won't change this simple economic law.

2- please take a history class, because we have been attacking the war on drugs from the supply side for about 30 years now and the problem keeps getting worse.

3- get some common sense because you seem to want to repeat failed policies over and over again, that's called idiocy.

Meth is dangerous, and there are solutions, but not the same "solutions" we have been trying for years which have only made the problem worse.

[Mr. Mojo]

So true -- If you tell (many) kids they'll get cancer, heart disease, or brain damage they'll look at you like you're nuts. But if you tell them their appearance will be destroyed and no one will be attracted to them anymore, or better yet show them a series of pictures like the ones above, you'll suddenly have their attention.

[dennisw]

1- please take a simple class in economics. Supply depends on demand, without a demand the supply will dry up, and if there is a demand there will always be people to supply. This is a fact of life and killing people won't change this simple economic law.

Kill off the supply by killing off the suppliers. Trying and executing them. They are murderous scum and need to be dead. I'm not into "understanding" such scum, that's your department.