WHEN METH RUNS WILD

Attorney General Roy Cooper provides some sorely needed leadership with his
sensible plan to discourage methamphetamine production. Because treatment
rarely ever works for meth users, preventing addiction is the only
effective way to slow this latest drug epidemic. And interrupting supplies
has to be part of the strategy.

Cooper's plan to include training and equipment for law enforcement
officers closest to the problem makes sense. Many of them have yet to come
in contact with meth, which was an unknown quantity in North Carolina just
five years ago. That has changed in shockingly short order. Police shut
down 177 meth labs last year, but the drug is so profitable that few expect
the profiteers to be easily discouraged.

So the attorney general is calling on distributors of meth's core
ingredient, the ephedrine found in over-the-counter cold medicine, to
report anybody buying in bulk. And he rightly aims to educate landlords,
garbage collectors and others about the evidence of meth production, such
as large numbers of empty cold-medicine packages, and how to report it.

North Carolina also needs tougher legal penalties for meth dealers. But
because of the higher prison costs involved, the leadership of the state's
top law enforcement official is needed to convince the legislature. Cooper
makes a strong case when he says it will cost North Carolina more in social
services to allow meth addiction to spread than it will cost in prison
slots to tamp down the epidemic.