METHOLOGY

Even though it might not be in Halifax yet, crystal meth has a
presence that looms from the street to the legislature. But curbing
the drug's spread will take more than laws that make it harder to buy Sudafed.

Let's begin with the simplest fact there is about crystal
methamphetamine in Halifax: it's not here.

The Halifax Regional Police Service has never arrested anybody for
possession of the drug, a powerful stimulant that's sold in rock form
like crack and can be smoked in a pipe or, when it's in powder form,
eaten, snorted or dissolved in water and injected. "You want to talk
about meth?" detective Ken Burton of the drug section says. "It's
going to be a short conversation."

Strictly speaking, he's right.

Here's another fact about the drug, which is known as jib among teens
(users are "jibbernauts"), Tina in gay circles and crank, speed,
crystal, ice, chalk and glass: it is here.

On Halifax streets, people are scoring ecstasy laced with meth. But
there's another less intentional way people are using meth in
Halifax: dealers are cutting--or completely substituting--crack
cocaine with meth.

"People are saying that the crack high is different," says Patty
Melanson, a nurse who covers health care services for Phoenix Youth
Programs, an organization working with homeless and at-risk youth
aged 16 to 24 in Halifax. Different how? Here's how: a woman smokes
what she thinks is a rock of crack and instead of being high for 15
minutes, she can be cranked for 15 hours.

Cindy MacIsaac, executive director at Direction 180, says visitors to
the Gottingen Street-based methadone program are describing the same
thing. There are "people reporting that the cocaine they're using is
different--the high is longer, they're staying up longer.

"You do stay up on cocaine, but this this keeps you going. You're
smoking something and suddenly you're up all night."

Cocaine-based drugs are already cut, of course; that's where the
money's made. MacIsaac says a common filler agent in Halifax is
Drano. But there are known unknowns and there are unknown unknowns.
Imagine smoking what you thought was a marijuana joint Saturday night
and not coming back down until you crash sometime Sunday evening.
Crack isn't pot (neither, for that matter, is meth), but the
comparison sticks: when you buy crack in Halifax right now you don't
know what you're getting. Or what you're getting into.

MacIsaac says it's no accident Halifax crack is being cut with
crystal meth, a drug that targets the central nervous system and
jacks up a user's heart rate, body temperature, rate of breathing and
blood pressure. "There are different ways of introducing a drug and,
you know, already [users'] inhibitions are down and whether [a dealer
says] this is meth or whether they don't, people are in a position
where they're not able to make an informed decision. It can be a way
that people introduce it to a community."

There is a third way crystal meth is making an advance into Halifax.
In the headlines.

News stories with local focus are creeping into Nova Scotia papers
now that the cops--and even more so the RCMP--are talking about the
drug. "Cranking up war on speed" and "Cops on prowl for meth labs"
are two examples.

The local media's interest has been piqued no doubt too by the
attention being paid to the drug across the US and in Canada's west,
where politicians and police routinely refer to the drug like it's a
vector-borne disease or a natural disaster. Vancouver's The Province
ran a week-long series in April 2005 called "The Menace of Meth,"
using headlines like "Meth 'ravaging' towns in BC" and "'An avalanche
coming this way.'"

Nova Scotia is an anomaly in the march of meth. The province is one
of the last Canadian jurisdictions to face an influx of the drug,
together with Canada's north and the rest of the Atlantic provinces.

In parts of the American Midwest--Montana, notably--and in spots like
downtown Vancouver, crystal meth has been called an "epidemic." What
that word means in the context of meth isn't always clear. A public
spat between Maple Ridge, BC mayoral candidate Gordon Robson and
then-mayor of Vancouver Larry Campbell took place in October 2005
when Robson called meth an "epidemic" in BC and Campbell called the
assertion "garbage."

"If Larry Campbell doesn't think this is an epidemic," Robson, who is
now mayor of Maple Ridge, told CTV news, "he should get down to the
streets of Vancouver and see."

Maybe it's all semantics or tit-for-tat politicking, but calling meth
an epidemic sure is a convenient way to lend a sense of desperation
to what's certainly a grave--if largely indefinable and possibly
unknowable--situation.

You know what else is convenient?

Treating crystal meth like it's a street drug, one that's only for
prostitutes and the people we call "street kids."

Meth is a boon to people surviving on the streets. It's written all
over the January 2006 research paper, The drugs are here. What are
you going to do about it? An Assessment of Crystal Meth and Other
Drug Use Among Street-Involved Youth in Halifax, NS. One research
assistant writing in the document calls it "the perfect street drug."

It is. When you're on meth, you don't want to sleep and you don't
want to eat. Presto. Two primary concerns are off the list of
day-to-day struggles of life on the street. Getting off the drug when
you're working to secure a job and find affordable housing? That's
another story.

As much as meth keeps users awake, it keeps them going too. Really
going. And that can be as helpful to young politicians as it is to
surgeons and stressed-out moms. Mick Jagger said mother's little
helper helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day. Who says
it has to be a tranquilizer?

"Crystal meth appeals to a huge demographic," says nurse Patty
Melanson. "It appeals to the young man who wants to play basketball
and maintain his place on the debating team and not go to bed at
night so he can get everything done. It appeals to a street youth who
needs to stay up all night to protect their territory or who doesn't
have any money for food. It attracts partiers. It's attractive to
business people, people in sales. And it's a synthetic drug. So
people don't see it like a dirty drug, like crack."

Perhaps they also fail to take in the fact that smoking meth is akin
to drinking an assortment of under-the-kitchen-sink chemicals. Meth
is made with a mix of solvents and highly reactive
chemicals--principally iodine crystals, red phosphorus and
decongestant drug pseudoephedrine. Users probably also don't see the
nervousness it's reported to instill, the irritability, paranoia,
tremors and the sometimes violent behaviour.

Know what else crystal meth is good for? Losing weight. A lot of it.
Up to 18 kilograms per month, according to a February CanWest News
story. That's 40 pounds. But how do you look good in your prom dress
when there's not enough make-up in the bottle to cover your facial
lesions and your teeth look like caramelized brown sugar?

Want to know one more thing that's convenient about meth? Imagining
it's strictly an urban problem. Nope. Meth is a rural drug too.

According to the province of Ontario's Crystal Meth Working Group, of
the 17 meth lab busts that took place in the province from mid-2003
to mid-2005, many were in rural regions.

Rural Alberta RCMP reported a more than tenfold increase in arrests
for meth trafficking between 1998 and 2002, a trend the agency
attributes in a Strathcona RCMP newsletter to "the criminal element
[moving labs] to rural areas to avoid detection."

Cape Breton Regional Police is watching several homes now where
suspected meth labs operate. While Halifax Regional Police hasn't
made a single meth bust, the CBRP has already made several. "In
sleepy communities the local vet gets arrested because he's got a
meth lab in his basement," says Patty Melanson.

When meth really comes to Nova Scotia--and it is coming, no one
denies that--it won't just be in the tobacco-lined pockets of the
crackheads. And it shouldn't be a convenient rationale for ignoring
the requests of panhandlers and another made-up reason to steer clear
of squeegee-toting youth at the Willow Tree. Crystal meth could be in
the knock-off Louis Vuitton bags of the mall rats and in the
briefcase of your periodontist.

"I was very interested," says Halifax youth outreach worker Dorothy
Patterson, "to find out that one of our youth's crystal meth dealers
out west was a 17-year-old girl from a middle-class home who went to
school. That was the norm."

Here's another simple fact about meth: it's been around for a long time.

Amphetamines--meth's parent drug--have been manufactured since the
late 19th century. Pill-form amphetamines were prescribed during
World War II to boost alertness and amphetamines have been used in
nasal decongestants and to treat depression. During the '50s and
'60s, your grandmother might have carried amphetamines around in her
purse--mine did--as a prescribed weight loss drug. Or, she might have
bought them illegally, doubled the dose and taken them as "pep pills"
or "Bennies."

Methamphetamine is stronger, longer lasting and easier to make. Its
potential for abuse and the intensity of its high is like
amphetamines to the power of 10. Methamphetamine is sometimes
prescribed--for narcolepsy and obesity--but its central use hasn't
been therapeutic.

Meth simmered on the fringes for six-odd decades before becoming news
in the 1980s. I have always remembered a December 1989 story in Spin
magazine about crystal meth. The profile was practically apocalyptic,
evoking images of the coming armies of meth zombies. Meth users
didn't march across Canada and the US so much as they straggled
forward one by one, a user here, a user there. Now meth is on the radar again.

So. Old drug, new interest. According to the recent Assessment of
Crystal Meth document (the one that outlines the chilling reasons
meth is "the perfect street drug"), meth is experiencing a recent
wave of popularity among 14- to 25-year-olds.

The question is: why now?

The answer: no one's certain.

Well how about this question instead: why has it been so slow to come
to Halifax?

Chalk it up to sentimentality.

"The drug culture likes to use what they're familiar with," says drug
detective Ken Burton. "And primarily in our city, it's either
marijuana and cocaine.

"It's like when you go to Cape Breton and they drink Keith's. There
are lots of other brand names, but they drink Keith's. And if you go
to the hunting camp, it's rum. People like to stay with what they're
familiar with. I think here you run into the same thing with your drug users."

"I think that's a fair comment," says Melanson, "but I don't think
it's not going to come." What will be the tipping point for meth in
Halifax? What will push it over cocaine? And when?

There are no answers to these questions. And that only helps to
confuse our understanding of meth.

Meth is two things at once. It's merely the dope of the hour (there
always has to be at least one), but at the same time it's also
something totally different--a challenge to addiction counselling,
social service and outreach organizations and the environment. But
how do you reconcile those competing notions? It's just another drug;
it's totally different. How should we talk about crystal meth?

For most media outlets, there's only one tack to
take--sensationalism. No wonder. Terror is an effective way to draw
in readers; piquing watchers' morbid curiosity is profitable.

Not everyone's buying in, though.

Online magazine Slate editor-at-large Jack Shafer deconstructed in
late March a Washington Post meth story called "The Next Crack
Cocaine?" which he says "embraces meth cliche, half truth, hyperbole
and broken logic at every opportunity."

Portland, Oregon newsweekly Willamette Week unleashed a lengthy
investigation of the even lengthier--we're talking almost 300 stories
(and counting) long--investigation of crystal meth use launched in
2004 by Portland daily The Oregonian.

The long of the Willamette Week's March-published teardown is this:
The Oregonian's statistics are shaky and the series is grounded in a
"rhetoric of crisis," misleading readers "into believing they face a
far greater scourge than the facts support."

The title of the scathing analysis says it all: "How The Oregonian
manufactured an epidemic, politicians bought it and you're paying."

These critiques of meth reporting are being monitored by ethics
investigator Kelly McBride, who works in journalism education for
Florida-based The Poynter Institute. She recently posted her "Meth
Wars" column on Poynter Online (in which, actually, McBride argues
the Willamette Week's knockdown of The Oregonian's meth series is way off).

In Nova Scotia, where meth is just beginning to feather its nest, the
tone of news coverage is only getting established. Will Reefer
Madness-style rhetoric rule the roost? On April 12, the Daily News's
David Rodenhiser wrote a well-balanced editorial, only tending to
overstatement when he called meth a "plague" and warned of "an
advancing scourge of drug addiction." An April 17 editorial in the
Chronicle-Herald dubbed the drug "instantly addictive" and called it,
yes, an "epidemic." No definition given. According to the editorial
headline, we're "Bracing for meth madness."

But what about the here and now?

Phoenix Youth Programs nurse Patty Melanson says, "I don't know what
the true picture is. I don't know that any of us know. But, like any
drug you have to be aware. And being informed is part of prevention."

Melanson meets me on a warm afternoon to talk about meth and have a
cup of tea. The nurse knows a lot about meth and its issues. It
shows. She barely skips a beat answering questions. Melanson must be
used to entering a place and getting down to work: she splits her
days between Phoenix Youth Programs's drop-in centre on Coburg Road
and Phoenix's emergency youth shelter on Tower Road. She works at
Direction 180 too.

"We don't want this fear-mongering, like, it's going to take over our
children and take over our families," she says.

It brings up that question again: how should we talk about meth?

If the easy way out is to sensationalize the drug's impact, to
fear-monger, how do we head in the direction of level-headedness
without understating meth's dangers?

How should we talk about meth? It's just another drug; it's totally
different. Which is it?

It's such a dirty dirty drug," says Cindy MacIsaac from her
street-facing office at methadone program clinic Direction 180.

She's busy today. Actually, it seems like MacIsaac's busy every day.
Direction 180, on Gottingen Street, positively buzzes.

Methadone is a synthetic narcotic taken daily to help users wean from
heroin or other opiate addictions. The dozen or so clients there the
day I visit are eager to see the nurse, get their prescription and
get on with their day. They chirp hellos and commiserate the state of
uptown--"it's easier to get crack out there than it is to buy a pack
of smokes," one guy tells another. The atmosphere is jovial. But
MacIsaac is talking about meth and she's not sharing the mood.

"If you're a crack addict and you have children, your children are
going to be neglected," MacIsaac says to illustrate the difference
between meth and crack, the drug it's commonly compared to. "If
you're a crystal meth addict and you're smoking crystal meth, then
that child, not only are they neglected, chances are they're inhaling
all of those toxins. And that damage cannot be repaired."

There are other reasons crystal meth is different from crack. And
it's not just the cheaper and significantly longer-lasting high.
(Crack is about $20 a stone for a half-hour-or-shorter high; crystal
meth is, MacIsaac says, about $5 for anywhere from a six-to 15-hour
high. Severely diluted crack or crystal meth-cut crack can cost less.)

What makes meth different, too, is the behaviour of its users.

Dorothy Patterson works at ARK Youth Outreach on Gottingen Street,
the organization that authored the Assessment of Crystal Meth
document. ARK Youth Outreach is known as simply the ARK, and it's
first-and-foremost a drop-in spot for youth aged 16 to 24. "If we've
known someone for a couple of years, we'll let them stay to 25,"
Patterson says, "and if there's someone on the street and they're 14,
we'll work with them."

Patterson is soft-spoken and kind-eyed, and she's been at the ARK
since it opened six-and-a-half years ago. The drop-in centre sees 35
to 40 youths (and several companion dogs) cross the threshold every
day. You'd never know it's there. There's no sign on the door. And
that's on purpose: "We asked the youth to give us a name," Patterson
explains. "And we offered money, but nobody wanted to put a name on
the door. One of the youths said, and everybody agreed, 'people's
homes don't have names.'"

Patterson (along with the ARK's two other staffers) do "the things
that build a community--make a meal, welcome someone, help someone
with an addiction, whether that means just listening or networking
them with drug dependency, or [needle exchange] Mainline or Direction
180 .Really," she says, "it's whatever comes out of a relationship."

Sometimes those relationships work around the intrusion of crystal
meth. "My observation is that the folks who are on crack," Patterson
says, "maybe for a few days you won't see that kind of crazy
behaviour. But with meth, there's a real unpredictability to it. It's
just so exaggerated, that it becomes hard to do anything and hard to
follow through on anything."

Tracy Bowler's seen it. That's not her name, but this much is real:
she's used meth a couple of times. Bowler is 21 and she arrived in
Halifax eight months ago from Ottawa with her band. She lives on
Gottingen and goes to the ARK now and again. She's done research and
writing work for the organization on the topic of meth and back in
Ottawa she saw a lot of people taking it.

"Within about two weeks you can see them sweating when they're
talking to you," she says. "You can really see it but they can't
because everything's going by so fast. They don't understand. They
don't eat or sleep and they can see benefits in that. A lot of girls
used to take it to lose weight. And they have no idea what they could
possibly be getting into when they're using it--19- and 20-year-old
women on the club scene. They're very shifty. They're fidgeting. They
can't stop moving around."

Is meth behaviour really worse than crack behaviour? The only
evidence is anecdotal. But people's behaviour is important--perhaps
supremely important--when you're talking about addiction, says
Phoenix nurse Patty Melanson.

"What that person took to elicit that behaviour, we can figure out
later," she says. "But, you know, it's the behaviour and what it does
to that individual's life that's important. There's a hype around
meth--is it coming? Is it here? Well, yeah, I don't know, maybe.
[What matters is] that kind of drug really messes with a person's
life. And meth really does a good job psychotically."

Melanson's talking about meth-induced psychosis.

A little background: it used to be common knowledge that hard drugs
could cause psychotic episodes. You know all those whispered stories
about Jane or Louise or Tyrone who took a hit of acid/caplet of
ecstasy/puff of pot and became suddenly, seriously and sometimes
irreversibly mentally ill? It doesn't happen that way.

"Drugs just speed the process along," says Melanson. "They can
exacerbate or bring on a psychotic episode earlier than one would
normally have one." But meth is different.

"With meth," Melanson says, "people who would never normally have a
psychotic episode [can develop a psychosis and] have a mental illness
for the rest of their lives. That's totally different from other
drugs. Ten percent of meth users who have a psychotic episode never
clear their psychoses."

That's the brain. But crystal meth also does to the body what other
drugs can't.

According to one former crystal meth user now living in Halifax,
meth's knack for quelling hunger and the need for sleep are
unequalled by other hard drugs--"the side effects make heroin or
cocaine healthier alternatives," he says.

Then there's "meth mouth." You might have seen pictures of the kind
of tooth decay typically found in the mouths of those misusing
crystal meth--crumbled copper-coloured teeth and pus-imbued gums.

The prevailing theory is that some of meth's side effects--like
tooth-grinding and dry mouth--and the harsh chemical make-up of the
drug, cause extreme, irreparable damage.

But there is debate.

Slate's Jack Shafer, the editor who criticized the Washington Post's
meth coverage, called meth mouth "our latest moral panic" in an
August 2005 editorial. Shafer says meth mouth reporting often
focuses, questionably, on meth itself as a sole cause of poor dental
health, rather than drug addiction generally. Reporters, he says, are
ignoring common causes of meth mouth, such as a lack of interest in
brushing and flossing--causes that aren't limited to meth users alone.

Bottom line: whether it's the meth itself or the overall dental
health of meth-dependent youth and adults, meth mouth exists. And
according to a November 2005 story in the Journal of the Canadian
Dental Association, by Chicago-based Gary Klasser, dental
professionals are seeing a rise in meth mouth (though one busy
Halifax dentist I talked to said she has yet to see a case in her
practice and hasn't heard of any colleagues treating it). In other
centres, Klasser says, dental practices need to change to accommodate
meth mouth patient care.

What else makes meth different? Take your pick: meth is simple enough
to make in a bathtub or a car trunk; simple to blow up too. (That's
often how cook operations are discovered--RCMP synthetic drug
division constable Paul Robinson said at a media-attended crystal
meth briefing in Cole Harbour this spring, "Seventy to 80 percent of
labs are found by first responders" such as firefighters, uniformed
police officers and emergency health services personnel.) And cooking
meth creates a generous amount of toxic waste (the number that's
thrown around most is six pounds of waste for every pound of sellable
meth); Patty Melanson guesses, "if someone's making meth, they're not
necessarily following HRM's environmental guidelines to dump their waste."

Significantly, the addiction is quicker, based on reports to Melanson
and Direction 180's Cindy MacIsaac and the ARK's Dorothy Patterson.
More so even than crack.

What it all adds up to is this: meth is impressive. "Not that other
drugs haven't impressed me or that I don't have concerns with other
drugs," says Melanson, "but the effect of this drug to the individual
and to the people around that person and even to the community is
more significant than most drugs."

Ken Burton's concern with meth is the flux and the flow.

He's the detective--that's what they call a sergeant when he's in a
specialized division, like the drug section--who told me a chat about
Halifax meth would be a short one since no city cop has ever made an
arrest for the drug. Burton's not glib. He's direct. His division,
other local police agencies and the RCMP are right now developing a
strategy for the blooming of crystal meth.

Burton, who works as part of a street-level team, doesn't spout
doomsday talk about meth. He's level-headed and he doesn't say
"epidemic" once. He refers to the expected "establishment" of the
drug in Halifax and the planning that goes hand-in-hand: "We don't
want to be caught with our pants down."

Burton's "thing with crystal meth" is how easy the ingredients are to
come by compared to the goods needed to make other drugs. "If we have
a large cocaine bust," he says, "the cost of crack might go up,
because the [source ingredient] dries up. But if you have a big
crystal meth bust, they go out to Wal-Mart and get more ingredients
and away they go."

Maybe not anymore.

Three common ingredients make up crystal meth: iodine tincture
crystals, red phosphorus from a matchbook strike pad and pseudoephedrine.

Iodine tincture and matches you can get at any number of stores
across the province, ditto for the other ingredients needed to
distill and cook meth--denatured alcohol, distilled water, acetone,
muriatic acid and lye. You can make substitutions when it comes to
some of those chemicals, but not with pseudoephedrine. If you want to
make meth you have to have it. And the only place it's easy to come
by is in decongestants like Sudafed.

After an April 10 recommendation from the National Association of
Pharmacy Regulatory Authorities, drugs containing pseudoephedrine are
now behind the counter at pharmacies in Nova Scotia and in some other
provinces. The medications have been removed from corner stores and
gas store shelves entirely.

In May, Deveaux, the NDP MLA for Cole Harbour-Eastern Passage,
introduced a private member's bill to make these recommendations law.
"Hopefully," he says, "there's time to do something."

The justice critic's bill passed, and with some added deterrents.
According to the legislation, people possessing high-density ammonium
nitrate fertilizer or anhydrous ammonia fertilizer (which speed up
the meth cooking process) must report missing or stolen amounts to
the office of the minister of justice; a list will also be kept of
purchasers of these products.

Cindy MacIsaac at Direction 180 is optimistic: "That's a proactive
approach and there needs to be awareness." She's also realistic:
"There's always a way to get the stuff."

One part of Kevin Deveaux's bill that didn't pass was the creation of
a government crystal meth task force. The Tories wouldn't support it.
"They say they already have something like it," Deveaux says.

The NDP idea was to create a working group not just with HRM police
and "people on the ground like those at Direction 180," Deveaux says,
but also with smaller police departments in towns like Stellarton and
Wolfville.

"We're so used to drugs being an urban issue," he says. "We put the
programs into urban centres and [meth] is going in through the back
door in rural communities. Direction 180 isn't in Annapolis Royal or
Lawrencetown or Havre Boucher."

And what about Direction 180's role in all of this? Or, for that
matter, the role of Phoenix Youth Programs, or the ARK or other harm
reduction programs like Mainline Needle Exchange in Halifax, which
recently launched a year-long crystal meth needs-assessment study and
education campaign.

Curbing crystal meth use doesn't just lie in asking pharmacists to
scrutinize the buying habits of Sudafed purchasers. And it's not just
about landlords and property owners reporting the tell-tale signs of
meth labs--strong chemical smells, windows covered with garbage bags
and dying vegetation.

A strategy for limiting the establishment of crystal meth in Nova
Scotia might also be found in shifting the way we understand
addiction and changing the way we support our fellow community
members who misuse drugs.

In fact, limiting the appeal of crystal meth might be partly in this:
stop the talk of extremes, escape what Jack Shafer calls a "moral
panic," quit the sensationalism and treat crystal meth--at least in
part--like any other hard drug in our communities. Remember what
Patty Melanson said? "What that person took to elicit that behaviour,
we can figure out later it's the behaviour and what it does to that
individual's life that's important."

You'll recall the appeal of meth for people on the streets: no need
for sleep, no need to eat--two big worries disappear. At least temporarily.

Simon Fraser University researcher Steven Kates illustrates another
perceived benefit of crystal meth in a 2004 study of the drug's use
among homeless youth in downtown Vancouver called "How Crystal Meth
Spreads Among Homeless Youth." He writes: "By preventing sleep [meth]
temporarily solves their safety issues and helps them to protect
their possessions. It also allays fear."

If you can appreciate that logic, you can see where social support
for vulnerable communities becomes part of the equation to keep meth
at bay in Nova Scotia. Not only that, ARK Youth Outreach's Assessment
of Crystal Meth document tells you why you should care: "We are all
implicated in the situation of youth homelessness and high rates of
drug misuse among these youth."

Searching for housing is a big part of Dorothy Patterson's job at the
ARK. "Even if they do want to get off the street but they don't have
a job and they're on assistance," she says, "they only get $235 per
month for rent and $190 to spend on food and clothes and phone and
everything else."

Is finding affordable housing a challenge? That doesn't even cover
it. "I know of a few rooms in the city you can rent for $90 a week,"
Patterson says.

Of course, there are many pieces to the puzzle. Finding apartments
for every homeless and under-housed meth user or potential meth user
doesn't make the problem disappear. But it's a start. And there are
myriad other social issues that can encourage drug dependency which
can be addressed--visible or invisible minority status, poor health,
lower literacy levels, for instance. These issues span the
urban-rural divide, and cross class and gender boundaries too;
conveniently, so does meth.

"What I've learned about drugs over the years is that you have to
acknowledge the good that they do for people," Melanson says.
"Without acknowledging that good, you can't understand an addiction.
And when I talk about good, I don't mean helping people. I mean the
perception, or the appeal. It's the perception in that individual's
mind of the good it's doing."

For instance?

"So, for a population of individuals who already have an impairment
of some kind," Melanson says, "because of lack of education or
nurturing or attachment issues, the moment they start using crystal
meth, it's clarity. I'm on top of the world and I feel good about
myself. And then when you come off it, if you've never felt good
about yourself and you've felt good about yourself for the past 12
hours, well I'd want that back too."

"These are people whose hopes have been shattered for so long," adds
Patterson. "And suddenly they feel like they can conquer the world."

"I don't get the sense that we have government or social policy that
addresses that kind of issue," says Melanson. "This is a health issue."

Melanson reminded me of something when she said that. A May 2005
Michael Specter story in The New Yorker called "Higher Risk: Crystal
meth, the Internet, and dangerous choices about AIDS."

I went looking for Robert Allan at the AIDS Coalition of Nova Scotia
to fill me in on the Nova Scotia perspective of Specter's
argument--that there's a link between crystal meth use and a rise in
HIV transmission rates, after many years of decline, among gay men in
large US centres.

Allan--a welcoming man with a messy desk, golf tchotchkes and a
poster in his Roy Building office that says, in part, "to play 18
holes in 54 strokes is possible"--couldn't oblige. Still, the
executive director of the ACNS knows a lot about crystal meth.

"Five or six years ago I wouldn't talk about it at all in my job,"
says Allan. "I kept asking anybody I knew who frequented bars and
frequented bathhouses in the area, party networks. People would say
there's a lot of coke, there's a lot of marijuana. No crystal. A year
ago that started to change."

Allan also has statistical knowledge of meth use among Nova Scotia
men from a survey the ACNS conducted last summer called Sex Now. The
document collected info from over 310 gay, bi, two spirited and
straight men that have sex with men (45 of the total lived outside HRM).

Here's what it says: four or five percent of the men surveyed were
"casual users" of crystal meth (no description was attached to term
"casual"). A higher number use cocaine on a casual basis; a
substantially higher number use marijuana or alcohol. "Those stats
are about comparable with the ones coming out of Montreal right now,"
Allan says.

Here's the kicker: "Guys who use crystal meth don't engage in unsafe
activities any more than guys who don't," Allan says.

"There's a very, very minor relationship. The stereotype is: use
crystal meth, and have lots of unsafe sex. Our data show a very small
difference, but it's not something that makes you immediately concerned."

The AIDS Coalition's focus is gay men's health. And while there are
meth-related health risks "and we need to take those very seriously,"
ultimately, Allan says, "there are other concerns that come out of
the survey." In short: Michael Specter's New Yorker argument isn't
borne out in the ACNS's Sex Now stats.

Is it a big American city thing? Or just more sensationalizing the
"epidemic" of crystal meth?

Robert Allan is cautious. "I want to make sure I answer in a way that
limits me to what I know," he says. "I think it happens with every
new drug that comes along."

He explains. There was marijuana, then poppers, then coke, then
ecstasy and K, and "now it's crystal meth. Here's what I see in the
research: some older guys say this comes in a long line of serious
drugs and in 10 years we're going to be talking about another one.

"Is this simply," he says, "that these are the guys [who were] using
ecstasy and Viagra 10 years ago and now they're using crystal? Or,
these are the guys [who were] using mescaline 30 years ago and now
they're using crystal? Or, are there people who truly had one way of
behaving and the introduction of crystal meth completely changed
them? I suspect it's a little of all of the above." But, he says, "we
tend to focus on the extreme."

It gets back to that nagging question: how should we talk about
crystal meth? And Allan is struggling with it. Its implications in
our communities--gay, straight, middle class, homeless, urban,
rural--shouldn't be understated. But is overstatement any more
helpful? How do we talk about meth? It's just another drug; it's
totally different. Which is it?

"I don't want to--in any way, shape or form--suggest that we should
just let [meth] go," Allan says. "There are some very serious health
concerns. But we also have very serious rates of alcohol abuse, some
very serious rates of other drug use. We have other health concerns
as well. This is on the list and it's important. But it's also one of
the current sexy ones that everyone wants to talk about."

Direction 180 executive director Cindy MacIsaac struggles with the
question too. And so does drug detective Ken Burton. "We need to be
aware and we can't ignore it," MacIsaac says. "But we don't need to
sensationalize it."

Burton agrees. "We have to be prepared," he says. "But there's a fine
balance here. And we could be creating a paranoia."

Tracy Bowler, who's seeing the slow advance of meth into Halifax the
way she watched it gain ground growing up in suburban Ottawa, says
any way to get the message across is worthwhile. "Even if you make it
sound sensational," she says, "it's better that it's out there. So at
least people can see it."