THE METH EPIDEMIC THAT ISN'T

Despite Scary-Sounding News Reports To The Contrary, Crystal Meth Use
Remains Very, Very Rare

Meet little Mary Jones. She's 13 years old. And she's a meth addict.

Crystal methamphetamine -- known as "ice" or "crank" on the dark
streets where dealers peddle death to kids -- is a drug unlike any
other. The pleasure it delivers is indescribable, say experts. But so
is the hell that follows.

"This stuff can hook you on the first try," warns police detective
Bill Mustachio. Addicts become little more than animals hunting for
the next fix of a drug that rots their minds and, ultimately, steals
their lives.

"It started in the west but now it's sweeping the country," Mr.
Mustachio says. "It doesn't matter where you live. It's coming."

Little Mary is one of the lucky few. She escaped meth's icy grip a
year ago. But still, she hears the drug's siren song, calling out to
her sweet suburban home, calling her back to the filthy streets where
she sold her innocence for one more hit of the stuff.

"Every day is a struggle," she says before scampering off to play
hopscotch with the neighbourhood girls.

This story should sound familiar. Chances are you've read it in a
newspaper or magazine. Maybe you saw it on TV. Filled with tragic
tales, lurid language and warnings that things will soon get much
worse, it has been a staple of Canadian journalism for several years.
We didn't invent it, though. We imported it from the United States,
where the same story became commonplace in the late 1990s and where
it remains a standard of American journalism.

You'll notice that I am describing these stories as a media
phenomenon, not as a reflection of reality. That's because there's
very little reality in them. Like all the media-driven drug scares
that came before it -- from the crack panic of the late 1980s to the
reefer madness of the 1930s -- the hysterical reports of a "meth
epidemic" tell us much more about the media's failings than they do
about drugs.

Consider the basic claim that meth is racing across the land as more
and more people use it. It's the foundation of all these stories.
Some say it explicitly. Others imply it with a lock-up-your-children tone.

But what evidence do they produce to support this picture? Sometimes
there isn't any evidence other than a few sad portraits of addicts.
More often, there is the testimony of police officers, politicians
and drug counsellors, which can be meaningful when it is limited to
their own personal experience. But it typically isn't. Instead, we
get sweeping claims that cover the whole state, province or nation.

"It's right across the country now," Scott Rintoul, a British
Columbia-based RCMP officer told CBC's The Fifth Estate. "It's not
all of a sudden, you know, Toronto and Montreal and the East Coast
it's going to hit them 10 years from now. It's there now. It may not
be at the same level as here but it is definitely moving from west to
east." On what evidence was Mr. Rintoul's opinion based? He didn't
say. And the reporter didn't ask. She simply took it as fact. She
even introduced her story by saying meth is "spreading across the
country with the speed of a prairie wildfire."

Unfortunately, that's typical. Reporters like to see themselves as
skeptics but when it comes to the police, far too many are as
wide-eyed as toddlers and their reporting is little more than stenography.

Another form of evidence that appears in some of the better
meth-scare stories is police data. We're told that the police are
seizing more meth, or shutting more labs, or charging more people.
And this, we are to assume, proves the meth market is growing rapidly.

But that's wrong. The simple rule about drug numbers is that police
find more when they look more -- and they look more when everyone's
worked up about some new drug "epidemic."

A better way to measure whether more people are using meth is simply
to ask them. Drug-use surveys aren't perfect, but they are fairly
reliable and they have been conducted many times over the years,
north and south of the border.

Oddly, these surveys are very rarely cited in meth stories. When they
are, only one set of numbers gets mentioned: According to the U.S.
government's surveys, the number of Americans who said they had ever
used meth, even once, in their lives doubled between 1994 and 1999,
from below five million to 9.4 million. In 2004, the total was 12
million, or four per cent of all Americans.

That certainly shows an increase. Coupled with tales of wasted lives
and police claims that meth is "instantly addictive" and capable of
destroying whole communities, it looks troubling.

But what the media never report is that most people who try meth do
not go on to become regular users, let alone addicts. In 1999, only
4.6 per cent of Americans who said they had used the drug at least
once in their lives said they had used it in the last month. In 2004,
that number was five per cent.

In fact, the 1999 "National Survey on Drug Use and Health" --
conducted by a department of the U.S. federal government -- found
that just 0.2 per cent of Americans aged 12 or older had used meth in
the month prior to the survey. In 2004, the total was exactly the
same -- 0.2 per cent. So while there has been an increase over the
last decade in the number of people who tried the drug once or twice,
there's been no change in the number of regular users: Meth use
remains very, very rare.

In August 2005, a Newsweek cover story called crystal meth an
"epidemic" and a "plague." Needless to say, it did not include any of
this statistical information. (For a more detailed look at the meth
scare in the U.S., see a superb new report called "The next big
thing? Methamphetamine in the United States." Published by The
Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C., think-tank, it can be found
at www.sentencingproject.org .)

Canadian drug data are patchier but it's clear the situation is
similar here. According to the 2004 Canadian Addiction Survey, 6.4
per cent of Canadians said they had used amphetamines of any kind
(including meth, but also less-dangerous pills like the "mother's
little helper" the Rolling Stones sang about 40 years ago) at least
once in their lives. Use of an amphetamine in the previous 12 months
was "less than one per cent" -- meaning the number was too small to
measure precisely, which hardly fits the definition of a rampant drug craze.

Even more telling is a 2004 survey of drug use by students in Toronto
that found that one per cent had ever used meth. That was down from
three per cent in 1993.

The damage done by exaggerated or false reporting about drugs comes
in many forms, not the least of which is the loss of credibility
suffered by the media and authorities when teens see friends get high
without turning into addicts or zombies. Why wouldn't they think that
everything adults tell them about drugs is crap?

It's a reasonable conclusion, but a tragic one, because meth really
is a toxic and potentially lethal drug. It may not be the slouching
beast portrayed in the media, but it is dangerous. And there really
are "little Marys" out there, rare as they may be.

Teens need to hear this from informed sources they trust -- which is
precisely what the media won't be if we keep trafficking in
moralistic, hyperbolic, inaccurate stories about drugs.