SOCIETAL COST OF METH USE IS GAUGED IN NEW STUDY

In the first effort to calculate the national price of
methamphetamine abuse, a new study said the addictive stimulant
imposed costs of $23.4 billion in 2005. While the authors, from the
RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., caution that many impacts
were difficult to quantify, their study suggests that methamphetamine
takes an economic toll nearly as great as heroin and possibly more.

Methamphetamine was named the primary cause of some 900 deaths in
2005, and the report estimates that premature mortality alone cost $4
billion. Its abuse has spread from Hawaii and rural areas of the West
and South since the 1990s, slowly expanding to the Midwest and the
East. In the process, it has wreaked havoc on addicts' physical and
mental health and on their families.

Federal surveys suggest that the share of Americans using the drug in
a given year has stabilized, at about 1 percent of the population over
age 12, which is far higher than the rate for heroin but half the rate
for cocaine. About 400,000 Americans are believed to be addicted to
methamphetamine, but a rising number are smoking it rather than taking
it orally or snorting it. Smoking brings a faster, jolting high,
quicker addiction and more ill effects.

The study is part of a project at RAND to evaluate the costs of drug
addiction, financed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and
directed by Rosalie L. Pacula, co-director of the Drug Policy Research
Center at RAND.

Extra financing for the report was provided by the Meth Project
Foundation, a private group that seeks to prevent young people from
using methamphetamine.

Dr. Wilson Compton, a division director at the National Institute on
Drug Abuse, said the study's major innovation was its effort to
quantify the effects of addiction on the quality of life - how factors
like poor health, anxiety and paranoia shrink the addict's horizons
and pleasure over time. Such estimates have been made for heart
diseases and other major ones but not for illegal drugs, Dr. Compton
said.

These intangibles proved to be the largest costs, with an estimated
price of $12.6 billion. Other major costs included $4.2 billion in
crime and criminal justice, $904 million for endangered children put
into foster care as a result of parents' use, $687 million in lost
productivity, $545 million for drug treatment, $351 million for health
care and $61 million for injuries and deaths at exploding meth labs
and for cleaning up the toxic wastes they produce.

Because of the difficulty in pinpointing the role of methamphetamine
in crime, medical care and other factors, the RAND researchers gave a
range of estimates, saying the overall toll may be as low as $16.2
billion or as high as $48.3 billion.

Several potentially major costs were not factored in because they
could not be measured. These include, for example, the burdens imposed
on the families and friends of addicts, and the burdens of children
who are not taken into the foster system.

The study is available on the Web at methproject.org.