STARK REALITY AND COMMON SENSE

You hear few if any arguments that the dangers and devastating effects
of methamphetamine are overstated. The evidence of meth's toll is
everywhere. Jails and prisons are increasingly crowded with meth users
and meth makers.

The Georgia Meth Project's dramatizations of meth tragedies are as
graphic and uncompromising as any public-service spots that have ever
appeared on television; yet nobody is saying -- as has been said of
other, earlier anti-drug campaigns -- that the approach is hyperbolic
to the point of being counterproductive. You don't hear people accuse
the anti-meth campaign of crying wolf.

So why, in the name of everything that makes sense, does anybody still
do meth?

"First of all, it's a great drug," says Barry McCaffrey, the retired
four-star general who served as President Clinton's drug czar --
"great," in this context, quite obviously meaning powerful and seductive.

"You take a nice young woman," McCaffrey said in an interview with
Ledger-Enquirer reporter Chuck Williams, "26 years old with three
children, single mom and she starts using meth because she is working
two jobs and she's lonely and insecure. The meth makes her feel
incredibly good. Then, one year later, we come back and look at her."

That later look is starkly different, uglier, and too often tragic --
for the user and the family.

As drug problems go, McCaffrey says, meth is "the worst, hands down."
One reason is its almost instant addictiveness. Another is its
well-documented physical devastation: permanent neurological damage,
personality disintegration, rotting teeth. But even that can pale next
to meth's mental and emotional toll: "It is destructive of the human
spirit like nothing we have ever seen," McCaffrey said.

Yet another frightening fact about meth now is its ties to the Mexican
drug cartels. The horrific drug violence of those organizations is now
subsidized by a substantial American market, McCaffrey called Mexican
meth suppliers "the dominant criminal enterprise in America right now."

Meth also reflects the perennial Catch-22 of illegal drug use: When
addictive drugs are more expensive, addicts have to commit more crime
to get the money to support their habits. Because meth is relatively
cheap -- far cheaper than cocaine, and with a longer-lasting effect --
meth addicts can get and use more, and thus do more damage to
themselves, their lives, their loved ones and everyone around them.
Lose-lose.

But the first approach to fighting the meth epidemic, says this career
military man, is not "battling cartels," but education and prevention.

"Step No. 1 is go tell the American people, watch your children.
Explain what meth is and why it is a fatal option."

If Step No. 1 works, there is no Step 2. Or any of the other, bleaker
ones that follow.

- -- Dusty Nix, for the editorial board