METHAMPHETAMINE PROPAGANDA

The Government And The Press Are Addicted

The press goes mad for meth. The myth of the adversary press holds that
reporters assume that every government statement contains at least
one flagrant lie, and that before disseminating the information the
press must expunge or otherwise expose the government propaganda.

Nowhere does the myth of the adversary press break down more often
than on the illicit-drug beat, where most government press releases
receive only a gentle rewrite before publication. Today's offender,
the Associated Press, took the handoff from a Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration March 1 press release to
produce a piece of junk journalism about an explosive increase of
methamphetamine users in drug treatment.

The SAMHSA-AP story has gotten wide play, with the Web sites of 307
news outlets picking up a version ("Sharp Rise in People Seeking Meth
Treatment, Report Finds"), according to a Friday morning Google News
search. At least four top newspapersa€"the Washington Post, the
Philadelphia Inquirer, the Miami Herald, and Newsdaya€"published some
form of the wire service's account.

Citing SAMHSA, the AP reports that the number of meth users admitted
to substance-abuse programs had quadrupled between 1993 and 2003.
There were 28,000 admissions for meth or amphetamines in 1993 (about
2 percent of 1.6 million admissions nationally) and almost 136,000
admissions in 2003 (more than 7 percent of the total 1.8 million admissions).

Neither the AP nor SAMHSA explains why treatment numbers are up, up,
up. A SAMHSA official indicates to the AP that the addictiveness of
meth is to blame, not an increase in prevalence; the AP reporter
cites unnamed experts to say meth use is "epidemic in some states,"
indicating that an increase in use might be behind more users seeking help.

A cursory look at the SAMHSA report points to another reason why
additional meth users are "seeking" treatment: coercion. If you read
all the way to the bottom of the SAMHSA report and consult the
endnotes, you learn that changes in drug law have helped boost
meth-therapy admissions. Under "referral" programs, some
jurisdictions can now divert nonviolent meth offenders from prison
and into substance-abuse programs. Part of the thinking here is that
drug abuse is a public health problem, not a criminal justice one.
Another is that it's cheaper to "treat" drug users than to
incarcerate them. California, which has one of the highest rates of
meth-therapy admissions, at 212 per 100,000 people, passed its
referral law in 2000.

The SAMHSA report notes that the percentage of meth admissions
referred by the criminal justice system rose from 36 percent to 51
percent between 1993 and 2003. Meanwhile, the percentage of meth
users referring themselves to therapy dropped from 35 percent to 25
percent. So to say that every meth user in the SAMHSA total is
"seeking" treatment as opposed to "avoiding" prison requires an
Orwellian sense of the language. Who wouldn't accept therapy instead
of a term in a modern U.S. prison?

One way to look at the SAMHSA data is that the number of people in
treatment is increasing because the criminal justice system is
feeding them a huge number of nonviolent offenders. Had the AP
reporter been wearing his thinking cap when he received the SAMHSA
handout, he could have written this story:

Drug Arrests Fuel Drug Treatment

WASHINGTON -- A new government report today showed that reducing the
number of methamphetamine drug arrests would sharply reduce the
number of people in drug abuse treatment.

None of this is to say that methamphetamine use never causes social
problems, or even to disprove the belief held by many in government
and the press that methamphetamine use is increasing. (Reason's Jacob
Sullum does some persuasive math on the user numbers here and here.)
But the AP's performance reminds us that journalists cheat their
readers when reporting data-intensive stories unless they:

1) Understand that press releases are not studies. 2) Look at the
actual data, not the data cherry-picked to make the press releases'
point. 3) Find the right data. 4) Focus on what matters, not what
they've been told to focus on. 5) Seek confirmatory or contradictory
studies. 6) Mind their p's and n's (significance and sample size). 7)
Consult the study's own explanation of what the limits are to its
findings. 8) And finally, when a studya€"or a press releasea€"makes
extraordinary claims, demand extraordinary proof.

For all its failings, the AP deserves a commendation for hinting that
the SAMHSA study's release might have been politically motivated. The
full version of the AP story noted that the government "report was
released hours before the Senate passed legislation to combat meth by
limiting sales of cold medicines used to make the illegal drug."

Indeed, the March 1 SAMHSA report that AP and so many news
organizations made a big deal about merely reheats data originally
released in November 2005 (see this large PDF file). The SAMHSA press
release acknowledges as much when it notes, "These findings are part
of a report released today from continued analysis of the 2003
Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS)."