FRONTLINE - THE METH EPIDEMIC - 10 to 11 TONIGHT

Want the straight dope on meth? It's not an epidemic, usage is not
increasing, and anybody who tells you otherwise is a liar. Sadly, that
includes the PBS documentary series Frontline, which tonight airs an
episode titled The Meth Epidemic that seems to have been pasted
together from old Reefer Madness outtakes.

Meth, or methamphetamine, is the latest drug-scare story from the same
people who brought you LSD-crazed hippies going blind from staring at
the sun, crackhead baby sitters roasting babies in the microwave and
Jimmy the 9-year-old heroin addict.

Everybody from Newsweek to Investor's Business Daily (honest!) has
been running stories lately about how meth use is spreading through
America like wildfire, and tonight Frontline joins the crowd. Here's a
fact that never, ever appears in any of these stories: The U.S.
government's own National Survey on Drug Use and Health says that from
2002 to 2004, the last year for which data is available, meth use did
not increase at all. Nada, nothing, zero, zip.

What's more: The average age of first-time use during that period
increased from 18 to 22, which means that another major component of
Frontline's "epidemic" -- that meth users are indoctrinating their
children into the abuse of the drug, turning them into a prehooked
junkie generation -- is also purely fictional.

Oh, and those 1.5 million meth addicts Frontline mentions -- well,
don't waste your time trying to find them. When you actually look up
the National Survey on Drug Use statistics, that's the number of
Americans who have ever, at any time in their lives, tried meth. The
closest thing to a figure for addicts is the survey's number of people
who used meth in the past month, which is about 600,000. If that's an
epidemic, then so is the Home Shopping Channel.

But there's no use trying to confuse Frontline with facts when the
same old drug-horror stories of murder, rape and really bad hair days
(lots of scary-looking police mug shots in this show) are so much more
fun. Lurid phrases like "the meth crime wave" and "the most addictive
drug there is" are tossed around with the faintest attempt to back
them up with evidence.

There's even an interview with a meth-head from Portland, Ore., who
insists, without contradiction: "I think meth has destroyed this
community. I think, in all reality, they need to take a bomb and blow
it all up, it's that bad." Luckily for Portland, budget cuts have
grounded PBS' fleet of B-1s.

The bombing of Portland is only slightly more extreme than most of the
policy suggestions that come up in Frontline. Though the program
didn't have time for a single interview with a meth-epidemic skeptic,
it drags out every nutty drug warrior it can find in support of
shutting down the production of pseudoephedrine, the chemical from
which meth is most easily manufactured. If pseudoephedrine sounds
familiar, that's because it's the active ingredient of most allergy
and cold medicines. Frontline's drug Rambos say that anybody who buys
those medicines should have to register with the government.

There's an epidemic here, all right -- of lunacy. And bad journalism
is not the cure.