IDLE COMMENT

It's rare for a New York Times columnist to write something worth thinking
about, so when one does, it ought to be grabbed. John Tierney can't keep
the typical liberal slant out of a complete column, including the
obligatory dig toward law enforcement, but he does make some valid points
worth thinking about. America has a serious drug problem, he says, but it's
not the manufacture and use of methamphetamines that is the serious problem.

He manages a dig at conservative William Bennett, whom he refers to as the
"former national drug czar and gambler," when he says that the problem is
the one identified by Bennett when Bennett said: "Using drugs is wrong not
simply because drugs create medical problems; it is wrong because drugs
destroy one's moral sense.

People addicted to drugs neglect their duties." So Tierney's analysis is:
"This problem afflicts not only a small minority of the people who have
tried methamphetamines, but most of the law-enforcement officials and
politicians who lead the war against drugs. They're so consumed with drugs
that they've lost sense of their duties." Tierney writes that those people
are like addicts desperate for a high and, with the help of the press, are
"frightening the public with tales of a drug so seductive it instantly
turns masses of upstanding citizens into addicts who ruin their health,
their lives and their families." Tierney concedes that methamphetamines
certainly do harm and "are a fad in some places.

But there's little evidence of a new national epidemic from patterns of
drug arrests or drug use." He writes that if an addict is someone who has
used a drug in the previous month, then only five percent of Americans who
have sampled meth would be called addicts, according to the federal
government's National Survey on Drug Use and Health, compared to eight
percent for crack, 10 percent for painkillers, 14 percent for marijuana and
37 percent for cigarettes. There is, of course, much more to the meth
situation than Tierney simplistically talks about, but indirectly it seems
he is trying to make the point that sometimes the illusion of an "epidemic"
is created to rake in more money from taxpayers. Non-profits do it all the
time. And Tierney doesn't dwell on reports that most meth appears to be
imported. Like heroin and other hard drugs.