THE NEW EPIDEMIC?

"America's Most Dangerous Drug," blares the cover story in Newsweek.
If you haven't been paying attention, you might wonder what drug the
magazine has in mind.

Tobacco, which kills more than 400,000 people each year? Alcohol,
which contributes to thousands of traffic fatalities? Crack, which
spawned a wave of violent crime in the 1990s? Heroin, which was
supposedly an epidemic a few years ago?

Answer: none of the above. America's most dangerous drug of the week
is methamphetamine, better known as crystal meth. It may sound odd
that this new scourge could suddenly become more hazardous than all
those other drugs, which have not gotten any less malignant. But the
drug war is sort of like horror movies: A new monster is always
needed, and the new monster is never much different from the old one.

Crystal meth is blamed for all sorts of ills. Addicts allegedly
neglect their children, beat their spouses, rot out their teeth, ruin
their health, commit burglaries and accidentally set themselves on
fire in crude home laboratories. All of this may be true. But we've
heard similar lurid tales about other drugs - none of which quite
lived up to the hype.

Once it was marijuana. Then heroin. Later, the unstoppable menace was
cocaine. A 1983 Time magazine story had this passage: "Several times
last year Phil stood quivering and feverish in the living room, his
loaded pistol pointed toward imaginary enemies . . . Rita, emaciated
like her husband, had her own bogeymen - strangers with X-ray vision."
A prosecutor said, "An exceptionally violent streak seems to run
through the trade." Sound like another drug you've heard about lately?

But drug epidemics are not like contagious diseases. Illicit
substances don't infect people against their will - people make
choices about whether to use them. When a substance is truly
destructive, word gets around, and people turn away. Toothless addicts
with horrible burns and oozing sores are not going to seduce hordes of
eager young recruits. In time, the meth epidemic will play itself out.

It's not even clear, though, that there is an epidemic. The federal
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which does
a huge annual survey on drug use, says that in 2003, the last year for
which it has data, there was no increase in methamphetamine use from
the previous year. If it's spreading in some places, it's losing
ground elsewhere.

When a panic erupts, the government tends to fall back on old weapons,
even if they haven't worked very well before. The fight against meth
consists mainly of two approaches: seizing home labs where the drug is
made and restricting sales of over-the-counter medicines that can be
converted into the drug.

Neither holds much promise. If you crack down on production of meth
here in America, users will look for sources elsewhere. Already, half
of the stuff consumed here comes from Mexico.

Recently, Oregon passed a law requiring a prescription for common
over-the-counter drugs, like Sudafed, that contain pseudoephedrine, a
primary ingredient in homemade meth. That will certainly inconvenience
people with colds and allergies, who spend $1.4 billion a year on
drugs containing PSE.

But will tighter controls curb drug abuse? Not likely. After Oklahoma
passed a law requiring that PSE drugs be sold only by pharmacists from
behind the counter, it saw a 90-percent drop in lab seizures.
Unfortunately, it was a dubious victory. Users didn't go straight, but
switched to meth smuggled from Mexico.

"Our problem hasn't gone away," Oklahoma City police Lt. Tom Terhune
told the Associated Press. "The problem that's gone away is the meth
labs."

The government can't save us from methamphetamine. But given the
benefit of knowledge gained from sad experience, we can save ourselves.