LATEST DRUG CRISIS: CRYING METH

CHICAGO - "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.

Nor is meth all that addictive. SAMHSA reports that 5.2 percent of all
Americans age 12 and older have tried the drug at least once. But only 0.3
percent is using it. That means the addiction rate is no more than one in
17. The addiction rate for tobacco, by contrast, is more than one in three.
For alcohol, it's about one in 12.

Maybe that's why even some members of the Bush administration are rolling
their eyes. A spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy complained to Newsweek a lot of people are "'crying meth' because
it's a hot new drug."

But 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 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. Some of them will have to pay for a doctor visit just to get
a garden-variety remedy like Claritin-D or Alka-Seltzer Plus.

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.

Stephen Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune
besides being a Creators Syndicated columnist.