THE LATEST DRUG CRISIS, AGAIN

'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 is 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 are currently using it. That means the addiction rate is no more
than 1 in 17. The addiction rate for tobacco, by contrast, is more than 1
in 3. 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 that 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 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. 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.