Much ado about something

How long has it been since I posted about devil meth? If you google "moral consequences Methamphetamine" as a recent visitor did, this silly blog comes up # 4.

At # 1, from the American Enterprise Institute, Much Ado about Meth?, by Sally Satel, M.D.:

Now I enjoy a good moral panic as much as the next person, but I think methamphetamine deserves its dreadful reputation...

The prickly journalists are probably fed up with the drug war. For the policymakers, though, part of the answer may be demographics. A social problem that fails to afflict major Northeast cities is not as attention-grabbing. Also, poor rural whites, one of the major subgroups afflicted, wield weak political leverage...

... [N]ational statistics can mislead... [I]n some states meth is big. For example, Arkansas, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Nevada, Oklahoma, meth accounted for as many as 20 to 40 percent of all treatment admissions in 2003, easily surpassing alcohol admissions, the next biggest category...

The fact is that meth is a devastating drug for those who abuse it, casting a vast halo of destruction across communities. To say so is not crying meth.