Sensational Meth Headlines

Seems to me that driving the price up is not entirely a bad thing. Increases in cigarette taxes are known to reduce tobacco sales. Nicotine is reputed to be more addicitve than most drugs and is legal besides. Seems to me the effect should work on meth as well. (I hope it does; I know too many people who have gotten seriously messed up on that crap.)

I think the poem on your site's front page indicates you might be a little bit biased on the subject:

"In this world, God is Drugs.
Scag is His Son.

God has sent His Son to the
earth to spread the Word.

The Word is that Scag is good.

Scag is our shepherd.
We shall always want."

I think you're just mad about the price going up.

Unfortunately, you didn't say much. You really need to expand your logic to make us understand your point. The last thing I want to do is side with the Oregonian, but I must say all you need to do is walk down the streets of downtown Portland to see they are not sensationalizing at all. It's a fact that meth is a major problem here in Portland. I work in social services and we have seen a surge in children being abandon because of their parents drug addiction. You have not put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

I also work in social services with seniors. What I see is meth heads abusing elders. It goes like this....they find seniors and follow them home. They wait to see if the senior is isolated and has any support around them, if not, they knock on the door... When the senior opens the door they bust in, beat up the senior steal all their id. Steal anything they can fence easily, take all the prescription drugs they can find and leave.

Meth head watch mail boxes that are easy to access, especically just after the first of the month when all SS checks go out. They rip off anything they can get thier hands on.

Here's another horrific thing I have seen 3 times in the last 2 years:

The meth heads case the home of a senior. If the senior is isolate they bust in and hold the senior captive, stealing all thier money, their social security check, their food. The meth heads usually live at the home of the senior for several months before someone in the neighborhood starts complaining about all the traffic and visitors to the house by people all messed up. In one case the elder was tied to a chair most of the time.

Ain't Amerika wonderful!

Meth _is_ a bad drug. maybe the police and drugstores cracking down on it is ok. ritalan is made from methamphetamines. oh wait that's legal.

This thing about meth heads stealing mail has proven true in isolated cases and yes there were a few theft rings but it's now being blown way out of proportion by puppets like Sen. Smith and Rep. Hooley.

I think it's deception on two levels. Prediction: after meth they'll want to link mailmen and women to similar types of theft or stealing for " organized meth syndicates " (an oxy moron on many levels). They'll bust a few postal workers.

I further predict the cops and feds will once again turn on distributors of marijuana -- the drug which people in this country most often get busted for. They'll launch federal subpoenas and indictments against FedEx and UPS drivers and managers. Notice how the mainstream news always wants to talk about customs searching imported cargo containers. drug paranoia is like a virus.

What's going on??! Who's there!? Grass is out to get your children! Tom DeLay says so. Lock your doors! Narc on your neighbors who may or may not be smoking pot. But by all means keep smoking those carcinogen-laced cigarettes, eating Splenda filled donuts, watching " fair and balanced " FOX news and shopping at your neighborhood all-American GMO friendly safeway.

Heil Bush! Heil Gonzales! Heil Cheney! Love live the Fourth Reich and the unspoken Prohibition.

The Portland Tribune is worse than The Oregonian. Whereas The Oregonian merely goes with the flow of its ownership and the the winds of editorial opinion at other conservative papers, The Portland Tribune never breaks a big story. It is a local, paid for, propaganda piece for Portland conservatism.

And, I agree that the stories are sensational but WTF meth is fucking bad.

I hate all the bullshit actions that they take like screwing with cold medicines when the real problem lies outside of town but meth is fucking bad.

What pisses me off is that they put so much emphisis on other bullshit "drugs" when they could focus more effort on meth which is fucking bad.

And, that is the problem that I see. They have priorities all screwed up. America would be far better off by conserving fuel rather than trying to sieze more natural resources from unwilling nations. In the same way America would be better off by focusing drug interdiction on really fucking bad drugs like meth rather than trying to scare the "potulation" into believing that all drugs are bad...except alcohol.

The powers that be are making it impossible for a lot of us to live in this country. Lacking the money that other people spend to feel better, we can only feel good by altering our brain chemistry. If some of us then go out and steal to support our drug habits well, you asked for it.

It's amazing how many people stopped their reading after the headline in there hurry to comment, apparently never making it as far as my disclaimer, which clearly (i thought) states "meth is garbage," and "no sane ... person would ever use meth."

Let me elaborate in response to a few comments.

"all you need to do is walk down the streets of downtown Portland to see they are not sensationalizing at all"

What this statement misses is that the doomed and helpless street tweakers who roam downtown Portland are but a tiny fraction of our state's meth abusing population. If the media focused more on working-class adult meth abusers, who are raising families while coping with a horrible addiction, then we might see more practical solutions, like improved health care, and efforts to increase education and economic opportunity in rural Oregon.

"Seems to me that driving the price up is not entirely a bad thing."

As I outlined, if you drive up the price of meth through increased controls of psuedo-ephedrine, meth prices will increase, while the production costs for the major cartels will remain relatively stable. All this means is increased profit for drug cartels, coming out of the pockets of addicts, and more importantly, coming out of the pockets of their families, government support agencies, and the various people who they rob, swindle and steal from to support their habits.

**Real Solutions**

1) Any law enforcement action to reduce supply needs to be executed in tandem with an initiative that creates a coresponding reduction in demand.

2) Oregon desperately needs to get its economy growing, so that it can provide living wages and full employment, especially in rural areas.

3) Addiction is real, and it needs to be treated. As long as the legislature and the body public continue to treat this disease with wardens instead of doctors we will never see any meaningful recovery.

4) Funding and access to education, which is the greatest source of hope and opportunity for individuals, and our state as a whole, must be expanded at every level.

Yes, I agree with most of the commenters, and with you, that meth is gross. But I, too, have been wondering what the ulterior motive has been behind the sudden sensationalist interest the corporate media has taken with meth. Let's face it. It's been around for a long, long time. We were fairly floating in it when I was in high school. It's not like it suddenly came out of nowhere. Why is this suddenly such an issue?

I hadn't thought of the things you brought up, though, in this very informative analysis of the interplay between meth and capitalism. You're right! And to actually take this a step further, who stands to gain? Hmmmm. Giant pharmaceutical companies who can sell PE for a LOT more money to drug cartels south of the border....

(I thought I should add this since someone said that tobacco use goes down with an increase in price. Along with that increase in price is a major, national media campaign that, while more than a little sensational, is more effective at decreasing tobacco use than the price hike alone.)

5. Educate people (not just kids) on how hard a meth addiction is to kick and what heavy meth use will do to your body over time. You will still get some people who say "Oh, it won't happen to me." but I think if you teach specifics about meth instead of the blanket message that "Drugs are bad." you will get a reduction in demand.

Your original article was pretty interesting, but the contents behind the link to your homepage make your disclaimer look trite. I guess I should thank you for your full disclosure, or maybe suggest that you work on unmixing your messages. It's hard to see how your website does anything but glorify use of a very nasty chemical.

I don't know why meth is suddenly a newsworthy crisis again, but I know several families that are seriously messed up because of meth. They're trying to recover, but the crap is too damn available... they have trouble getting away from it.

All the steps you suggest are good steps to take. But raising the price (by cutting into supply chains) is also a good step to take. (Personally, I think making PE prescription-only is going far enough to accomplish that, so I'm a bit puzzled about the outright ban.) To me, it's not so much a matter of trying your approaches instead of banning the precursor chemical, but in addition to the ban.

I hear what your saying Bison, and all I'll say is that my homepage is mostly hyperbole, satire, and inside jokes.

My blog is written for people who know me (although others are certainly free to read it). That is why I write a lot there, and only occasionally post here, when I feel that something I have written could be relavent to a larger audience.

The other thing that I would like to point out is that while it is perfectly fine and well for us to openly discuss public policy on illicit drugs, prudence makes it impossible for me to carry on the same discussion as it applies to me at the personal level.

I think you missed the point of the Trib piece, which was that the policy failures of 1987 -- i.e., not going far enough fast enough -- allowed the current meth crisis to happen. To compound things, policymakers are taking the exact same steps this time around and hoping for different results while saying flat-out they do not expect it to work long-term.

What's wrong with the Trib trying to point that out?

Once the profit has been wrung out of "pseudo-ep", whats to stop an enterprising biochemie from exploiting natural substances such as kat or yohimbe for the capital generating properties they posess? It should be noted that ephidrene can be extracted from a desert shrub which is also known as "Mormon Tea". Of course this can ONLY be obtained from an Elder of the LDS church. Now you know why they are all so "smily/happy". Much better to concentrate on "root causes" which propel one into such behavior. In case anyone is wondering, nicotine has been isolated in such a way. It has commercial application as a pesticide.

I'd like to correct the assumption that an RPI reaction produces such a small amount- Having paroled from prison for "manufacturing", I can attest to this. The RPI reaction isc flexible enough to produce several pounds in one reaction, plus another 10% or so on in the second wash. Yes, "annie" is used in larger bulk, simply because it is much faster than the 40 hours needed for a high quality RPI run. The main difference is that RPI reactions can be down-sized to be used in a small vial the size of a cigar tube, producing about .50 gram of finished product---"annie", on the other hand, can not be used in such a small proportion.

In my opinion, stopping the local cooks only takes money from locals and puts it in the hands of, like you saym mexican mafioso. Does anyone realize what our laws consider "posession"? You can pick up a felony, worth 2-5 years in the penitentiary for---empty baggies, dry (but used) glass pipes, or any other items where "residue" that may not even be testable can be. Do you realize that most items are never even TESTED, because the DA assumes that a plea bargain will be reached, and evidence is not needed. Ninety-five percent of all drug cases end in plea bargains. Ninety-five percent!
The war on meth is a hoax, with little attention to exactly what is being used as "evidence" in the few cases that actually go to trial, and the almost EXCLUSIVE use of confidential reliable informants, who are the real scum.

Sixpack
women's anarchist black cross
wabc.mahost.org

i arree with sixpack. this war on drugs is bullshit, it's a war on personal freedom for profit. how do you think organizations such as the mafiaso keep in buissness? pay offs! it might sound far fetched but come on this is america, capatalism gone mad where most people in the force care more about personal gain and a sense of authority than people. we have the right to use anything we want as long as it does'nt harm other people. whether it's meth,pot or acid we ALL HAVE THE RIGHT. the problem lies with what the thread is about, addicts abusing people to get money. the problem does'nt lie with the meth it lies with mis-education. ALL DRUGS ARE NOT BAD!! getting hooked on them obviously will cause problems. we need to inform kids at a young age of the issues and that they can be dangerous if abbused, it's time to be honest and upfront not lump all drugs in one catergory and deem them as bad! otherwise the only way to learn is the hard way, the way at the moment. another BIG problem is the drinking age. if people can't legally go out and have fun with alcohol until 21 then there going to turn to easier sources to get hold of. look at england for example, the drinking age is 18 and the drug issues are nowhere near the severity. most drug use is recreational and most users are well rounded, expanded people. the issue at hand hear is the FUCKING GOVERNMENT not the chemists or meth heads!