The Meth Mess - Continued
There's some really good discussion in the comments of the post below, talking about Senator Cantwell's work as co-chair of the Senate Anti-Meth caucus. I wanted to follow up with some more comments.
There doesn't appear to be much disagreement about one major thing. Meth addiction plays a huge role in the amount of crime we're seeing in the country right now. Pete at CoolAqua posted up a report from the Olympian that found that nearly 25% of all people arrested and booked in Snohomish County (north of Seattle) over a recent 8-week period had meth in their system. When you compare that to surveys that have shown that the total number of regular meth users in the entire United States is around 500,000 (less than .2% of the population), that gives you an appreciation for the role that this drug is playing in our overall crime rate.
The point I'm making here is that when individual states began making it more difficult for people to cook meth in their own homes (by restricting the amount of pseudoephedrine an individual could buy), the supply was replaced with a more potent variety coming from Mexico, where law enforcement does not (and will never) have the resources to stop it. The New York Times reported on this back in January after officials in Iowa noticed that crime was going up there as soon as the number of labs being busted went way down. Since then, there have been a number of stories on how meth is being made south of the border and how the distribution stretches across much of North America. I don't have any doubt that this is a major factor in the recent upswing in crime nationwide.
The other point of contention is whether or not the amount of meth use is going up and whether the 500,000 number is too low. The numbers up until 2005 do not show any increase in the amount of past-month meth users in this country, even though we've been treated to a few years of meth use being described as an 'epidemic'. However, I have seen a number of articles that do show that areas of the country (particularly New England) that have not seen meth before are now starting to see it. It's possible that because the supply is now controlled by more organized gangs with greater reach means that the number of users is actually going up after being steady for many years. If that's the case, it's an even more significant failure of the approach that Senator Cantwell and her co-horts took in trying to deal with this issue.
And finally, Boss Tweed asked a question that I probably need to be asked more. What's my solution for this problem?
When it comes to meth, I think that the approaches that have worked for heroin can be used here, but meth will be more difficult for a couple of reasons. First, we should be registering addicts and setting up safe sites. These safe sites would have trained medical professionals who are authorized to dispense meth, but can also encourage people to enroll in treatment centers. Vancouver's safe site already works somewhat like this, although the users must still obtain their own supply of the drug. They're just exempt from prosecution if they use it in the safe site. A lot of people automatically reject any plan that allows people to do drugs for free, but the reality is that this approach has worked very well in dealing with heroin problems in the places they've been tried. The hidden benefit of sites like these is that while you're basically supporting some people's bad habits, you're also significantly changing the stigma of these drugs from being "cool" drugs done by outlaws to being those "lame" drugs that those losers in the clinic can't stop doing. In Zurich, the amount of new users of heroin dropped by 82% since they opened their safe site.
As for why meth will be more difficult than heroin, I think much of it comes from the fact that its effects last for a long time, and I'm not convinced that people, even addicts, would rather sit in a clinic for 12 hours when they could pay money and do what they normally do. Another obstacle to that approach with meth is that, while heroin use has tended to be an urban problem where safe sites have a very logical location, meth use is more rural. I'm not sure if there's a way to solve this problem without having a large number of safe sites in various locations. It would be very difficult for any small community to take that kind of first step on their own knowing that meth addicts from other communities might move there. Chances are, any solution to this that would actually work would need to be done on a statewide basis. For now, though, I find no redeeming quality in spending money to make this problem worse. I believe we're at a point right now where we can start having serious discussions about how to move away from this failed incarceration model for dealing with drug addiction, even the more dangerous drugs. It's not as taboo a subject as it has been, and if the awareness of how this recent upswing in crime is so tightly related to how we've dealt with meth, Americans may finally have the courage to start considering alternatives.
There doesn't appear to be much disagreement about one major thing. Meth addiction plays a huge role in the amount of crime we're seeing in the country right now. Pete at CoolAqua posted up a report from the Olympian that found that nearly 25% of all people arrested and booked in Snohomish County (north of Seattle) over a recent 8-week period had meth in their system. When you compare that to surveys that have shown that the total number of regular meth users in the entire United States is around 500,000 (less than .2% of the population), that gives you an appreciation for the role that this drug is playing in our overall crime rate.
The point I'm making here is that when individual states began making it more difficult for people to cook meth in their own homes (by restricting the amount of pseudoephedrine an individual could buy), the supply was replaced with a more potent variety coming from Mexico, where law enforcement does not (and will never) have the resources to stop it. The New York Times reported on this back in January after officials in Iowa noticed that crime was going up there as soon as the number of labs being busted went way down. Since then, there have been a number of stories on how meth is being made south of the border and how the distribution stretches across much of North America. I don't have any doubt that this is a major factor in the recent upswing in crime nationwide.
The other point of contention is whether or not the amount of meth use is going up and whether the 500,000 number is too low. The numbers up until 2005 do not show any increase in the amount of past-month meth users in this country, even though we've been treated to a few years of meth use being described as an 'epidemic'. However, I have seen a number of articles that do show that areas of the country (particularly New England) that have not seen meth before are now starting to see it. It's possible that because the supply is now controlled by more organized gangs with greater reach means that the number of users is actually going up after being steady for many years. If that's the case, it's an even more significant failure of the approach that Senator Cantwell and her co-horts took in trying to deal with this issue.
And finally, Boss Tweed asked a question that I probably need to be asked more. What's my solution for this problem?
When it comes to meth, I think that the approaches that have worked for heroin can be used here, but meth will be more difficult for a couple of reasons. First, we should be registering addicts and setting up safe sites. These safe sites would have trained medical professionals who are authorized to dispense meth, but can also encourage people to enroll in treatment centers. Vancouver's safe site already works somewhat like this, although the users must still obtain their own supply of the drug. They're just exempt from prosecution if they use it in the safe site. A lot of people automatically reject any plan that allows people to do drugs for free, but the reality is that this approach has worked very well in dealing with heroin problems in the places they've been tried. The hidden benefit of sites like these is that while you're basically supporting some people's bad habits, you're also significantly changing the stigma of these drugs from being "cool" drugs done by outlaws to being those "lame" drugs that those losers in the clinic can't stop doing. In Zurich, the amount of new users of heroin dropped by 82% since they opened their safe site.
As for why meth will be more difficult than heroin, I think much of it comes from the fact that its effects last for a long time, and I'm not convinced that people, even addicts, would rather sit in a clinic for 12 hours when they could pay money and do what they normally do. Another obstacle to that approach with meth is that, while heroin use has tended to be an urban problem where safe sites have a very logical location, meth use is more rural. I'm not sure if there's a way to solve this problem without having a large number of safe sites in various locations. It would be very difficult for any small community to take that kind of first step on their own knowing that meth addicts from other communities might move there. Chances are, any solution to this that would actually work would need to be done on a statewide basis. For now, though, I find no redeeming quality in spending money to make this problem worse. I believe we're at a point right now where we can start having serious discussions about how to move away from this failed incarceration model for dealing with drug addiction, even the more dangerous drugs. It's not as taboo a subject as it has been, and if the awareness of how this recent upswing in crime is so tightly related to how we've dealt with meth, Americans may finally have the courage to start considering alternatives.
posted by thehim at 9:14 PM
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