The needle and the damage done
Sometimes it seems like the war on drugs is being fought by people on drugs.
Now there are plenty of people who advocate the legalization of some drugs. But I don’t think any sane person will recommend that you make meth-amphetamine available to one and all with no penalty.
The horror stories surrounding crank are countless. The meth labs blowing up when the backyard deranged chemists make a mistake in processing the speed. The physical abuse and crime rates that skyrocket around meth centers, so bad in Missouri that they have taken to calling the state Methouri .
The problem is that the ingredients to make the stuff are common substances. I Google searched and found dozens of recipes in just a few minutes. All of them call for over the counter cold meds that contain ephedrine or pseudo-ephedrine.
So in what you would think would be a brilliant move to stem the tidal wave of meth the sale of Contact and other cold meds has been limited in most states where meth is a problem. It’s pretty much put the backyard meth chemists out of business.
Unfortunately our friends south of the border have no such restrictions so the flow of meth from Mexico is picking up where the locals left off. As a matter of fact according to some authorities the Mexican speed is cheaper than the home grown variety and it wasn’t very expensive to begin with.
Most crime associated with meth use isn’t to buy the drug. It stems from the fact that speed scrambles the addicts up so badly that they can’t hold any jobs at all and have to steal just to live.
So once again our leaders in well intentioned moves have made a bad drug problem even worse. The war on drugs accounts for most of the criminal populations in our prisons. Maybe something needs to be done but so far every move we make seems to make no sense.
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