"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Meth and Cheap Thrills: City Pages Has a Point
Posted 11:05 a.m., April 27, 2006
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We've known at least since the salad days of Sam Kinison that you can simultaneously be both tasteless and right. Minneapolis' alternative news weekly The City Pages (a publication, I should note, that I used to write for) managed that neat little trick this week--albeit while utterly failing to be as funny as the Rev. Sam.
The free publication came out with its much-anticipated "Best of the Twin Cities" issue this week. In addition to its usual bevy of "best-of" accolades (best acoustic performer, best all-ages venue, best FM radio personality, etc.), the editors decided to tweak all us squares a bit by making a pretty stunning choice for "best cheap thrill."
City Pages named methamphetamine.
I heard about this on the radio--WCCO-AM, to be exact, an indication that I stand squarely in the demographic that Steve Perry and his staff were trying to shock. And, predictably, I got quite riled. Meth? Best cheap thrill? I got even angrier after I read the actual entry, which reads in part:
"As it turns out, there are still plenty of [meth] enthusiasts in Minnesota. They value the drug for one reason: It provides a cheap thrill. Whatever else you want to say about meth, you can't deny that. In the 'bang for the buck,' category, meth blows away rival stimulants. At 80 to a hundred bucks a gram, a user (though not a high-tolerance addict) can stay energized for days on a single score."
-- "Best Cheap Thrill: Crystal Meth,"
The City Pages
April 26, 2006Now, if I wanted to do the customary blog thing and just focus on that passage, I could twist it to my advantage, and I could pump out one heck of a fine screed, raving about what a bunch of miscreant creeps it is that works at City Pages. Maybe I could even get published at Powerline.
But the responsible thing might be to actually read the rest of what City Pages has to say.
And to do that is to begin to see their point.
"Between the blizzard of scare stories in the media, the proliferation of those nasty 'Life or Meth' billboards on the freeways, and the batch of harsh new meth laws passed by the Legislature, Minnesotans seem to have come into collective understanding: meth is the evilest drug ever. ...... It would have been best had meth not been invented. But remember this as well: In terms of overall social harm, meth still pales in comparison to the perfectly legal (and very lethal) drug of choice for most Minnesotans, alcohol."
-- "Best Cheap Thrill: Crystal Meth,"
The City Pages
April 26, 2006I'm not going to give City Pages very high marks for either grace or class in pitching their argument in the form of a sick joke. And aside from that, it sounds a little too close to the old hippy saw about how virtuous pot is in comparison to that old demon alcohol. Which is too bad, both because I don't think that's what they're trying to say, and because it undercuts their truly valid point.
That point is made at the end of the entry, which cites a Hazelden survey of 952 patients that found "no difference in outcomes between meth users and non-meth using patients as measured by continuous abstinence rates one year after treatment."
This is an important issue that deserves further discussion.
Society generally attacks the drug problem from a sort of "scared straight" angle, trying to spook kids to keep them away from the nasty stuff. It's perfectly understandable. But often as not it has the reverse effect, just as warning some kids away from cigarettes with photographs of gnarled, blackened lungs from autopsy photos somehow leads them right to the nearest pack.
But the scare tactics about meth, it seems to me, have been effective in two very powerful ways, neither of them good. First of all, they've worked to convince the rest of us meth is evil incarnate, the most purely addictive of drugs, from which there is virtually no escape. That kind of attitude necessarily will affect they way we see the user--as an almost automatic hopeless cause. If the drug is evil, what does that make the drug user?
Secondly, the scare tactics tend to make meth addicts see themselves in those same terms, leading them to believe that once they are hooked, there is no real hope for them, no alternative but suffering and death.
Meth, as Hazelden points out, is approached by users differently than most other drugs. It is not typically used for its euphoric affects like marijuana or mescaline--not as City Pages wrongheadedly states, for "cheap thrills"--but as a means to an end: To stay alert while driving truck, to keep up with a passel of kids underfoot, to keep weight off so that little black party dress keeps fitting. It is, in effect, a performance-enhancing drug. The sad thing is that it works, even as it slowly kills the user.
Its utilitarian quality is what sets meth apart from most street drugs. But there is also an important way in which meth is quite like other drugs--and this is where the City Pages makes its most salient point.
People, in fact, can recover from meth addiction. And many, though by no means all of them, do recover. There are hundreds of thousands of successfully recovering meth addicts walking among us.
Here are a couple of other pieces of evidence to that effect, all of them courtesy of Hazelden:
Those are all short-term studies, and further tracking needs to be done to gauge long-term success or failure rates for meth-addiction recovery. I would suspect those abstinence rates would fall over time, just as is the case for alcoholism. But the numbers nevertheless have to be seen as encouraging.
- Iowa's Division of Behavioral Health and Professional Licensure found that 71 percent of meth users were abstinent six months after discharge.
- Tennessee's Bureau of Alcohol and Drug Abuse found that 65 percent of meth clients were abstinent six months after discharge.
- Texas Department of State Health Services found that 66 percent of meth clients were abstinent 60 days after discharge (publicly funded services 2001-2004).
At a minimum, they should force us to reconsider our attitudes about the evil nature of meth users. Seems to me that evil is like ugly: It's forever. But clearly meth addiction doesn't have to be a life sentence.
Meth does deserve its terrible reputation. It is an incredibly destructive drug, and as a do-it-yourself chemical compound that can be cooked up in any basement, shed or open field, it is has done immense damage. When I lived in San Diego in the late '80s, meth was already rampant, and I'll never forget what happened to one girl I knew there--her name was Anita--whose pretty young face became a field of angry, ripe pustules after she got hooked. At 20, suddenly she looked 40. But she did stay thin.
Meth also played an indirect role in the death of my equally beautiful nephew, Brian Miller, 29, of Minong, Wis., who died just before Christmas last year in a Duluth intensive care unit. I was there; I watched him die.
Like many addicts he was powerfully cross-addicted, to meth and to alchohol. And like some others like him, it was neither of those drugs that ultimately killed him. What killed Brian was an overdose of the painkiller oxycodone, which possibly he took as a means to subdue the agony of meth withdrawal. But judging from my last conversation with him several months before his death, what led him to that point was his own sense of hopelessness, his lack of conviction that there was any way out of his personal hell.
There was. But he couldn't see it. In effect, he believed the hype--he bought the meth myth--that he was a lost cause.
So, I'm provisionally on board, City Pages. I'd like it if you had found a more elegant way of stating your case. But here's hoping the conversation you've started stays on course. Because when it gets right down to it, you're right--when we demonize the drug, we demonize the users--and we help render them hopeless.
And that is simply wrong. Where there is life, there is hope.
-- Kevin Featherly
