The Insidious Price of Crystal Meth

For the record, I am of the mind that one should be able to put into one's body whatever one chooses without government interference so long as it does not affect anybody but the user. That said, there are substances in this world that for whatever reason exist, and no good whatsoever can ever come from their existence. I have a paticular axe to grind with the drug Crystal Methamphetamine because I have personally seen the destruction it can wreak. Fortunately for me I recognized the evil that it represented early on; unfortunately for a few of my friends they did not, and their lives were forever changed for it. Today there is an article in the NY Times that highlights one of the more sinister byproducts that "tweakers" leave in their paranoid-delusionial wake: innocent children.
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From the article:
While foster populations in cities rose because of so-called crack babies in the 1990's, methamphetamine is mostly a rural phenomenon, and it has created virtual orphans in areas without social service networks to support them. in Muskogee, an hour's drive south of here, a group is raising money to convert an old church into a shelter because there are none.
Officials say methamphetamine's particularly potent and destructive nature and the way it is often made in the home conspire against child welfare unlike any other drug.
It has become harder to attract and keep foster parents because the children of methamphetamine arrive with so many behavioral problems; they may not get into their beds at night because they are so used to sleeping on the floor, and they may resist toilet training because they are used to wearing dirty diapers.
"We used to think, you give these kids a good home and lots of love and they'll be O.K.," said Esther Rider-Salem, the manager of Child Protective Services programs for the State of Oklahoma. "This goes above and beyond anything we've seen."

Meth has been around since WWII. I believe it was first invented by the Japanese as a way to keep their factory workers productive over long periods of time. It began to gain popularity about 20 years ago in rural areas as an alternative to high priced and harder to find cocaine. It is interesting to note that it is just now beginning to get coverage in the MSM. A more cynical person than I might say it's because it has recently been discovered by the gay community as the latest and greatest party drug. Formerly it was only a "red" state problem, and as such it did not warrant the attention of the MSM. Now that it is moving to urban areas, urban papers such as the NY Times feel compelled to talk about it.
The real crime in all of this is that valuable "war on drugs" resources are being wasted on combating marijuana while little seems to directed towards combating meth which any rational person can see is by many orders of magnitude worse than marijuana. Controls exist over the sale of the main ingredient pseudoephedrine here in the USA, but regulation in Mexico is less stringent. I read not long ago that much production is being shifted south of the border. I believe that even if Mexico did have the resources and the desire to crack down on meth production it would simply continue to move south.
Here's an idea that will never happen but should. Anybody that has anything to do with setting drug enforcement policy in our country should sample all of the drugs available on the street and judge the danger of each from a personal point of view. That way meth and marijuana would not both be schedule 1 drugs link
Who knows? We may even be able to form a comprehensive drug enforcement policy based on facts rather than fiction and be able to distinguish between drugs that do real quantifiable harm to our society and those that do not.
P.S. if you have not seen the movie "SPUN" yet, go rent it today. You will think it surely must be a parody, you will be shocked to discover it's not.