Pubdate: Fri, 26 Aug 2005
Source: Providence Journal, The (RI)
Copyright: 2005 The Providence Journal Company
Contact:  http://www.projo.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/352
Author: M.J. Anderson
Cited: Gonzales v. Raich ( www.angeljustice.org/ )
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)

U.S. DRUG POLICY A CHILDISH PURSUIT

THE FIRST FULL-LENGTH RESEARCH REPORT I wrote, as a sixth-grader, was about
drugs. Who knows what materials instructed me. All I remember is that they
scared me stiff. I penned a horrified summation, then made a lurid red cover
illustrating the varieties of chemical damnation (I was artistic in those
days). I was rewarded with an A.

A better report would have been about the luck that came with my birth. I
could read spine-tingling tales of what heroin would do to your brain, then
go home to supper and two responsible parents. It would have been tough, in
those days, to find any drug stronger than whiskey in my small Midwestern
town.

Today, many rural children are not so lucky. Their parents have become
addicted to methamphetamine, a substance so wasting that users very often
stop caring for their young. Parents who crash after a meth binge may leave
children unfed and unwashed for days as they sleep off the effects. Those
who make meth themselves, in home laboratories, also expose children to
toxic chemicals and the risk of severe burns resulting from dangerous
explosions.

In users' homes, police and social workers have seen children of just 4 or 5
trying to care for younger siblings, according to a recent New York Times
report. They find youngsters living in filth; eating plaster; infested with
lice. In areas where social services are sparse or nonexistent, there is
often no place for these children to go.

Frequently, police try to leave the youngsters with relatives. But often,
the relatives turn out to be using meth as well.

Methamphetamine intensifies sexual drives. As a result, some social workers
say, users are having more children, some of whom enter the foster-care
system as newborns. Doctors say that older children may be subjected to a
highly sexualized environment, and themselves sexually abused.

What once was thought of as a mainly rural problem has spread to U.S.
cities. In Chicago and Atlanta, methamphetamine addicts are the
fastest-growing group seeking treatment. Regionally, the West Coast,
Southwest, Upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest have been hardest hit.

In July, a survey by the National Association of Counties in 45 states
documented an escalating scourge: 87 percent of the 500 law- enforcement
agencies queried said that meth-related arrests and lab seizures had
increased over the prior three years. And nearly 60 percent said
methamphetamine was their most serious drug problem.

Because meth is so higly addictive, rehabilitation is difficult. Hooked
parents commonly lose their children. The need to remove these children from
their homes has strained shelters and foster-care systems. Over the last
five years, according to the Times report, 15,000 children were found at
meth laboratories. Untold numbers more depended on users who were not making
the drug.

No wonder local officials are pleading with the Bush administration to
restore, in the proposed 2006 budget, $804 million in drug-fighting funds,
to keep methamphetamine from developing into a full-blown epidemic. Several
members of Congress back them.

The administration, however, has other priorities. It asserts that marijuana
is America's number-one drug threat. In June, it threw resources at a
crackdown on clubs set up in San Francisco to provide marijuana for
medicinal use.

Restricting marijuana for such purposes is admittedly difficult. For the 10
states that allow medicinal use, a recent Supreme Court ruling favoring
federal control may even have made the job impossible.

Still, no one is talking about the therapeutic promise of meth. Nor do
social workers report droves of children being neglected because their
parents smoke marijuana. Like all drugs, including alcohol, marijuana can
compromise health. But its harms are not in the same league as meth's.

Comparing these two threats, the White House has evidently identified a
problem of simple math. Fifteen million Americans are using marijuana,
whereas only 1 million are using meth. (To quiet objections, the
administration recently pledged $16.2 million in treatment grants for meth.)

But this is reasoning worthy of a sixth-grader, as wrongheaded as if the
federal government had decided to throw most of its health- research dollars
into curing bloating and gas instead of cancer. After all, which occurs
more?

I could swear that the president's staff was using my sixth-grade report as
its playbook. The skinny marijuana cigarette on the cover, with its thread
of evil smoke, looked every bit as threatening as the hypodermic needle. In
my own mind, every substance I reported on had an equal chance of turning me
into a zombie. No way was I going to smoke marijuana; even today you would
have to drug me to get me to do it.

But once I spoke as a child. A responsible government cannot afford to. When
youngsters in makeshift shelters are trying to call their moms on toy
phones, it's time for a new lesson plan. A president who has pledged to
leave no child behind should listen to what Americans on the front lines of
this war are trying to tell him.

M.J. Andersen is a member of The Journal's editorial board.
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