I work for a local government and I would have to agree with your piece - clearly the biggest drain on law enforcement officials fighting drugs is in tracking down these meth labs. They crop up overnight and that makes it difficult for officials to track down the distributors.

Honestly, it's the worse kind of drug problem - the turn around time for these drugs is short - there's no growing time, or cultivation factor like all other drugs in its class.

It's artificial and the supplies can be purchased over the counter - and the directions for making the crap is easily accessible.

Worse yet is the devastating physical effects of the drugs, not just the addictiveness, but the debilitating aspects of it. Perfectly reasonable parents become total psychotic monsters within weeks and entire families are destroyed. It's very sad.

I bet the DEA wishes people would just have stuck with weed.

"Faces of Meth" where the link leads has one of the most horrifying before-and-after pictures I've ever seen! If Teresa Baxter's "this is your face on meth" after snapshot is not enough to convince would-be users not to start, they have no brains left to destroy with the drug...

this is amazing and scary and i had no idea that meth could do this to people. i've never done it and haven't read much about it, so had no clue it could do this to people. Obviously, i knew it wasn't GOOD, but this is unreal. What the hell happened to those people's faces? Why is their skin all torn up with sores? is that from picking or what? a side-effect of the drug? I've never seen anything like this - talk about aging in a short period of time This is terrifying. I will show this to my son and pray that he listens, though he's not into drugs now, i want it to stay that way - this will help ensure that he stays on the right path, to be sure.

Wow. Thanks for sharing this ... that link is one of the most frightening things iv'e ever seen... i just can't get over that.

thanks for sharing,
sadi

Truly disturbing.

I knew "uppers" tended to age a person, but not like this!

Instead of trying to stop drugs from coming into America or being grown or created in America, we need to make very graphic commericals about the effect drugs have on people and their friends and family.

Re: Faces of Meth. That first one - Theresa Davis - is truly horrifying. The rest could be worse. It looks more like meth causes you to get in a bar fight and then get a bad haircut, though there is one where it looks like meth causes you to turn into Charles Bukowski, and that's enough to scare anyone straight.

Dave

I have to disagree that meth problems have been ignored.

In fact for many many newspapers it is almost an annual story. I've written about four or five stories about it and my paper did a series on it last year. We even put those type of pictures bang on the front page above the fold. Scared the shit out of me and I'd already seen the ugly effects up close in two different communities.

Here's how I started the series:
Sometimes the smell of cat urine is just that, cat urine. Sometimes it's the smell of someone down the block, cooking up meth.

Neither is pretty. They probably taste about the same. The urine may be better for you. More ...

I had read the rest of the stories in the series before writing my piece and what was missing was quite how disgusting this stuff is.

I can write till my fingers bleed. Somewhere, someone along the way has to step up and resolve to spend the cash. Someone who can make the decison to spend the cash.

It is more of a health problem than anything and HAZMAT teams have to be called to breakdown a meth lab, whether in a hotel, a remote trialer or the trunk of a car.

it is the worst of drugs. Essentially it's throwing everything under the kitchen sink together, cooking it up with ephedrine-based prouducts and injecting or snorting. The more crap you put in the greater amount you can produce. And meth users aren't picky (unless you're talking scabs0.

There's no such thing as high-grade meth. No celebritiy I have ever heard has bragged about taking meth. There is zero glamour.

The good thing about meth is that periodically a trailer housing a meth lab blows up taking the meth cookers with it. If they could just make it a bit more dangerous to make meth we could establish a perfect equilibrium where all the labs blew themselves up.

Dave

When I was in highschool some of the people in my circle of dear friends, including a couple of the people in my band, used shoot up meth periodically. I don't seem to recall anything happening to their faces. Haven't kept in touch, but I'm sort of curious as to whether they're dead or something.

I am currently doing a research paper on this so called war. I am from Iowa and know exactly what it is that you are saying. However, I feel that money spent on putting these people behing bars is wasteful. Instead of building prisons for non-violent drug offenders, why don't we build residential lock down treatment centers that can address the medical and social aspects that addicts face? Give them the opportunity to get clean, the tools to stay clean, and slow release back into society. In 2006, 60% of all federal prison inmates were there on drug convictions. state prisons had drug offender populations of close to 35%.