New Report Challenges Meth Misinformation

In a new report released this week, neuroscientist Dr. Carl Hart and coauthors Joanne Csete and Don Habibi examines common assumptions about methamphetamine use and users and finds them wanting. Instead of careful, evidence-based analysis, rising concern about meth use has resulted in "a barrage of misinformation and reckless policies," Hart finds.

As its title suggests, the report, Methamphetamine: Fact vs. Fiction and Lessons from the Crack Hysteria, finds clear parallels between the tide of distorted facts, faulty assumptions, and misinformation that characterized the crack cocaine scare of the early 1980s and similar claims made about the most recent drug panic over methamphetamine. Both feature the same sorts of claims, made by the same sorts of claims makers -- largely police, health professionals, and academics.

While the report finds real detrimental health effects with sustained meth use, it says those effects are exaggerated and/or the result of factors other than meth use in or by itself, such as poor overall health, poor nutrition, poor dental care, and poverty. It also challenges claims that meth is more powerfully addictive than other drugs.

In the report, Hart calls on lawmakers at home and abroad to revisit laws that harshly punish methamphetamine possession, to invest in treatment instead of punishment, to reconsider restrictions on access to amphetamines for legitimate medical purposes, and to stop supporting "wasteful and ineffective" scare campaigns replete with misinformation about meth use.

"We've been down this road before with other drugs that were poorly studied and misrepresented by media," said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program. "The results included policies that hurt the users, ineffectively addressed the problem and ultimately failed society. We can't afford to repeat these experiences."