Dawn of the Meth

From BostonHerald.com:

Deadly meth marching toward New England: DEA battles Midwest scourge before it hits

The Hub is winning the war on crystal methamphetamine thanks to lessons learned from battles waged in the meth-gripped West and Midwest, a top federal drug official said yesterday, but she warned that the addictive drug is on a destructive march toward the East Coast.

Should I start putting sandbags around my house?

If I didn’t know better, I’d be bracing myself for a narcotic sandstorm of crystallized chaos. I’d be plugging my nostrils with cotton balls and spray-painting "stolen" on my valuables so I can’t pawn them.

But I’m not stupid. I know that meth doesn’t "march" anywhere, or make decisions of any kind. Meth doesn’t arrive at your doorstep like a military recruiter or Jehovah’s Witness and try to talk you into choosing a new direction in life.

The Herald makes it sound as if meth arrives arbitrarily and just finds its way into your nose or something. Like it instantly turns your life into a horrifying before & after shot, and the survivors can see the trail of debris winding its way back to Iowa as they escape by helicopter.

Fortunately, meth only goes where people take it and people only take it where it’s wanted. There’s actually plenty of it on the east coast already, it’s just not that popular here because it actually can’t just climb up your nose and drag your sorry ass kicking and screaming onto America’s Most Wanted.

But the boundless alarmism of The Herald even has an answer to that:

Conniving drug dealers have also been known to sell crystal meth to buyers while claiming that they are giving them cocaine or ecstasy in hopes of hooking them on another fix, Stansbury said. "Greedy drug traffickers try to make a market," Stansbury said. "It’s buyer beware. You never know what you are getting."

Maybe I should start drug testing myself. This could explain why I get the same thing for lunch everyday. Perhaps there’s drug dealers at Baja Fresh putting meth in my nachos. Mmmm, tastes like chicken.

Update: This post is a stab a just one of many absurd articles to emerge as a result of National Meth Awareness Day. Eric Sterling highlights a particularly disturbing  consequence of this peculiar celebration: the apparent practice of delaying meth lab raids for the purpose of conducting them on Meth Day.

Either there was a grave danger and DEA ignored that grave danger to the public in order to make a media splash, or DEA believes that the danger of explosion is greatly exaggerated but useful for snookering the news media.

Shameful.