Niches spread through society
Drug’s grip on users is nearly unbreakable
From Hollywood actors to lawyers, from race car drivers and minor league baseball players to children of pastors, from surfers to teachers — from any walk of life you care to name, methamphetamine has found its takers, its socalled tweekers.
“I can equate it to my habit of choice — chewing tobacco,” says Nick Reding, author of “Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.”
Reding spent parts of four years in Oelwein, Iowa, population 6,415, studying the pervasiveness of meth. “We live in a country and a world where drugs are very acceptable,” he says. “Alcohol’s a drug and acceptable, right?”
Methamphetamine, obviously, has not reached alcohol’s level of acceptance. Highly addictive and restricted, the drug can be prescribed to treat obesity and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But the illegal form has found multiple niches in American society, and there is enough general understanding about the drug — gets you way high, may rot out your teeth, can keep you awake for days — that it’s even a subject for a cable-network TV drama.
The main character in “Breaking Bad,” which has gained a cult following during its five seasons on AMC, is a high school chemistry teacher named Walter White who turns to making and selling meth after receiving an advanced-stage cancer diagnosis.
The product’s ultimate power over users who become abusers is indisputable. According to the National Admissions to Substance Abuse Treatment Services data from 2000-2010, primary admissions to receive long-term rehabilitation/residential treatment due to methamphetamine/amphetamine outnumbered admissions for all other drugs combined.
Ending the cycle of addiction — breaking good, so to speak — is extremely difficult and often complicated by the fact that 52 percent of all those admitted for treatment were referred by the criminal justice system (compared with 37 percent of those who had a different primary drug of abuse).
Nick Taylor, a clinical psychologist in Montrose, Colo., about 300 miles southwest of Denver, was a founder and the clinical director of a meth treatment/drug court program in Delta County from 2006 to 2009. Participants who successfully complete the program receive a deferred sentence.
“The client has to identify the 10 people in their life they have to get away from to stop using,” Taylor says. “And the judge says, ‘If I hear you’ve been around this person, you’re gonna spend three days in jail.’ That’s tricky if they’re married to each other.”
Jane Maxwell, a senior research scientist in the Center for Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin, understands well that meth is easily available — both from the Mexican cartels and by enterprising “meth cooks.” She is studying 222 meth addicts and believes she may be on to a social/environmental precursor: “They’re much more likely to have been abused and neglected as children and adults than heroin users.”
The Meth Project (methproject.org) launched an advertising campaign in Montana in 2005 aimed at teenagers. As the campaign has expanded, several Hollywood directors, including Darren Aronofsky (“Black Swan,” “The Fountain”), have assisted with the project, making shocking and graphic ads about the drug’s dangers.
The goal? The same as it was in the beginning, says Meth Project executive director Jennifer Stagnaro: “Unsell meth.”