The Politics of Meth Panics

In my
latest Forbes column, I review a new book on on the
history of methamphetamine panics. Here is how the column the
starts:

By 2005, when Newsweek identified “The Meth
Epidemic” as “America’s New Drug Crisis” in a
sensational cover story, illicit methamphetamine use had been
declining for years. In the National Survey on Drug and
Health (NSDUH), the number of respondents who reported
consuming meth in the previous year fell by about a quarter between
2002, the first year the survey was conducted, and 2005,
when Newsweek cried “epidemic.” Data from
the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, an earlier
version of the NSDUH, suggest that meth use during this period
peaked around 1999, six years
before Newsweek discerned a “new drug
crisis.”

In his provocative and illuminating new book Meth
Mania, Nicholas Parsons, a sociologist at Eastern Connecticut
State University, seeks to explain why public alarm about
methamphetamine bears little or no relationship to objective
measures of use or abuse. Parsons persuasively argues that drug
scares, like other moral panics, are driven by the interests of
various “claims makers” who seek to persuade the public that an
emergency exists and that urgent action is required. In the
mid-1990s, for example, the government agencies whose funding
depends on fear of the pharmacological menace du jour needed a new
threat after the crack cocaine panic of the 1980s fizzled out. The
yellow journalists at Newsweek (and many other
media outlets) were happy to help, because stories about scary new
drugs attract eyeballs, even when the drugs are neither new nor as
threatening as the breathless warnings imply. But the policies that
result from such scaremongering—which in this case included
draconian prison sentences and precursor restrictions that
bolstered murderous drug cartels while treating cold and allergy
sufferers like criminal suspects—tend to do more harm than
good.

Read the whole thing.