The West continues to be the hot spot for meth in the U.S., leading the rest of the country with 65 percent of meth treatment admissions, according to a new 171-page study by the RAND Drug Policy Research Center.
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health
puts Nevada first in meth use, with 2.02 percent of the population
using the drug, followed by Montana and Wyoming (1.47 percent), and
Idaho, Nebraska and Oregon (1.24 percent). The other western states —
Arizona, New Mexico, California, Colorado, Washington and Utah — are
all in the top 20.
The RAND survey marks a few changes:
Although meth use was originally highly concentrated among
white men, users are now increasingly female and Hispanic. The
emergence of meth is also a significant concern for the criminal justice
system. The majority of county law-enforcement agencies now report meth
as their primary drug problem. Moreover, the share of meth-related
treatment admissions referred by the criminal justice system is
approximately 50 percent higher than for other substances.
The highly addictive neurotoxin methamphetamine — which can be smoked, snorted, injected or ingested — releases enormous bursts of dopamine into the body, causing euphoria and mental alertness. At least at first. Over the
long haul, meth use results in everything from
insomnia and teeth grinding to liver damage and death. The
synthetic stimulant is produced in labs and homes using
over-the-counter drugs (ephedrine and pseud0-ephedrine) and commonly
available chemicals (hydrochloric acid, methanol, iodine).
RAND puts the cost of meth abuse in the U.S. in 2005 at
$23.4 billion, with an upper estimate of more than twice that amount.
In computing the costs, researchers tried to include the intangible. For example, the process of producing meth results in 5-6 pounds of toxic by-product
for every pound of the drug — an environmental problem difficult to quantify but estimated at $61.4 million. There were 900
deaths attributed to meth in 2005 — valued at a rather astonishing $4.5 million per person. The problem of “meth babies” and children, many of whom are taken out of the homes of their meth-using elders…$905 million.
The RAND study also notes that the effects and cost of meth use are
disproportionate in relation to the percentage of people using the
drug. Only .5 percent of the U.S. population reported using meth in
2005 — way below rates for marijuana and cocaine and slightly lower
than for heroin. High school seniors (presumably the most drug-taking
demographic in the country) used meth at a rate of 2.5 percent, as
compared with 5.1 percent for cocaine, 9.7 percent for hydrocodone
(often via the prescription drug Vicodin) and a whopping 33.6 percent
for marijuana.
The study comes up with a per capita cost: $26,872 for each person
who used meth in the past year and $74,408 for each dependent user.
And finally, the study concludes with the thought that even
the most painstaking survey cannot uncover the true costs to society,
or the actual number of meth users:
It is probably not the recreational meth user who imposes the
greatest burden on our society, but rather those who become addicted,
engage in crime, need treatment or emergency assistance, cannot show up
for work, lose their jobs, or die prematurely. These are the
individuals who impose the greatest cost on society, yet they are also
generally populations that are not adequately captured in household- or
school-based surveys.
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