Picking Our Battles

The less recreational drug use we have the better off we are, but many of us use alcohol while believing that the most significant drug problem lies with the users of the most unpopular drugs. Perhaps if we added it all up the time and health that we lose to alcohol, tobacco, and marajuana, we would find that those costs exceed the costs of meth. Perhaps the biggest costs are the losses that we suffer by trying to force the use of drugs to zero by focusing on the supply, making the prices high, and the business of drugs more unsafe than it needs to be. Perhaps we are willing to accept these costs because it helps us see the drug issue as a problem with someone else.

Here are a few good articles arguing that the meth epidemic is not the large problem that we make it out to be. We need to keep these problems in perspective as we try to pick the most productive way to work on them.

• Debunking the Drug War by John Tierney in The New York Times
• Meth Madness at Newsweek By Jack Shafer in Slate