Our drug problem & what to do about it

Jan. 4, 2006

If you read the Express each week you may have noticed that the paper has been on an anti-drug crusade over the past few months, highlighting reporter Anne Stanton’s excellent series on the spread of methamphetamine in Northern Michigan, along with last week’s story on crack cocaine.
America’s meth plague is a subject we take very seriously here, thanks to warnings in magazines such as Newsweek and because of word-of-mouth reports from readers who are close to the problem. After one of Anne’s stories was published, a young addict called to say that meth use is epidemic in many towns across the country, and a walk through a downtown in a state such as California can mean bumping into dozens of people strung out on the drug.
Closer to home, undercover drug officers have cited Kalamazoo as a hotbed of meth production -- its meth lab chemists are generating a cancer that threatens to infect the rest of the state.
As the Express series demonstrated, we need to draw the line in Northern Michigan before that cancer takes hold here. In fact, the series revealed that we’ve already got a serious drug problem:
• The explosion of a meth lab cabin in Missaukee County that took the life of a young mother through severe burns.
• Meth lab busts at a hotel in Traverse City and a motel in Petoskey.
• The deaths of young people in the area tied to methamphetamine overdoses.
• A meth lab explosion in a home near a school in Cadillac.
• A man convicted of manufacturing meth after he was arrested carrying a mini lab in a backpack at the Horizon Outlet Mall in TC.
• An after-midnight raid on a drug house in Grawn where a two-year-old girl was one of the occupants.
• Dozens of arrests and the revelation that meth labs and drug houses can be operating next door to your own home.
What can we do?
For starters, we need to kick the dust off that old reliable, Education. High school teachers throughout Northern Michigan should consider sharing Anne Stanton’s drug series with their students, starting with last week’s story, “Crack Connection,” about a crack cocaine dealer from the Kingsley-Grawn area facing a sentence of up to 35 years in prison this month.
Teachers, those stories can be downloaded from the Express website (www.northernexpress.com) and reprinted as handouts. No need to request permission, just go for it.
Those stories tell it like it is on the dead-end futility of the drug life and offer plenty of room for discussion, especially for young people eager to debate the moral issues of, say, meth-addicted mothers exposing their toddlers to the world of hard drugs.
To read the series, check out the archives at www.northernexpress.com, starting with:
• “Meth Madness” in our Oct. 27 issue.
• “Devil Drug Takes Its Toll,“ Oct. 27.
• “The Meth Lab Next Door,“ Nov. 10.
• “Addicted to Meth,“ Nov. 17
• “Can a Drug Cure a Drug?“ Dec. 1.
• “Crack Connection,“ Dec. 29.
Beyond that, we need to pick up the phone and get law enforcement involved whenever there’s a suspected drug house, meth lab or drug ring in our midst. Northern Michigan has enough problems with poverty, ignorance and the lack of job opportunities without going down the hard drug path. We need to draw the line on America’s meth plague to make it very clear that it won’t be tolerated in Northern Michigan.