tangential news
More meth news from a place where it was chic ten years ago. A young woman left her seven month old in a car, while she went into a friend's trailer to smoke weed and do crank. Fox gets six years in death of son.
My first instinct with these sorts of incidents is to find some humor in it's distilled essence. The starkness of the picture alone is enough to illicit the strange giggle of ironic distance and sadness that I feel.
Harrisburg lies on Hwy 99 -- just off the I-5 corridor -- in the middle of not a whole lotta much. Eugene is twenty minutes south, but it's another county and another world. It's closest place of commerce is Junction City - home of RV manufacturing (according to my father, Junction City is second only to Winnebago, IA in RV production). Except the RVs manufactured in Junction City aren't always recreational vehicles for the retirement set. Many of them are converted to homes in the many mobile home/RV parks across Oregon and the rest of the Northwest. The RV that Michell Fox went to cook in was probably built just down the road, in Junction City.
All the current meth coverage in the media is extremely charged for me. In some ways, I see it as an epidemic that has been ravaging the West and rural places (and my family) for years. Growing up, meth labs were a constant part of the landscape -- burnt out outbuildings, boarded up buses parked in fields, barns stacked with gallon buckets of chemicals. Years ago I took my college girlfriend on a drive through my small town and the outlying country it accidentally turned into a explanation of how cooking works and how to spot it. By the time our 30 min drive was over, we had deemed it the "meth tour." It would have been easier had we stepped out of the car -- meth cooking has a smell that is unmistakable. It's foul and like a lot of chemical smells, it hits your eyes first.
Just up the highway from Harrisburg this week, a mother in Salem, OR was sentenced to 18 months for passing a high level of meth onto her 9 month old child. She took him to the emergency room where nurses noted he was unusually agitated. In a move ala the NYPost The Oregonian donned her a "meth mom". Therein lies the problem. Although I see the scourge that meth is, I can't imagine that making it the new focus of the war on drugs is a positive thing. An increased demonization of users, new catch phrases to summarize addicts and their offspring reeks of the war against crack and the myths that arose from that. I mean, the fact that "crack baby" remains a prevalent term in casual vernacular even though dire predictions about the children of addicts proved to be unfounded. Moreover, despite the hysteria subsiding crack use remains high. The entire episode did little to stop distribution, use, crime, or to help addicts. Instead, the supply got cheaper, so the drug war in the streets ended, and attention waned. I fear much the same is true of the governments new found pet drug -- attention to the meth epidemic will lead to more punishing attitudes, harsh sentences, stigma for children and families -- but none of those things help anyone. Destructive drug use has to be treated and it's underlying causes -- poverty, lack of education, unemployment -- have to be treated.
In the meantime, all of us should make sure that as the meth hysteria rises, we keep the lessons of the 90s drug war and prison boom ever present. Mandatory minimums and harsh justice need to be resisted on the local level to avoid the further devastation that comes from criminalization's reinforcement of the poverty cycle.
My first instinct with these sorts of incidents is to find some humor in it's distilled essence. The starkness of the picture alone is enough to illicit the strange giggle of ironic distance and sadness that I feel.
Harrisburg lies on Hwy 99 -- just off the I-5 corridor -- in the middle of not a whole lotta much. Eugene is twenty minutes south, but it's another county and another world. It's closest place of commerce is Junction City - home of RV manufacturing (according to my father, Junction City is second only to Winnebago, IA in RV production). Except the RVs manufactured in Junction City aren't always recreational vehicles for the retirement set. Many of them are converted to homes in the many mobile home/RV parks across Oregon and the rest of the Northwest. The RV that Michell Fox went to cook in was probably built just down the road, in Junction City.
All the current meth coverage in the media is extremely charged for me. In some ways, I see it as an epidemic that has been ravaging the West and rural places (and my family) for years. Growing up, meth labs were a constant part of the landscape -- burnt out outbuildings, boarded up buses parked in fields, barns stacked with gallon buckets of chemicals. Years ago I took my college girlfriend on a drive through my small town and the outlying country it accidentally turned into a explanation of how cooking works and how to spot it. By the time our 30 min drive was over, we had deemed it the "meth tour." It would have been easier had we stepped out of the car -- meth cooking has a smell that is unmistakable. It's foul and like a lot of chemical smells, it hits your eyes first.
Just up the highway from Harrisburg this week, a mother in Salem, OR was sentenced to 18 months for passing a high level of meth onto her 9 month old child. She took him to the emergency room where nurses noted he was unusually agitated. In a move ala the NYPost The Oregonian donned her a "meth mom". Therein lies the problem. Although I see the scourge that meth is, I can't imagine that making it the new focus of the war on drugs is a positive thing. An increased demonization of users, new catch phrases to summarize addicts and their offspring reeks of the war against crack and the myths that arose from that. I mean, the fact that "crack baby" remains a prevalent term in casual vernacular even though dire predictions about the children of addicts proved to be unfounded. Moreover, despite the hysteria subsiding crack use remains high. The entire episode did little to stop distribution, use, crime, or to help addicts. Instead, the supply got cheaper, so the drug war in the streets ended, and attention waned. I fear much the same is true of the governments new found pet drug -- attention to the meth epidemic will lead to more punishing attitudes, harsh sentences, stigma for children and families -- but none of those things help anyone. Destructive drug use has to be treated and it's underlying causes -- poverty, lack of education, unemployment -- have to be treated.
In the meantime, all of us should make sure that as the meth hysteria rises, we keep the lessons of the 90s drug war and prison boom ever present. Mandatory minimums and harsh justice need to be resisted on the local level to avoid the further devastation that comes from criminalization's reinforcement of the poverty cycle.
posted by good golly at 10:03 AM
1 Comments:
word.
i was recently on a delta song flight and the only satellite channel that came in clearly was this a&e "expose" on meth in the suburbs and it really rankled me for the very reasons you expressed so eloquently here.
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