Where Even the Sheriff Deals Meth

Good story in the Times about Elsinore, Missouri, an Ozarks town where the last sheriff committed suicide and the current one has been arrested for dealing and using meth:

For two troubled years, Mr. Adams was sheriff of Carter County, until his arrest last month on charges of distributing methamphetamine, the home-brewed drug that has poisoned much of this poor, sparsely populated stretch of timber country. Mr. Adams was accused of regularly snorting it as well.

But in this long-struggling community in southeastern Missouri where distrust of law enforcement has always run deep, the story of a sheriff enabling the scourge he was supposed to fight has not provoked outrage. Rather, many local residents are accepting it, even sympathetically, as another disappointing chapter in what they see as a hopeless fight.

“It shows how entrenched methamphetamine is in our system,” said Rocky Kingree, the county prosecuting attorney. “It’s something that has to be stopped, and it doesn’t seem like there is an end in sight.”

As the mayor of Elsinore told the Times, everybody knows who is using the the town, but nobody does anything about it. They know because heavy meth use leaves running sores and other obvious physical marks on the body, and because it changes people's behavior. People do it anyway because they want to get high; they want to change the way it feels to be alive, to escape from lives of drudgery in boring, depressed places.

Meth is a dangerous and destructive drug, so it makes a better thought experiment about legalization than marijuana. Manufacturing and dealing meth have corrupted many other places in rural America and sent a lot of people to prison; although it hasn't led to international madness on the level of cocaine, fighting meth is still a real cost.

What would happen if we stopped? I don't know. I don't really think, though, that use would go up very much. For one thing use is already very common, and for another it has those ugly effects on appearance that will keep most people from wanting to try it. I have read that getting high on meth costs less, in some towns, than a six pack of beer, and it impairs your driving less. Fifty years ago you could get a prescription for meth in America, and it was one of those prescription drugs widely abused by those who could afford it; have we really gained anything by driving it underground? There are many horror stories about lives ruined by meth, but the problem with using those stories as arguments against legalization is that they happened while the drug was illegal; does anybody really know that there would be more such stories if meth were legal?

Obviously legalization of meth (or cocaine) is not going to happen in America, so this is just whistling in the wind, but in a nation with a million prisoners we need to think about the costs of criminalizing behavior that we have no chance of preventing.