Methamphetamine,
that crystalline psycho-stimulant that’s been plaguing
our communities for years now, appears to be on the decline around
the nation, according to results of a survey released by the
federal Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
As penned in a USA Today article:
“… methamphetamine use, which raced across the USA for a decade, has declined sharply. The number of past-month users fell from 731,000 in 2006 to 353,000 in 2010.”
So could this be the beginning of the end for methamphetamine?
In our area, I’m not seeing any slowdown in police reports from around the county. But we have certainly seen heroin rear its ugly head in the past couple years. And, as you can see from this one sentence I’ve posted from a real police report, it appears, at least anecdotally, that at least one drug seller was having a tough time pushing meth.
I’ve spoken to Bremerton Police Special Operations Group Sgt. Randy Plumb about that very sentence, and he told me not to give it much credence. There’s still plenty of demand out there.
As the report shows, it certainly isn’t the end for marijuana use, which is ingested regularly by almost 7 percent of Americans, up from 6 percent in 2007. But newer laws and education efforts appear to be working in the fight against meth.
UPDATE: The National Drug Threat Assessment, authored by the Department of Justice, is out and says that actually, meth demand is increasing in some markets in America:
“High levels of methamphetamine production in Mexico, along with
increasing smallscale domestic production, have resulted in
increasing methamphetamine availability,” it says.
Apparently, the federal government’s public health arm and its law enforcement arm appear to be contradicting each other a bit.
