Remember how back in the day methamphetamine was everywhere?
And remember Paul Holmes going on a campaign against meth after his daughter got hooked and how he got pseudoephedrine banned from chemists’ shelves?
According to the media it was a full-on crisis. Well, here are some graphs.
And remember how whether you were brown or white you were just as likely to get hooked? Here’s another graph.
In other words it was all a media beat-up and not only that: meth use has actually increased since then. It’s like the media got bored with the whole methamphetamine thing after it stopped selling newspapers.
Of course this kind of media bs isn’t limited to just methamphetamine. The top prize for media bs and illicit drugs is the media and MDMA (ecstasy). Every death where MDMA is present is reported in the media as an MDMA death, even if MDMA isn’t a factor. Just like how the media always says “died with Covid” instead of “died of Covid”, thinking we’re too dumb to notice.
Still, it’s hard to manufacture a crisis when there are so few actual deaths caused by MDMA. Remind you of anything *cough* Covid *cough* else?
And who can forget Reefer Madness?
But the real kicker is the media is filled to the brim with drug abuse, particularly alcoholism. In fact I’ve been told that methamphetamine is particularly popular with sports journalists.
You may be thinking, ‘Well, that’s just the media and I don’t do drugs and never will.’ But this kind of media reporting has very real consequences that affect everyone. For example, Paul Holmes’ campaign led to the removal from shelves of the only truly effective cold medicine ingredient (it’s replacement has been shown to work no better than a placebo). When the media manufactures a crisis involving a particular drug, the public inevitably demands that something be done, leading to politicians saying ‘we are doing something!’ (in order to garner votes), which inevitably leads to the removal of basic human rights in the name of the common good.
Most drug deaths are in fact the result of the use of multiple substances, pre-existing medical conditions, car accidents, suicides or the result of sheer stupidity. And you can’t legislate against stupidity.
