All about the Crystal

As if you needed another reason not to fuck around with that vile, evil drug crystal meth, here's another:

Methamphetamine use has shown to increase the progress from HIV to full-blown AIDS by as much as 1500%.

It's not like a rocket scientist needs to tell you that putting Drano in your system is probably a dumb idea, but where the hell is the media on meth?

I would think that taking the time to flat out state precisely what's in meth (Drano, sulphur, iodine, and mm, mm, mm-much mm-more)and just what it does to you is probably going to have a hell of a lot more effect than someone, somewhere seems to think.

Meth is a terrible, tragic social condition. Unlike your typical drug with its standard worst-case scenarios--homelessness and desperation, with meth, you get even more. You have a wonderful memory-impaired future ahead of you. If you're really lucky, you'll even get to become an absolute wacko with acute paranoia and hallucinations.

Now, where do I sign up?

Naturally, this AIDS angle makes this already incredibly disruptive and marginally discussed drug an even more intense problem. Now, heroin also fuelled the social spread of AIDS, but my understanding is that it never markedly helped HIV reach full-blown status. Meth, however, does.

Thanks to that favourite past-time, sex, this freaky hypersensitive HIV strain is not going to stay confined to meth addicts. Who's to know how or when it might become a strain that's damaging to the public at large?

The saddest thing of all with these two topics, both HIV and the meth crisis, is that education--uncensored, unflinching, brutal education--could really profoundly change the rate at which both the drug and disease are spread.

Sigh. You could get the impression that our kids' frail psyches somehow meant more to us than keeping them alive, and their generation is most at risk. What are we doing?