More surprisingly, Walters hinted something heretofore unimaginable: that the meth epidemic was over. “Was meth an epidemic in some parts of the country?” he said in his interview with Suo. “Yes… Is it the worst drug problem? Is it an epidemic everywhere? The answer is no.”
But the questions that had to be asked that December night at Las Flores was why, if everything seemed so much better, had the number of meth cases that Nathan Lein was getting not declined? And why hadn’t the number of meth-related complaints of Clay Hall-berg’s patients dwindled? The answers to those questions require an understanding of what exactly a drug epidemic is and how a report like the National Survey on Drug Use and Health gets made. But the most important aspect to understanding why Oelwein’s meth problem seemed to have become “invisible,” as Clay put it that night, was a recent shift in the narcotics market. As had been happening for twenty years, since the days of Gene Haislip, meth had not gone away or been eradicated. It had reassorted its genome.
Ask any drug epidemiologist the question “What is a drug epidemic?” and the answer will likely be, “I don’t know.” It may seem counterintuitive that a drug epidemiologist can’t define the very concept for which the profession is named, but consider the difficulties of the related field of viral epidemiology. Say you ask your doctor these elemental questions: What is the flu? Where exactly does it come from? What exactly does it do? How does it do that? What can I do to confront it? What will be the outcome of that confrontation? The best your doctor can do is take the little that is known beyond a doubt about the flu; combine it with common sense, anecdote, and theory; and recommend a solution without any guarantee of success. The epidemiology of a drug is no different: it is unquantifiable in absolute terms.
Consider again the opinion of Dr. Stanley Koob, the neuropharmacologist at the Scripps Research Institute and a highly regarded drug addiction specialist. When he says that “meth is way up there with the worst drugs on earth,” only part of that opinion can be proven. It can be scientifically measured that smoking a drug—as opposed to eating, snorting, injecting, or taking it anally—is the fastest delivery system to the brain. It is further supposed, though not proven, that the speed of delivery affects a drug’s addictiveness. So, because meth can be smoked, it (like nicotine, but unlike alcohol) has entrée into the category of “most addictive.” From there, Koob’s statement veers into the realm of instinct mixed with common sense. The bulk of Koob’s evidence regarding meth’s “unique dangers” stems from his theory of the drug’s social identity. In Koob’s opinion, much of meth’s danger lies in the drug’s long history of usefulness to the sociocultural and socioeconomic concepts American society holds dear, many of which stem from the pursuit of wealth through hard work.
Now take national drug studies. Though the term implies technical exactitude, it is simply impossible to know how many people become addicted to any drug, methamphetamine included. It’s impossible to know how many people are using a drug—addictively, regularly, episodically, or singularly. Furthermore, there is no set number or percentage of drug users that signals a drug “epidemic.” It’s this very lack of a quantifiable foundation that prevents any honest drug epidemiologist from being able to define a drug epidemic. Saying there is a meth epidemic is just as unverifiable as saying the meth epidemic is over. In this odd way, the newspaper columnists who, in reaction to Suo’s reporting and the work at Newsweek and Frontline, had begun asserting in mid-2006 that there had never been a meth epidemic—that it was an invention, a myth—were partly correct.
The point is that we invariably come back to testing as a means of understanding drug use, even though assuming these tests lead to truth puts one on shaky ground. You simply can’t prove something to be true or false if the means of confirmation are easily questioned. Consider how the National Survey on Drug Use and Health concludes every four years how many meth addicts there are in the United States. First, surveyors ask employers to give their employees a questionnaire on drug use. The survey asks employees whether they have done amphetamines (not specifically methamphetamines) in their lifetime, in the last year, and/or in the last six months. First, it seems unlikely that drug addicts will take this completely optional test; will answer truthfully if they do take it; and will even be at work in the first place—as opposed to home cooking meth. Further, since methamphetamine is just one of a broad class of stimulants in the amphetamine family, an answer of yes to a question about using one amphetamine can’t be taken as an answer of yes to using another. And yet, for the study’s purposes, anyone who says they’ve done any kind of amphetamine in the last six months is considered “addicted to amphetamines,” and—in a way that is impossible to understand—a certain percentage of these responders is deemed addicted to crank. It’s in accordance with this system that NIDA proclaimed—and John Walters celebrated—meth’s demise in 2006.
But a drug’s availability, according to Dr. Koob, is the key to its power. And whether or not the Oelwein police were busting labs, clearly there was still a lot of meth around town, since Nathan hadn’t noticed a drop in his cases. Lab busts removed the drug’s most obvious elements: the smelly homes, the fires, the sickened children. Removing labs, it turns out, isn’t the same as removing the drug, or the problems for which that drug serves as some sort of answer. Where meth was coming from now; how it was getting to Oelwein; and why the Combat Meth Act hadn’t stopped it—these were the new questions that had to be answered.
Sitting in Las Flores that night, I was reminded of a talk I’d had a year before with Phil Price, who had since retired as the special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. At the time, Price was simultaneously investigating eleven execution-style murders of Mexican nationals, all committed in empty mansions in quiet Atlanta suburbs, all meth-related. In discussing the murders, Price had foreseen the Combat Meth Act’s ultimate weakness, long before it was passed.
“Look,” he’d said in his thick North Georgia accent, “I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but the Combat Meth Act will only take the little bit of the meth business away from the dipshits with the Bunsen burners and the Budweiser chemistry set and give it to the only people who’ve known all along what to do with it: the Mexican DTOs.
“For a while,” he went on, “people will applaud the government, and things will get remarkably better. But mark my words: it’ll get worse from there. Because none of this is about a drug. It’s about a system of government and an economy. The Combat Meth Act will only serve to highlight our immigration policy, and what a holy crock of shit it is. But no one will see that. All they’ll see is a short-term victory against meth. By the time the crank comes flowing back,” concluded Price, “the government and the media will be long gone, and we’ll be stuck worse than ever.”