After reading Nicholas Parsons’s Meth Mania: A History of Methamphetamine, Sullum believes so:
Although NSDUH data cited by Parsons indicate that monthly meth users never accounted for more than 0.3 percent of the population between 2002 and 2011, the drug in its latest incarnation loomed large in the public imagination. Meth did become the next crack in the sense that it was portrayed as the scariest drug ever, turning its users into hideous, homicidal, zombie-like subhumans who made speed freaks seem attractive and tame by comparison. Popular portrayals of meth’s effects, which Parsons describes in detail with a keen eye for exaggeration and unjustified assumptions, were grossly misleading on two major counts: They presented extreme cases as typical, and they blamed every harm suffered or inflicted by meth addicts, ranging from tooth decay to murderous rampages, on the drug itself.
This sort of pharmacological reductionism is belied by the history of methamphetamine, which shows that the effects attributed to the drug are powerfully shaped by context.
Phillip Smith praises the book for addressing how these myths are made and by whom. He writes that “Parsons is especially interesting in his discussion of law enforcement as a claims maker when it comes to drugs”:
[L]aw enforcement has its own interests to protect. Parsons notes one particularly brazen example of self-interested panic purveying, the “ice” scare of the late 1980s. The DEA jumped all over that — until its annual budget was secured, then not so much.
This leads me to something Parsons didn’t discuss, but which I have long wondered: Why, exactly, are police considered experts on drugs? Because they arrest drug users? Police arrest domestic violence suspects, too, but that doesn’t make them experts on domestic bliss, as their own divorce and domestic assault rates indicate.
The Dish 