tell your children

Paranoid hysteria. It’s not just for the editorial page anymore.

Yesterday evening I was going through the AGNs that had stacked up on my porch while I was in Austin. On Saturday, March 19 AGN editors chose to fill up most of the front page with an article that could have been titled “Meth Madness”: Women cry for it; men die for it!

This particular article was titled “Convenient Addictions,” and it followed on the heels of John Kanelis’ epic March 6 editorial “Meth plague infects everyone - everywhere .” I’ve followed the AGN for years—through wars, famine, plague, and pestilence—and I don’t remember the editorial page editor ever seeing fit to devote a whole page to one issue as Kanelis did with this one.

Don’t get me wrong. Methamphetamine is some bad stuff. It rots the teeth right out of your mouth, they say, makes your skin fall off in pieces. Some users have even turned into wingnutty district attorneys.

But a full-page front-page article warning of the dangers of such meth paraphernalia as ball point pens (“can be used as a pipe for smoking meth”) and altoids tins (“can be used to transport meth”)?

Suddenly I’m remembering those Health class textbooks that warned to stay from “Horse” and “Mary Jane”.

SPACEDARK