Education won't slow meth crisis.

Byline: GUEST VIEWPOINT By Norm Thomas For The Register-Guard

The methamphetamine crisis in Oregon has deepened over the past 10 years, despite the fact that Gov. Ted Kulongoski and our recently appointed state senator from District 4, Floyd Prozanski, have acted on it only since January (the date of the appointment of the governor's Task Force on Methamphetamine).

According to no-nonsense law enforcement officials such as Mike Grover, Cottage Grove's chief of police, the explosive growth in the manufacture and abuse of meth has been with us since the early 1990s, a period in which both the governor and the new senator have been in office in Salem.

An informal survey of many local druggists, one of whom works at a pharmacy that has been in business for more than 50 years, revealed that not a single one knew of the existence of the governor's task force or its plan to tag meth ingredients and distribute informational brochures in drugstores. The same person indicated that the state has provided little or no information to local druggists about street drugs in Oregon.

Apparently, ample opportunity for sharing such information exists in the form of seminars and workshops regularly attended by pharmacists, but the state has been conspicuous by its absence.

Clearly, the situation has changed since methamphetamine was first synthesized in 1887. The drugs in the amphetamine family have been used since then to treat low blood pressure, asthma, narcolepsy, epilepsy and depression. At the same time, they were abused by students cramming for exams, truckers on long hauls, soldiers and pilots.

However, pharmacist Darryl Inaba, director of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics in San Francisco, also points out that Oregon, California and Texas have been centers of meth manufacturing since the early 1990s. In his informative book, "Uppers, Downers, and All Arounders," Inaba says, "One of the reasons for the resurgence in the use of meth in the '90s (was a) new, somewhat safer, cheaper and almost odor-free manufacturing technique." The process is still risky, but not as risky as before, and the changes have made it even more difficult for law enforcement to detect.

At the same time, then-Rep. Prozanski voted to tie the hands of law enforcement by preventing the sale of drug manufacturers' seized assets. He has consistently voted to limit funding for law enforcement in general.

For a time, many of the ingredients in meth were readily available legally. The main ingredient used by street chemists is ephedrine. Despite a ban on the sale of ephedrine in the United States, it is still being smuggled in from China and Mexico, where it is extracted from the ephedra bush, and from Germany, where it is synthetically produced. The other components of meth, including hydriodic acid, are smuggled in or manufactured illegally. Already-manufactured meth continues to flood the American market. The task force will be hard pressed to tag such contraband.

There is no doubt that the fallout from continued abuse is substantial. Public health officials in the Portland area have linked an increase in syphilis to the popularity of crystal meth. They also suspect methamphetamine's role in the surge in the number of HIV-positive individuals.

In the face of all this, the governor's task force's "solution" is to attach store tags to the most often used components in the manufacture of meth. "These tags (would) alert and educate customers as to the types of products often used by meth cooks," Prozanski wrote in an Aug. 2 guest viewpoint. Surely, the meth cooks already know what those are! (For that matter, so does anyone who lives in Oregon and has ever read a newspaper.)

The only real solution to the meth epidemic is stricter enforcement. Placing decals on the components and handing out brochures in stores is nothing more than a Band-Aid approach to a genuine health menace.

Norm Thomas of Eugene is the Republican nominee in state Senate District 4. He is a former elementary school teacher and administrator, and has written educational materials about drug use.