The Orion Online

Issue date: 10/1/08 Section: Opinion

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The addict's arm glistened gangrene and abscessed. He screamed as doctors wheeled him, prostrate, to the emergency room.

He didn't want to tell anybody about his self-wrought infection for fear of prosecution, and just told everybody he had a spider bite. Then it was too late. If doctors were going to save him, they would have to cut off his arm.

This was the first day of the rest of his life.

If the Butte County Department of Behavioral Health used more images like this to teach young people the dangers of drug abuse, it might actually get its point across. Instead, it relies on cheesy rap songs that are more comical than proactive.

The department's "recipe for meth, recipe for death" ads consist of cliche images of drug use overlapping the worst rapping I've ever heard in my life and beats that seem to come from 1994.

In one ad, the lyricist attempts to rhyme "was" and "function" to no avail. As a frizzy-haired woman with a savage look on her face ties one off in a sepia-toned photograph, the rapper drops the "l" on "needle" to make another verse work.

As the incessant rapping continues in another ad, an actor with more mascara on than necessary poorly emulates someone in the brink of an overdose. His parents hold his hand and feign concern as the rapper declares, "Meth loves to rip you and your family apart."

And here I thought meth was an inanimate object.

Rather than inform young people about meth, the only thing the behavioral health department has succeeded in doing is creating something for stoners to laugh at while eating Cheez-Its between episodes of "Family Guy."

According to the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an estimated 10.4 million people age 12 and older - 4.3 percent of the population - have tried methamphetamine at some time in their lives. About 1.3 million reported past-year methamphetamine use, and 512,000 reported current use.

I've seen firsthand the horrors of meth addiction growing up in a bad part of Bakersfield, a bastion of cyclical degeneracy in California's Central Valley.

People steal from their own families. They shrivel into malnourished shells of their former selves. They spend every sober moment with a void that can only be satiated with one more hit, one more line, one more chance to escape from the train wrecks their lives have become.

I've seen children forgotten in foster homes after their parents were placed in jail. I've seen friends and family balancing time and finances with visitation hours and booking money. I've seen parents forced to sever aid to their kids once they realized they were enabling the problem.

If the behavioral health department wanted to explain to young people why they shouldn't use meth, it could tell people about the little boy who has to speak to his mother through a layer of bulletproof glass. It could tell people about the woman who sold her innocence for a fleeting moment of chemical imbalance. It could show the rotted teeth and jaundice-colored gums of a meth addict's mouth.

Young people know when we're being talked down to, and we will immediately tune out. So the next time the public relations department at Butte County Public Health wants to make a positive ad, it should keep that in mind.

Earl Parsons can be reached at
eparsons1@mail.csuchico.edu

Meth Habits (Female)

Video from YouTube

Recipe for Meth...Recipe for Death

Video from YouTube

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