Meth and the Environment

Pubdate: Fri, 02 Feb 2007
Source: Langley Advance (CN BC)
Copyright: 2007 Lower Mainland Publishing Group Inc.Contact: editorial@langleyadvance.comWebsite: http://www.langleyadvance.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1248
Author: Roxanne Hooper

METH MAKERS LEAVE COSTLY MESS
Langley taxpayers are paying a high price as the Township becomes known as the Lower Mainland's meth waste dump.Without even taking detox, lab dismantling and preventive education costs into account, Langley taxpayers are forking out more than$120,000 a year just to dispose of meth lab waste.
While Lower Mainland residents are increasingly aware of how prolific crystal methamphetamine use has become in today's society, and howhighly addictive and horrifyingly toxic the drug is, its producers continued to make and sell the hallucinogenic drug in mass quantities. But it seems the disposal of large quantities of waste created duringproduction of this drug is what is putting Langley on the map for manymeth producers.

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The hazardous nature of illegal meth labs and their environmental cost has been drummed into us for some years now. Before that, we were entertained by stories of the destruction caused by the dumping of gasoline and other solvents into Andean streams by Colombian cocaine factories.

What these stories don't tell us is that cocaine has been produced since the 1880s and amphetamines since the 1930s by responsible, legal manufacturers without environmental damage. Legal manufacturers, subject to governmental oversight and inspection, can be -- and are-- required to properly dispose of their industrial waste. (I know the Greens will object that regulations still allow manufacturers to pollute way too much, but we do hold the manufacturer of Ritalin to a higher standard that that observed by the typical country cooker of meth).

The number of meth abusers in this country is small now, but it is probably larger than it was in the 1950s and 60s, when all truckers used stay-awake pills, every suburban housewife tooke amphetamine to lose weight, and benzedrine inhalers could be purchased OTC.

Luckily (?), since the states have decided to make it practically impossible for us to buy cold medicine, trying to cut off the supply of pseudepinepherine (sp?) to meth cookers, most meth in this country is now imported from Mexico across our well-protected border, leaving the Mexicans to deal with the environmental damage.

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Responses to comments

1. Most doctors don't know how to treat pain. From the 1920s til the 1980s, most medical schools only taught "don't use opioids"; but then research started; and many new doctors know better. As a result, many undertreated patients have been left on their own and have turned to the street with unfortunate results.

2. George Washington as a toker is probably an urban myth springing from one entry in his diary about sexing hemp plants. It's true he raised hemp -- the British and colonial governments even required it as a necessary naval supply -- but most hemp has a THC content so low that one cannot get high smoking it. There is no evidence of recreational cannabis use in America before about 1860 and no evideence of smokin it until almost 1900.