oops.

April 17, 2006 11:59 AM

Small town girl killed by meth dealer. It was a story that we talked about before. A Meth dealer admitted to tying up a little girl in order to 'scare' her into silence about his lab. The girl died. There's only one problem though, it didn't happen, the confession was false, and DNA evidence linked another man to the crime, who has since been charged. According to Al Roker, though, Meth is still to blame, for causing 'hallucinations' and 'dementia' rather then police pressure to confess regardless of actual guilt.
posted by delmoi (44 comments total)

Lewis Black said it best:

"Al Roker, that big, fat fuck."
posted by Mikey-San at 12:01 PM on April 17, 2006

But he played Kingdom of Loathing and read MetaFilter, right? Just as long as we can still demonize him for something.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:03 PM on April 17, 2006

Anybody check Al Roker's DNA for the match yet?

Yeah, he claims it was stomach stapling, but we know he got thin off the glass pipe diet.
posted by Pollomacho at 12:03 PM on April 17, 2006

I know I should refrain from personal attacks on others... but Al Roker looks like a deflated balloon.

/derail
posted by ninjew at 12:05 PM on April 17, 2006

Erm... nobody's suggesting that the meth problem is overblown, right? Because my family might have something to say about that.
posted by jokeefe at 12:11 PM on April 17, 2006

Oh right. The meth problem and global warming. I've seen this liberal hysteria propaganda before and I'm not buying it.
posted by xmutex at 12:18 PM on April 17, 2006

From the FA: "No one would deny meth is a serious issue, but in this instance it appears Court TV may have leaped before it thoroughly looked over the evidence."

Meth is scary as fuck without fabricating reasons to be worried about it. Particularly with drugs, I've always thought it was a bad idea to lie about how bad they are/the consequences of using, because the lies usually come to light and then people who should know better argue that all of the consequences are really just fabrications put out by the man.
posted by OmieWise at 12:26 PM on April 17, 2006

"The meth problem" is pretty obviously one of the latest US media scare stories. It's not that meth isn't bad, just like avian flu is bad, but it's the "fear of the month" these days, which means it gets people into overblown hysteria on a regular basis.

Then again, friends of mine actually got attacked by Africanized bees while on easter vacation, so...
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:32 PM on April 17, 2006

i don't think hyping the dangers of meth is helpful because its negative effects are in reality very subtle. It starts out fairly harmlessly and can possibly even benificial, in terms of personal productivity. You could probably go for a year or more of regular use without having any serious negative personal side effects. Addiction creeps up on you slowly.

If you tell people that it's going to turn them into marauding, psychopathic monsters, that's going to go against their direct experience of it, and people are going to ignore the warnings.
posted by empath at 12:33 PM on April 17, 2006

The sentencing of the confessed murderer has been postponed.
posted by ?! at 12:34 PM on April 17, 2006

This one time meth came to my house and beat up my dog.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 12:36 PM on April 17, 2006

you can't spell 'empath' without meth...ap.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 12:37 PM on April 17, 2006

Wow delmoi, great find!
posted by thirteenkiller at 1:06 PM on April 17, 2006

:P
posted by thirteenkiller at 1:06 PM on April 17, 2006

I was once attacked and mauled by a bear with africanized bees in its mouth. The bees had sars. Thankfully the lyme disease I picked from the shark attack I suffered while kidnapping a young white girl prevented me from contracting it.
posted by Pollomacho at 1:08 PM on April 17, 2006

That sounds like quite an ordeal. Too bad the bird flu is going to get you.
posted by Gamblor at 1:13 PM on April 17, 2006

I fucking hate when news shows start with a conclusion, and then build a story to reach it. It inevitably ends in a really poorly reported story.

Big ups to Al Roker and Court TV, for helping re-prove that "Infotainment" (or whatever the fuck they call the News as Entertainment shows) is a fundamentally broken idea. Now if only the blissed out masses would recognize this, and change the fucking channel.
posted by I Love Tacos at 1:17 PM on April 17, 2006

I was once attacked and mauled by a bear with africanized bees in its mouth. The bees had sars. Thankfully the lyme disease I picked from the shark attack I suffered while kidnapping a young white girl prevented me from contracting it.
posted by Pollomacho at 3:08 PM CST on April 17

Did the bear say "Превед!" before it attacked?
posted by ninjew at 1:19 PM on April 17, 2006

See, I work in drug and alcohol counseling. And I have done my share of drugs, and still enjoy some from time to time. I think meth helped with atleast two college papers (nothing like typing 25 pages out in 9 hours). But, I see the dangers of meth, the children of meth mothers, who haven't brought groceries in weeks, but she beggs me for $$ assistance for bus fare to "go to her parents", then returns all strung out, never intending to get on the bus. The dad who has a lab in his trailor that his 3 year old son lives in, (not to mention the junkies that kid was exposed to). Like I said, I have done my share of shit, and for some people, I even encourage weed or mushrooms; I think peyote is awesome and all these are better for you than alcohol. If there is a dark side to drugs, I have seen it, and meth and heroin top the list.
posted by cdavidc at 2:04 PM on April 17, 2006

causing 'hallucinations' and 'dementia' rather then police pressure

rather than.
posted by quonsar at 2:05 PM on April 17, 2006

I live in southern Oregon, and a meth scourge isn't a media artifiact here, it's all too real.
posted by everichon at 2:11 PM on April 17, 2006

“Even though Katie Collman's case may turn out not to be meth-related, it awakened the small town of Crothersville to its big meth problem," the documentary concludes.”

Just because it’s not true, doesn’t mean we’re lying.

and this says it all:
“On TV tonight:
...
A new, more vicious attack is in the offing on "24" at 9 on Fox.
A trio of masked men rob and shoot a woman at a spa in "CSI: Miami" at 10 on CBS.
...”
etc. etc. etc.

Just because they seem to care, doesn’t mean they’re not being exploitive.

And in the wise words of OmieWise:
“Meth is scary as fuck without fabricating reasons to be worried about it.”

And false police confessions just piss me the fuck off. Obviously there is the human rights thing - but if a machine is broken it needs to be fixed. You have a bunch of cops coercing a false confession and going off to coop some place and not doing their jobs finding the actual guy.
I wouldn’t be as irritated if I thought all cops and all police departments suck. This type of crap makes it that much harder on the cops actually trying to do something productive.
posted by Smedleyman at 2:17 PM on April 17, 2006

everichon, did you actually read all the links you've posted?

The second link links to an article that basically says that The Oregonian used questionable reporting and faulty statistics to overhype the meth problem. In other words, the author does come close to saying that the "meth epidemic" is indeed a media artifact there.

Yeah, meth is a big problem, but ... ya know, don't post links that disprove your argument, yeah?
posted by Pontius Pilate at 2:56 PM on April 17, 2006

Just a couple years ago Oregon took the crown from Iowa for the greatest number of meth-lab busts.
posted by delmoi at 3:16 PM on April 17, 2006

The recent Frontline on Meth was pretty incredible.
posted by docpops at 3:22 PM on April 17, 2006

Eh, busted. I took what I could find in a hurry. Damn. Still, my incompetence aside, it is a hige problem down here.
posted by everichon at 3:41 PM on April 17, 2006

HUGE. Good god, I am doing poorly today. ;o)
posted by everichon at 3:43 PM on April 17, 2006

Frontline was on Meth? I'll be that was a pretty friggin awesome show!
posted by Fezboy! at 3:46 PM on April 17, 2006

Al Roker may not actually be on meth, but this story has awakened me to the full horrors of Al Roker's meth problem.

Coming up next: Is Al Roker safe--for YOUR children?
posted by arto at 3:59 PM on April 17, 2006

Meth has been around forever. Why is it only such a terrible problem now? Is it perhaps because social forces are driving this"epidemic", rather than the chemical itself?

No, of course not. Drugs are evil, and are evil irrespective of any social or economic context. That is why the 4th amendment was just a bad idea. It gets in the way of the criminalisation of drug use.

When is the US going to grow up and approach the drug problem from a realistic angle? Honestly, how long is it going to take?
posted by [expletive deleted] at 5:15 PM on April 17, 2006

Expletive,

I'm quite confused, I'll admit. Can you shed some light on why you think the Fourth Amendment is a bad idea?
posted by Pontius Pilate at 5:23 PM on April 17, 2006

Frontline was on Meth? I'll be that was a pretty friggin awesome show!

I think he meant watching the show while on meth.

(anyway, after their eppisode on porn I think I'll just ignore everything they have to say now)
posted by delmoi at 6:05 PM on April 17, 2006

Surprise, surprise, the government lies.

Not that meth isn't nasty shit. ISTR government researchers using that fact to their advantage when they labeled meth as E in order to "prove" that E eats holes in the brain.
posted by vsync at 6:49 PM on April 17, 2006

Metafilter: The media fabricates stories and meth-amphetamine is bad for your health.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 11:00 PM on April 17, 2006

>Frontline was on Meth? I'll be that was a pretty friggin awesome show!

I think he meant watching the show while on meth.

No, it was totally the staff. The upside is that I lost a lot of weight working on it. The bad parts were the transparent spiders and the jerks at "Antiques Roadshow" who narced on us because we were stealing their lighbulbs to smoke crystal out of.
posted by Mayor Curley at 4:53 AM on April 18, 2006

Saw the fr0ntline show. Hated it. Treated everything coming out of the cops mouths as uncriticisable gospel truth. Foxes and chickencoops, anyone? The show also built up a bogus analysis of the chemistry of methamphetamine (crank), likening it to methaqualone (qualude) in chemical synthetic complication, which crank most definitely is not. There are many synthetic routes to crank, since its chemical structure is really quite simple.

And, naturally, of course, there was no mention at all of the speed being handed out in school by the nurse to kids every day by the millions in the US. Hmmm, I wonder where these folks doing meth first got their taste for it?
posted by telstar at 9:12 AM on April 18, 2006

And, naturally, of course, there was no mention at all of the speed being handed out in school by the nurse to kids every day by the millions in the US. Hmmm, I wonder where these folks doing meth first got their taste for it?

Monster truck rallies, from the looks of them.

Saw the fr0ntline show. Hated it. Treated everything coming out of the cops mouths as uncriticisable gospel truth. Foxes and chickencoops, anyone?

I think the producers tried to find some well-spoken crank cookers willing to rebut the claims, but the pro-meth people were too busy.
posted by Mayor Curley at 11:09 AM on April 18, 2006

telstar writes "The show also built up a bogus analysis of the chemistry of methamphetamine (crank), likening it to methaqualone (qualude) in chemical synthetic complication, which crank most definitely is not. There are many synthetic routes to crank, since its chemical structure is really quite simple. "

I just watched the show on the internet the other week, and I don't really think that's what they were going for. I think the equivalence they were setting up was over methods of production control based on raw materials. It might not be as effective as ludes, but, then, the lude story is pretty dramatic. They were actually quite clear in the piece that producers were changing their raw materials because its possible to synthesize meth in more than one way.
posted by OmieWise at 11:21 AM on April 18, 2006

I think the producers tried to find some well-spoken crank cookers willing to rebut the claims, but the pro-meth people were too busy.

I'm sure they could have found someone if they'd tried.
posted by delmoi at 12:33 PM on April 18, 2006

I just watched the show on the internet the other week, and I don't really think that's what they were going for. I think the equivalence they were setting up was over methods of production control based on raw materials. It might not be as effective as ludes, but, then, the lude story is pretty dramatic. They were actually quite clear in the piece that producers were changing their raw materials because its possible to synthesize meth in more than one way.

Supposedly you can make meth from phenylalanine, which is an essential amino acid, found in all living things. I don't know how difficult that would be, though.
posted by delmoi at 12:35 PM on April 18, 2006

FRONTLINE got a well-written letter from someone claiming to be a former meth cooker and he claimed that there were plenty of recipes that included no ephedrine or pseudoephedrine. I did a little digging, and they do exist (at least on the internet, who knows if they work). However, they also include extra steps, harder-to-get ingredients and, it appears, lower yields.

You can't stop meth entirely. But you could make it quite a bit more unusual by cutting off psuedo supplies. But, as an allergy sufferer, I'd rather have meth around and effective decongestants.
posted by Mayor Curley at 2:32 PM on April 18, 2006

However, other countries with much less of a meth problem won't be jumping to ban psuedoephedrine anytime soon. Even here in the US, there is quite a bit of resistance to the idea, since many millions of people use Sudafed for colds. As has been discussed already, eliminating psuedo is of debatable value. Meth is what's known as an unsubstituted phenethylamine, and it's the "unsubstituted" part that makes so many synthetic routes possible.

At any rate, I've heard rumors that synthesis is shifting to other countries, Mexico in particular. Since meth doesn't require any particular plant input to create (unlike other popular illegal drugs) it can be made anywhere a lab can be set up and precursors obtained.

I'm really afraid that the hysteria around meth will take us much further down the road to a police state, and worse, all the various bans and restrictions being discussed will turn out to have very little effect on supply.
posted by telstar at 3:08 PM on April 18, 2006

In case you'd missed it.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 1:23 AM on April 19, 2006

"A lie can make it halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." -Mark Twain
posted by telstar at 5:47 AM on April 19, 2006