Focusing communities on the dangers of meth

The emergency evacuation of 1,500 residents in downtown Arlington could have long-lasting effects. Sunday’s ammonia leak should provide a wake-up call about the dangers of methamphetamine.

To some degree, residents of Snohomish and Island counties have been aware of the serious problems created by the popularity of meth for several years. There have been numerous thefts of ammonia by people who use it to manufacture the drug. We’ve all heard about the environmental and health problems created by the hundreds of homes, apartments and motel rooms contaminated by the labs used to make the stimulant.

As Sheriff Rick Bart told Herald reporters Scott North and Janice Podsada earlier this year, he talks regularly with people struggling to save an addicted family member, usually a young person. Many individual lives have been ruined or sidetracked by the paranoia, hallucinations and other mental problems the highly addictive drug can induce among users.

There has been no shortage of news reports documenting meth’s effects, including Podsada’s moving accounts earlier this of year of one girl’s successful struggle to break free of addiction. Still, the meth problem seems easy enough to ignore most of the time. Efforts by young people in Granite Falls to mobilize community concern are more an exception than the rule. Bart, for instance, says he has found a number of school districts slow to respond to requests that students be allowed to attend a teens-only summit discussing the drug late this month.

Maybe the Arlington evacuation is a good opportunity to focus our minds, and especially the minds of younger people, on the drug’s dangers. A drug that leads to the evacuation of an entire downtown is one to be concerned about.

The evacuation apparently resulted when thieves left a valve open on a tank of anhydrous ammonia at Twin City Foods in Arlington. Two people were hospitalized for treatment before being released.

For anyone thinking about using meth, the incident ought to bring home a couple of questions. Are the folks selling and making this stuff really people I can trust? Do I want to put anything into my body made by them?

Many of the individuals making the drug are also using it. That’s an issue raised rather pointedly a while back by John Adcock, a Snohomish County deputy prosecutor who specializes in cases involving drugs and violence: "Why would you put anything in your body that some drug-addled moron cooked up in his kitchen? This stuff is not approved by the FDA."

The people who manufacture this drug are so intent on their own profits that they are too careless or stupid to avoid putting an entire community at risk. On Mother’s Day, no less.

The Herald’s series, "Meth: A Year in Hell," is on the Web at www.heraldnet.com/specialreports.

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