Amphetamine psychosis: a delirious take on the latest "new drug of choice".

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Rant - "Plague in the Heartland," by Paul Solotaroff criticized

TIME WAS THAT connoisseurs of drug war propaganda contented themselves with fare such as Reefer Madness, Dragnet reruns featuring acid-eating hippies, and health class films such as 1968's Marijuana, a Just Say No sermonette featuring a curiously red-eyed Sonny Bono.

Now you can cop a fix just by picking up rolling Stone, the self-styled countercultural institution that once upon a time showcased the pharmaceutically fueled writings of America's premier pill popper, Hunter S. Thompson. Rolling Stone's January 23 issue featured the story "Plague in the Heartland," by Paul Solotaroff, the latest entry in a dubious but endlessly rewritten journalistic genre known as the "new drug of choice" story. Depending on the moment, the drug under scrutiny can be marijuana, or cocaine, or heroin, or turpentine, or Ecstasy, or PCP-better known to anyone who ever sat through a Quiann Martin production as "angel dust." This week's special guest villian? Methamphetamine, a.k.a. "crystal meth" and "crank."

All the cliches of the form are on display in "Plague in the Heartland," worn down every bit as smooth as the teeth of a longtime meth fiend. Summary claims to ubiquity, hyper-addictiveness, and national crisis? "Cheap, easy to make and instantly addictive, crystal meth is burning a hole through rural America," avers the story's subtitle. Hyperbolic claims of uniquely intoxicating effects? "The chemical equivalent of ten orgasms at once," swears a doctor. The revelation that this crisis is really about--egad!--the white middle class? "These aren't no-tooth yokels from trailer parks," reports the police chief of Granite Falls, Washington, where the story is mostly set. "They're kids whose moms and dads work at Boeing."

Exoticized, sinister dealers who don't care about the effects of what they're selling and who wrap themselves in the Constitution to boot? Solotaroff, with a police guard, walks up to a notorious meth-cooking site and interrogates a white-cooking site and interrogates a white-trash specimen who is equal parts Deliverance technical consultant and ZZTop roadie: "He has broad logger's shoulders, a chest-length beard and eyes that dart from side to side, pulsing in their sockets." After being accused of manufacturing meth, the frenk...