Just Where The Heck Is THE Meth Capital?

We recently ran a photo of a woman on this website who looked rather happy.

I thought this was odd since the picture was her booking photo from a drug bust. Shouldn't you look sad for a police mug shot or at least be unemotional? But this woman was smiling, appearing to be as happy as a lark.

I mentioned this to Matt, our online editor. He'd noticed the same thing.

"Are you surprised?" he asked me. "She was probably high when they took the photo."

And then he said The Phrase.

"They got her in Stoddard County. You know that's the Meth Capital of Missouri."

I've heard that phrase -- something-or-other capital -- thrown around a lot over the years. It seems that every city and town in the U.S. aspires to be the Capital of something. Even illicit narcotics are OK.

For instance, in Missouri we seem to have a lot of Meth Capitals. That's not surprising. Our state is often touted as the Meth Capital of the country. I don't know if that is true or not. That would then make lil' ol' Stoddard County the District of Columbia of Meth for the United States of America. That seems rather unlikely.

Personally, I think the whole Meth Capital issue is up for debate.

Just a week or so ago I read in the Post-Dispatch that Jefferson County was The Meth Capital of Missouri. Stoddard County was not even mentioned in that article.

But here was our online editor telling me that Stoddard County was The Meth Capital of Missouri. Another newsroom editor chimed in that she thought Bollinger County was the Meth Capital of the Show Me State.

I guess it all depends on how you define what it takes to be labeled The Capital.

In the case of meth, perhaps you are the capital if your county's law enforcement has the most busts. Or perhaps the capital could be decided by the quantity of narcotics that are captured. One great big giant bust has to be more important than a dozen itsy-bitsy busts.

Or maybe the title of Meth Capital should take into account the entire population of a county when compared to the number of busts. If that were the case, I could see Stoddard County potentially being the Meth Capital of Missouri rather than Jefferson County. Jefferson County has nearly 220,000 residents, seven times more than Stoddard County.

Maybe we don't know where the REAL Meth Capital of Missouri actually is located, because those drug kingpins have managed to avoid detection. Jefferson and Stoddard Counties may just be contenders for the Meth-Dealers-Who-Have-Been-Stupid-Enough-To-Get-Caught Capital and some other county that has not had a single bust is in fact cranking out meth on an industrial scale. They could be the REAL Meth Capital and we wouldn't even know it.

This is a dilemma. How can the media know which county is or isn't the real Meth Capital of Missouri?

Tim from our design department was passing through the newsroom at the time of this discussion. He suggested we sponsor a "Meth-Off."

I like it. It's a good name. It's catchy. I like catchy.

Although I'm not really sure what it would take for a successful Meth-Off. Tim did not actually suggest any process for how you would exactly go about running one.

That seems to be a recurring problem here at The Irony Of It All blog. We're able to dream up outside-of-the-box solutions to problems or issues, but a lot of times we're a little sketchy on the exact process for actually accomplishing these Big Picture plans that we propose.

We're like The Capital of that kind of thing.