METH, DRUGS, CRIME NOT LIMITED TO ONE RACE

Hopefully, our readers have paid close attention to our weeklong series on methamphetamine and have gotten a better understanding on the epidemic of meth in our community, region, state and nation. Without giving a long-winded restatement of what we've reported this week, I can give people who missed the series the short version.

Meth kills.

This was not an easy project to write about. Experts were relatively few in number, and sources were hard to come by. It was a tough series, and our bad attitudes and missed deadlines brought about several near-fatal confrontations, but like always, the newsroom survived.

My peace of mind, however, was another thing. You see, from the moment we started this series, I felt a little like the defender of a lost and misunderstood community.

Rather than diving right into this, let me give an example. I was the only high school student from Southeast Missouri at a journalism workshop one summer, and one of the professors took note of this. My presence excited him, because then he was able to talk to "an expert" about a subject he'd obviously thought a lot about.

During a lunch with another professor and two other students, this professor quizzed me for nearly an hour on the high rate of incest in our region of the state. Despite entreaties from his embarrassed colleague to switch the conversation, he talked and talked and talked about how "everybody down there knows about it, it's just a problem they can't help."

I don't know who his "everybody" was, because I for one didn't know about it. I defended the Bootheel as best I could, considering I was a 17-year-old who had never had a run-in of this sort before. It angered me that the man would assume everybody in the Bootheel was aware of, lived among and was related in some way to the incest problem, but I was unable to put my feelings into words.

I felt a little of that same anger while preparing this meth series, because it became apparent that at least a couple of my colleagues had no idea what we were dealing with. Everything they knew about drugs had been related to them by a biased source, whether that source was the media, law enforcement or their friends. Because of this, they related drug abuse in the Bootheel to the poor, the black and the more southern neighborhoods in this region.

In other words, several people thought that because meth is a chronic problem, the places to go to find out about it were places like Good Hope Street in Cape Girardeau, the Bottom in Sikeston, and throughout Hayti Heights. That bothered me, and I let it be known that those areas were the least likely to have meth dealers. However, I don't think they really believed me until the law enforcement and media reports we rely on began corroborating my statements.

You know, it's amazing how often we associate people and places with things like drugs and crime. Fifteen years ago, drug addiction -- mainly crack cocaine -- and juvenile violence were associated disproportionately with young, black, inner-city males. Eight years ago, those same problems were becoming a growing problem -- mainly because more young, white kids were becoming addicts and committing crimes.

Today, crack cocaine is a recognized multiracial problem that's taking a back seat to meth, which is produced, dealt and used almost exclusively by whites.

This is not a racial debate on my part. However, I do find it interesting that drugs and other societal ills most often get priority status after the non-poor and non-minorities begin using them.

Enough said.

I and my colleagues learned a lot about meth in a very short time period while working on this series. I hope we were able to educate our community and knock a hole in this problem, which is already becoming another multiracial dilemma. I hope we all learned something else from this series, though. There is no color connection with drugs, crime or any other societal ill.

What affects one of us affects us all. The sooner we stop trying to wrap our problems in pretty little color-coordinated packages, the sooner we can begin developing solutions that work towards uniting us rather than segregating us.

When that happens, I believe the anger and helplessness I felt in my experiences will disappear from others just like me who feel bound to defend the under-represented.