There has been some interesting reporting on drugs and the drug trade in the past week. First, Peter Jennings hosted a prime time special on Ecstasy which seemed surprisingly level headed. The bottom line: the jury is still out on the long-term effects of Ecstasy use, but there is no doubt that the government's warnings have been intentionally misleading, not to mention based on extremely poor science. The most scary and most hyped result of the government-sponsored research &em; that for some people as little as a single dose of Ecstasy could bring on Alzheimer's &em; comes from a study who's author now admits that the animal subjects of the study were mistakenly given methamphetamine, not Ecstasy. The report closes with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson, something to effect of "public trust in government is a precious commodity, which ought not to be wasted." I certainly agree with this characterization; when there are so many facts of import that government would like to communicate to the public, why waste any reputation for truth-telling to scare people away from a drug whose health risks have been inconlusive at best?

Slate provides the second story, an interesting look at the plummeting use of LSD in America. The University of Michigan's noted survey of drug use among high school students shows about a 70% drop in LSD just since 2000. Dramatic, indeed. The article attributes this drop to the fact that LSD is simply hard to get in most American cities now. Two events seem to explain this difficulty. In 2000 the DEA busted a drug lab in rural Kanses that was suspected of producing an astounding 95% of the American LSD supply. Second, the death of Jerry Garcia and subsequent halt of the Grateful Dead tour, served to dramatically disrupt the LSD trade. It seems the DEA finally has a "success story", after so many failures in the ongoing war on drugs.

Who's Got the Acid? - These days, almost nobody. By Ryan Grim