Satan's son?
Montana Meth Project advertising does one thing well - it inspires creative writing.

Thanks to the aggressive, slick, and lurid advertising campaign mounted by the Montana Meth Project high school students are thoroughly versed in the purportedly inevitable consequences of meth use: a disgusting, rotting mouth; cheap sex in dirty bathrooms; scabs and oozing wounds; and crime.

Evidence of the campaign's success to scare kids straight was printed in the Billings Gazette in the form of a letter from "crystal" penned by a local high school student.

"I have very serious long-term affects. Signs that you have been hanging with me could be rotten teeth, nasty oozing scabs and a disgusting odor coming from your body. I can be injected through your mouth, nose or veins."

What appears to be a creative writing project probably in response to yet another "horrors of meth" news story is family values-inspired drug porn. Meth provides, like marijuna, heroin, and crack before it, the chance for Americans to indulge their need to be voyuers and peer into the world of the nasty "other." This time around, we feed our desires with scenes of sweet young kids being turned into thieves and whores by methamphetamine.

All of the kids featured in the Montana Meth Project video and print ads are actors. They get paid to portray drug users. The women who are all too often exposed on drug and law enforcement websites, however, are real. Their lives are summed up by mug shots, which are arrayed in chronological order typically progressing from a shot of a pretty blonde who becomes, over the course of ten years and ten busts, a haggy old crone with no teeth because she couldn't kick the habit.

In the act of laying out a woman's life in her mug shots and summing it all up to drug use is a convenient, and apparently legal, way of stripping drug users of their humanity and privacy. Like the portrayals of young users in the Montana Meth Project ads, they become part of a public peep show and the poster children of the drug warriors.

What the Montana Meth Project ads and the mug shots don't do is talk about the many reasons people turn to drugs, and they certainly don't address the realities of our world where the pressure to perform and produce and stay skinny and take care of the kids can be overwhelming.

A better use of our ad space and air time would be to engage young people in an honest conversation about turning complex problems, like methamphetamine use, into lurid stereotypes and why we find it so hard find the humanity in others.