The proposed answer to the country's meth problem? Just keep a key ingredient, pseudoephedrine, out of the hands of meth producers. I have to admit, it is a decent article, although some of the statistics feel fast and loose. That said, surely there would be some preventative effect in creating a prescription requirement for pseudoephedrine. Additionally, I understand that this op-ed was limited in its scope. However, what we really need are better jobs in middle America (or jobs at all) and treatment and counseling facilities, not to mention drug prevention programs that teach children the actual dangers of these harmful narcotics.

If there is no other way to earn an income in Kentucky, people will find a way to make and sell meth. They have to. To allege otherwise is to argue that people will opt for poverty and destitution in the face of a profitable, if not harmful and illegal, alternative.

Additionally, to tamper recidivism and relapse rates, we need better counseling and a stronger emphasis on problem-solving courts, as opposed to throwing people into the criminal justice system. If a court is either unable or unwilling to order a perpetrator to receive counseling, spend part of his or her sentence in a halfway house, and address the sort of underlying psychological problems that are so prevalent in our criminal populations, we won't see a dramatic decrease in our crime rates.

Last, there needs to be an open dialogue about drug use that begins in the schools. The danger of using scare tactics with children is that, once those scare tactics are exposed, the message and the messenger lose legitimacy. When I was a kid, my class listened to several speakers between first and twelfth grade. It was a lot of talk about addicts living on the street, peer pressure, gateway drugs, and accidentally overdosing on your first usage. There was never a word mentioned about the dangers of alcohol. As we now know, this message was more than misleading, it was largely incorrect. We can't lie to kids about some drugs and expect them to believe us about others. Curbing meth use may mean accepting that kids experiment with drugs in college or that many high school and college kids know more about prescription pill abuse than you might expect. Then again, we could just keep doing what we're doing, right?