Where The Crank Labs Are... AKA "Californians in Prison, By County"

Source and inspiration for this post: Sacramento Bee - Interactive Map: Counties with the most residents in prison

A panel of federal judges Tuesday ordered state officials to lower California's prison population by about 40,500. No mass prisoner releases are imminent, but the order eventually could affect some counties more than others, since many counties send a higher proportion of residents to prison.

Da Buffalo commented @ Google Maps:

"Where the Methamphetamine labs are in California" would be a useful comparison. But as someone who's watched the drug culture over the last 40 years morph to nihilistic escapism, and has lived in California for the last 33 of them, I'd say the prison-industrial complex is making 'bank' on Meth.

View Californians in Prison, By County in a larger map

Also See: Methland... @ Global Guerillas
(A PDF of the prologue to Nick Reding's book "Methland" is available here)

Why Midwestern Small Towns Have Been Ravaged by Meth Addiction @ Alternet
(with a recent review of the now-released Nick Reding book and discussion)

...and this Travus T. Hipp Commentary: Incidental Illuminations And A Closer Examination Of The Situation In Burma - We Have Some 'Conflicts Of Interest' Besides Chevron/Texaco Oil... Drugs & Gems
(The drug now driving Burma's underground economy is NOT Heroin anymore)

In summation... my socio-cultural insight @ the Global Guerrillas article (and a partial answer to this statement pulled from the Alternet article):
"Aside from its ease of manufacture -- you can make meth out of readily available industrial and pharmaceutical products, enabling a twenty-first-century variant on the moonshiners of earlier generations such as Jarvis -- the drug's most novel aspect was its clientele: the same predominantly white small-town residents who had watched the urban depredations of crack cocaine from afar and told themselves that they weren't that kind of people. "We're in Iowa, for God's sake," a former Oelwein high school principal, explaining his decision to request police patrols of his school, tells Reding. "We don't do that." In mainstream America's Rockwellian imagination, police officers in towns like Oelwein were supposed to be stopping high school kids from making out in cars on prom night. In the meth age they suddenly needed bulletproof vests and hazmat training."

I live in a town where there are literally hundreds of teenage speed freaks and AFAICT (and I've been watching the drug culture since the sixties) it fill a hole in one's psychology that, in consumer cultures such as the U.S. and most of the Western industrial world, is caused by the media's endless pitch that one is never good enough, the car is never classy enough, WHAT? You don't have a diamond studded Rollie on your wrist?

...and of course, the girl is NEVER skinny enough or self-assured enough to get the boy she likes (or so she thinks).

In other words all that advertising batters their self-esteem to the point, when it's all said and done, our children take a drug that essentially makes it easy for them to say: "I don't give a f*ck what you think!"

Last fathers day, I was listening to a local radio station.

There was this loud audio-compressed pitch for a local superstore.

BUY A CELL PHONE... BUY A PLASMA TV... BUY THIS... BUY THAT!... BUY SOMETHING!!! (the ad really said that last...), and after that ad, a PSA for methresources, the US government's meth self-help site.

Go figure.

Oh, and by the way, Perdue Pharma, the folks who brought us "Hillbilly Heroin", OxyContin (Rush Limbaugh's favorite), another curse on the rural youth of America, were fined a few million dollars and slapped on the wrist for lying to doctors across America about the non-addictive quality of their product.

The FDA told them it was OK to say that it MIGHT be less addictive... but that's NOT what their sales reps told the doctors.

Why hammer on the poor rural folks of America in need of a few extra buck to make the mortgage for the shack, and not put companies like Perdue Pharma out of business entirely for creating a generation of teenage junkies?

I'll answer that... Because the imprisoning and 'programming' of American youth is BIG dollars, and attacking the pharmacological source of another plague isn't.

The local smoothie store, 'Jamba Juice', employing kids in, and just out of high school, makes it quite clear on their job app that if you've been in a 'program' it no problem at all.

They expect you've been institutionalized by the time you leave High School.

Sick.