Horror Show

On Tuesday, Oct. 9, television stations in Portland, Eugene and Medford will donate a half-hour of airtime to a documentary, called Crystal Darkness, about the evils of methamphetamine.

The privately financed documentary originally aired in Nevada in January, though Oregon-specific content has been added. WW wasn't able to preview the Oregon remix, but the original is available on YouTube and in five parts below.

The original Crystal Darkness echoes the current federal line on meth—a message that's faith-based, in-your-face and, according to independent studies, ineffective at best. It's also an approach at odds with the lower-key and more scientific tack taken by Oregon public health officials.

"We don't subscribe to the scare tactics," says Karen Wheeler, addictions policy manager with the Oregon Department of Human Services. "We try to put the evidence-based messages out." Wheeler, who hasn't seen the film, believes depictions of scabby, rotten-toothed tweakers (which are shown and spoken of in the original version of Crystal Darkness ) give people the wrong idea.

"Addiction is a brain disease," says Wheeler. "And showing things like that stigmatizes people who have addiction."

Portland treatment providers Chris Farentinos, director of ChangePoint, and Wayne Centrone, field medical director for Outside In, agree.

"There's a huge stigma with addiction, which makes it very hard for some people to seek help until very late in the game," Farentinos says.

State health materials say meth is dangerous, but also note that meth addicts recover at about the same rate as other narcotic abusers. (Last year, half of the 120 people in a model Oregon program for meth addicts completed treatment.) That's an "evidence-based" message.

Crystal Darkness is, by contrast, a faith-based film—not just because it shuns hard data for horror stories, but because its promoters are devoutly religious.

Christian News Northwest , a 33,000-circulation monthly newspaper geared toward evangelicals, has emphasized that the effort to bring the movie to Oregon was "energized largely by local Christians."

Jim White, a Lake Oswego accountant, decided to import Crystal Darkness to Oregon. White is a member of Promise Keepers, a controversial male-only ministry, and Christ@Work, which advocates evangelism in the workplace. Randy Glanz, owner of James Media in Tualatin, is producing the local version of the film. Glanz has told The Oregonian of his strong faith. Neither man responded to WW' s messages asking about the film.

The Nevada version of Crystal Darkness is less a study of addiction than a portrait of damnation and salvation. One judge interviewed in the documentary likens meth use to a choice between two sides of a door: "One side, absolutely every time, leads to disaster and death. The other side, to a happy life."

Repentant addicts fill up most of the half-hour with anecdotes. They talk of losing jobs and families; of becoming "despicable" non-humans.

The subject is not so much the drug itself but the bad people who use it. "You could get shot," says a former addict. Or your "faceless" "druggie" associates "will stick a knife in your back." With luck, you'll merely go to jail—"the best place for me," says a sheriff's daughter who got busted for meth.

The personal stories are hard to contest, but they're even harder to draw broad conclusions from. No scientists are interviewed. A social worker and a dentist make brief cameos, but neither offers hard data. A pastor makes multiple appearances.

The closest thing to quantification comes from the judge, who claims without supporting evidence that 90 percent of all felony cases are "directly or indirectly related to drugs."

Fox 12 was the first Oregon station to agree to air the film. Patrick McCreery, news director of Fox 12 in Portland, says some others "came kicking and screaming."

And McCreery says fear works as a storytelling device for its audience. "If I'm speaking to my 12-year-old daughter, I'm not going to throw facts and figures at her," he says.

In style and tone, Crystal Darkness emulates the federal anti-meth ads (like the one on page 16 of this paper). The Office of National Drug Control Policy has spent more than $1.5 billion on advertising since 1996, or more than Oregon's general-fund appropriations for Portland State University over the past decade

A report last year by the federal Government Accountability Office supported findings that the media campaign was ineffective in reducing teen drug use, which was its stated aim. Yet the Bush administration's budget for next year would actually increase its budget by $30 million, to $130 million.

The GAO said, "continuation of programs that have been demonstrated not to work diverts scarce resources from programs that may be more effective."

"That's a good argument," says Wheeler of Oregon's health department.

It's too soon to say whether Oregon's "evidence-based" approach to drug-abuse treatment and prevention, required by a 2003 state law, will prove any more effective than scaremongering. The mandate only took effect this year.

WWEEK.COM: WW previously examined dubious statistics in meth reporting (see "Meth Madness" March 22, 2006).

Crystal Darkness

Part 1