Excellent article and some great comments (savageslister, your comments were some of the best and most eye-opening! Thank you!) but it never ceases to amaze me how stupid and heartless and thoughtless Americans can be! For such an "educated" country, we sure do have a disproportionately large amount of bigots and haters! It saddens me to read some of these callous and hate-fuled comments! I have done speed/meth (never really liked coke, didn't last very long and cost too much!) off and on since high school (thanks Dad, rest in peace), and lately I have had some of the symptoms 71 had mentioned, mainly the scabs just inside my nostrils. I am more than a little worried now, since I have been HIV+ since at LEAST '96, and an AIDS diagnosis in 1998 (say what you will, HATERS, you can't make me think any lower of you than I already do, and I'm sure I deserve AIDS because I'm a fucking faggot, and that's how I got it, because an ex-boyfriend (now dead) of mine cared so much for me that he had unprotected sex with me knowing his status but not telling me! I've been chased, hunted down and beat up by assholes like you, so your hate-filled comments wont hurt me!). I really want to stop, and I am going to make more of an effort now, especially after reading savageslister's insights! I had wondered what was causing the sores and scabs in my nose, and now I think I know. Why wasn't there any mention of meth in this article? Where can I get a kit? More importantly, where can I get non-12 step help (listening to others drone on about their addictions does not help me use less, it makes me want to use more!)? I'll shoot this comment off to your email, Brendan, so you know how to get ahold of me, and thanks again for such a well-executed and informative article! Had I not come across it accidentally (or maybe it wasn't an accident!), I might become one of those statistics! I'm sure I am not the only life you may have saved! Kudos to you and this site for doing what mainstream media has failed in for decades now! Honesty and integrity are not totally dead (just in the conservative republican ass-wipes!).