Happy Methday!

—By Vince Beiser

| Fri Dec. 1, 2006 12:00 PM PST

For those of you who weren't, um, aware that yesterday was National Methamphetamine Awareness Day, Bill Piper of the Drug Policy Alliance has a holiday card for you. Among his several well-reasoned critiques of our nation's approach to the speed problem - which Piper sums up as "incarcerate as many methamphetamine offenders as possible and hope for the best" - is the nugget that California's policy of diverting low-level offenders into treatment instead of prison has saved taxpayers over one billlion dollars in the last five years.

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