A lot of scary facts about methamphetamine, a particularly nasty but increasingly popular illegal drug, are packed into Newsweek’s cover story “America’s Most Dangerous Drug.” About 12 million Americans have sampled the cheap crystalline brew of chemicals that has been called “the poor man’s cocaine,” says Newsweek, which details how its long-lasting “euphoric rush of confidence, hyper-alertness and sexiness” can quickly take over — and ruin — the lives of many who snort, smoke or inject it. With about 1.5 million Americans regularly using meth, Newsweek says it has become a national epidemic that touches all socioeconomic classes. “Crank” is no longer confined to the rural South and the West Coast. Meth labs have been uncovered in every state, with Missouri the national leader with 2,787 seizures last year. Pennsylvania seized 106 labs. Newsweek documents the growing crisis: Nearly 60 percent of police departments rank meth as their major drug problem. Meth addicts undergoing publicly funded rehab have doubled since 1995 to 104,500. And, as with other illegal drugs, law enforcement can’t do much to stop its use, manufacture or importation from Mexico. Part of the reason, Newsweek suggests, is that the federal government is focusing too much on eradicating marijuana. Newsweek’s package gets most of its impact from pictures of meth users who were horribly burned by their exploding meth labs and the shocking before-and-after pictures of a 39-year-old woman who abused the drug for 3 1/2 years. Meanwhile, The Weekly Standard and National Geographic continue the magazine industry’s commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the dropping of A-bombs on Japan. National Geographic’s “Living With the Bomb” is a large collection of maps, timelines and mushroom-cloud photos that surveys the world’s eight known nuclear powers to see how safe we are — or aren’t — from a future nuclear blast. The Standard’s long cover essay by World War II historian Richard Frank, “Why Truman Dropped the Bomb,” relies on vast amounts of top-secret Japanese radio intercepts decoded during World War II but fully declassified only in 1995. Frank makes a strong case that if we had known everything Truman and a few other U.S. leaders knew in 1945, we’d all agree that using the Bomb was a no-brainer: Japanese leaders were prepared to fight to the death, in hopes of forcing America to back off its demand for unconditional surrender. Ending the war quickly without an invasion, Frank says, saved countless American and Japanese soldiers’ lives — plus it spared hundreds of thousands of noncombatants who were dying each month in Japanese-held territories.

---

Copyright ©2026— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---