If you happen to be watching COPS or America's Most Wanted this Saturday night on KRQE Channel 13, you may catch the New Mexico state police's newest anti-meth commercial.Yes, that is Andy Primm.
A local musician with an apparent flair for pretending to be strung out on meth, Primm depicts a clean-cut businessman who has everything going for him until he gets addicted to meth and has his whole world crash down around him.
Andy is a friend of mine, which is how I came to be in possession of this video (also, every time he mentioned something about getting ready to shoot a meth commercial, I thought he was joking or making some kind of avant garde reference so I kind of needed to see it to believe it).
The commercial is the second of what Lt. Ryan Suggs, who is a zone commander out of Alamagordo and a plain-clothes officer in the investigations bureau, tells me will be three anti-meth commercials.
The commercials are funded through a $1 million three-year COPS grant aimed at combatting meth use in New Mexico. Approximately $142,000 of that, Suggs says, is being used for public service commercials such as these (kind of a bargain compared to this federal campaign).
As for the commercial's content (business man's life destroyed from meth), Suggs says the point is to show that meth impacts every possible demographic.
"We do have cases of business people utilizing meth and it completely alters their life. What we're trying to say is it could happen to anyone out there, the drug is so powerful and so addictive," Suggs tells me.
And, he adds, it's abundant. "It's so available, there's so much of it being mass produced, that it's just overwhelming. The risk we have for the youth to be exposed to this drug is overwhelming."
My own take is that a few commercials showing people's teeth and nails turning black from doing meth would be a pretty strong deterrent (blech!). My main beef against meth addicts is that, thanks to them, I have to show ID every time I want to buy allergy medicine! But Suggs says that law has been of some help in, at least, "there's a little more control" and "a little bit of deterrence."
