North Carolina lawmakers should be ashamed of themselves getting swept up in the mindless meth panic. Banning cold medicine from store shelves across the state is a gross overreaction to unbelievably hyped problem. How hyped? Check out what Reason’s Jacob Sullum found when he looked at Tennessee’s statistical claims about the ravages of meth:

Do the math (which the Tennessee District Attorneys General Conference clearly didn’t), and you will see that 13.4 percent of Americans die as a result of methamphetamine abuse within five years of graduating from high school. According to the Census Bureau, there are more than 20 million 15-to-19-year-olds in the U.S., so we are talking about hundreds of thousands of deaths a year, and that’s not even counting people who start using meth after high school.

Sullum, who actually reads what government studies say rather than rely on third, or fourth-hand rumors about meth in the streets, also notes that the official federal survey on meth use only finds 600,000 people nationwide who use meth as often as once a month. Accordingly, the numbers of near-daily meth addicts, you know the ones roaming the countryside and South Charlotte apartments, must be smaller still.

And veteran media myth-buster Jack Shafer chimes in with this little data point:

Another significant metric is found in the superb number-crunching performed by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey. Each year, the survey asks high schoolers what drugs they’ve taken in the last year. In 1975, 16.2 percent of all 12th graders said they’d taken amphetamines over the year. That number peaked at 26 percent in 1981 and bottomed at 7.1 percent in 1992. Methamphetamine arrives on the chart in 1999 at 4.3 percent but dribbled down to 3.4 percent by 2004.

Some epidemic.

Still, somehow it is the scary junk numbers from Tennessee that get caught up in a meth feedback loop passes on absolutely anything about meth without any critical examination. Worse, the meth panic exactly replicates the crack panic of 20 years ago, a misstep that drug policy experts came to regret.

I have to believe that today’s policy makers and law enforcement officials are simply too young to remember that sad turn toward fantasy and away from reality. The alternative is they well remember, but do not care.

PS — Bonus points for remembering the crank panic, the “new” heroin panic, the OxyContin panic…………….