What is the cost of meth addiction?

Delivering his annual report to the McLeod County Board Tuesday (May 6), County Attorney Mike Junge expressed the toll in both dollars and wasted lives.

Meth sells for about $100 per gram, and many users start taking it in quarter-gram doses. As addiction takes hold, it’s not unheard of for a $25-a-day habit to mushroom into a $700-a-day one.

Junge prosecuted a 19-year-old Brownton man last year for two felony counts of financial transaction card fraud and one felony count of check forgery. The man stole a total of more than $10,000 in a single month from his grandmother, father and an employer, to feed his meth addiction. This was the man’s first run-in with the judicial system, Junge said.

“The bottom line is, it’s easy to get into a lot of trouble really quick,” he said. “People are entering the system and going straight to the top (of sentencing guidelines) in a very short amount of time, and they hurt the ones they love the most.”

Junge said it costs $35,000 per year to house an inmate at a Minnesota prison. He asked board meeting attendees to consider how many students could be put through college for that money. For an undergraduate, a year’s tuition at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus costs $10,084.

McLeod County needs meth addicts to recover and become productive members of society, Junge said. “We can’t afford to incarcerate ourselves out of the problem.”

(Jorge Sosa is a staff writer for the Hutchinson Leader. He can be reached at sosa@hutchinsonleader.com)