Meth Takes Hollywood  These ugly times have produced an ugly
drug in entertainment—that drug appears to be methamphetamine in
movies like Winter's Bone and TV's Breaking Bad.  Every era has
a drug of choice, a substance that dominates the plotlines of
our entertainment and personifies the collective neuroses. It
was the stiff cocktail in the 1960s, marijuana in the 1970s,
crack and cocaine in the 1980s, and heroin in the 1990s.  Today,
it’s methamphetamine, the most destructive, least romantic of
them all. Though it’s been trickling into TV and film plots for
years, meth in storylines has seemed to accelerate in recent
years, mirroring the substance’s corrosive effect on American
culture. But even the TV writers and filmmakers who have
famously taken on meth as a plot device say it can doom a story
just as it dooms the lives of its users. For them, interpreting
the cultural blowback of this particular demon drug means facing
meth’s black hole with only strands of humanity to sustain their
audience.  “If you w