We need to place much more faith in our children

.

. in life as well as in school.

'People who do not want to wait for old age to shrink their brains and bring on memory loss now have a quicker alternative - abuse methamphetamine for a decade or so and watch the brain cells vanish into the night."

So began an article by Sandra Blakeslee in The New York Times on Tuesday. She went on to report that a study of methamphetamine addicts shows

"a forest fire of brain damage... comparable to the brain deficits in early Alzheimer's."

An old, old television spot showed an egg in a frying pan to supposedly demonstrate your brain on drugs. It was a clever anti-drug message but it hardly carries the weight of the findings just published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Getting high on meth decays the parts of your brain that control memory and emotions. "The cells are dead and gone," according to Dr. Paul Thompson, an expert on brain mapping at UCLA.

Thompson was also shocked to find that methamphetamine use inflamed some parts of the brain as much as 10 percent larger than normal.

The good news?

Abstain, and the swelling may go down.