If Colorado Attorney General John Suthers told journalists that he hates illegal drugs, it wouldn't be news.

But when he announced Feb. 4 that methamphetamine costs Colorado $1.4 billion per year, reporters were all over it. Journalists love to write stories that quantify social problems.

Articles in the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post told us not only about the $1.4 billion, but also about how much Suthers hates meth and about the horror that the drug is causing in Colorado.

But neither newspaper bothered to offer any critical perspectives of Suthers' announcement. Absent was the view that his meth cost figure was basically meaningless.

"If we waved a wand and made meth disappear, then people would do something else with the money they were spending on meth," Jeffrey Miron, a senior lecturer at in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, told me. "Now, you hope they'd spend it on peanut butter cookies, but they're probably going to spend it on something that has similar properties to methamphetamine, because that's why they chose to spend it on meth in the first place."

Miron says Suthers' $1.4 billion figure has no economic meaning. A useful economic analysis, he argues, would focus on, for example, the costs of a "prohibition regime in which there are very heavy penalties vs. a prohibition regime in which there were lighter penalties," including more treatment.

A sensible study could compare the current costs of methamphetamine with the costs of a specific policy that aims to reduce its use or the negative side effects, he says.

"Otherwise, what are you studying?" he told me. "How much less expenditure would there be on meth if we could magically make it disappear from the planet? That's clearly not an option."

Even if they accepted Suthers' figure at face value, reporters could have at least put the meth problem in perspective, pointing out, for example, that national costs of alcohol abuse is $148 billion, according to a 2000 (latest available) estimate by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, vs. $23 billion for meth in 2005, according to the RAND Drug Policy Research Center study, which provided the basis for Suthers' figures.

Suthers announced the meth costs as he called for a four-year extension of the term of the state's 27-member Methamphetamine Task Force, which he chairs.

If reporters had asked more critical questions of Suthers, we would have been better equipped to decide whether the task force should continue to exist, or perhaps focus its attention on some other social problem.

"Drug misuse is a symptom of many things, not the cause," said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, pointing out that drugs are blamed for social ills correlated with drug use but they aren't necessarily caused by drugs.

Chatty Ernie. News stories about people "reinventing" themselves are in vogue as the economy slides.

So it's not surprising that former Denver TV anchor Ernie Bjorkman's own story, of becoming a veterinary assistant after being fired from KWGN Channel 2 in December, has spread through the media.

The stories about Bjorkman are fawning, like obituaries, telling us, for example, that Bjorkman's voice "calmed and informed Denver viewers for 26 years" (Rocky, Jan. 30).

With Bjorkman in the spotlight, I'm surprised we haven't seen more lighthearted needling of his being a local TV news anchor for so long.

Bjorkman gave us information some of the time, yes. But local TV anchors are also do strange things, like the chitchatting among themselves.

In a typical program, judging from a 2006 sample, Bjorkman - like other anchors - spent about a half-minute or more engaging in smalltalk with his fellow anchors during live broadcasts while many of us cringed.

So I calculate that he spent more than 50 hours babbling on the air during his 26-year career. Good luck with your next job, Ernie.

Ballot measure hype. With so much real legislation to cover at the Capitol and so little space, why give serious coverage to the earliest and easiest steps required in getting a measure on the election ballot?

For example, the Rocky dedicated about a third of its "Legislature 2009" pages on Feb. 10 to two ordinary guys who want to put a question on the election ballot OKing gay marriage.

Yes, ordinary people can sparkplug a ballot measure, but the Rocky understated obstacles ahead when it reported that the measure is in the "second of many steps to get a proposal on the ballot."

Earlier, on Jan. 27, the Rocky gave serious treatment to the very first step toward getting a tax-cutting measure on the ballot.

In their earliest stages, ballot proposals should be covered sparingly, if at all.

Jason Salzman, president of Effect Communications, is the author of Making the News: A Guide for Activists and Nonprofits. Reach him at salzmanj@RockyMountainNews.com.