New York Times Hypes Methamphetamines, reports Maia Szalavitz:

The New York Times ran a front page story on the dangers of toxic methamphetamine labs on February 23. It wasn’t enough that these labs do more damage than other drug manufacturing businesses, it wasn’t sufficient that one in five labs is discovered due to an explosion: The drug had to be harder to kick than crack or heroin as well.

But the data is inconvenient. All the research shows that stimulant addictions tend to be shorter in duration than alcohol or heroin addictions, which means that the latter are harder to end. And research comparing success rates in traditional treatment doesn’t find that methamphetamine users have higher relapse rates than anyone else.*

And she's got another item that says:

...research on addictions shows that the vast majority of people quit them without formal treatment—or even self-help groups.

She links to Stanton Peele's copy of What We Now Know About Treating Alcoholism and Other Addictions (originally from The Harvard Mental Health Letter of December 1991) which says among other things,

Researchers at the Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto found that many untreated middle-class cocaine users were able to cut back or quit on their own when they found that they had begun to lose control. Cocaine addicts and alcoholics often testify that tobacco is the hardest drug of all to give up, yet more than 40 million Americans have done so. During the 1980s, according to a survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, 47.5 percent of smokers who tried to quit on their own succeeded—twice the success rate of those who used treatment programs.

According to one authority,

the most important single prognostic variable associated with remission among alcoholics who attend alcohol clinics is having something to lose if they continue to abuse alcohol...

The best way to discourage addictive behavior is to show people how to meet the demands of life without drinking or drug use.