Nick Reding’s Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town hits close to home for me. It’s the story of Oelwein, Iowa, population 6000. My parents grew up in one of those don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it farming towns just outside of Oelwein. They went to college and moved away. Lots of others moved away as well: Oelwein’s population fell 25% from 1960 to 1990, and is still dropping. Oelwein hasn’t been kind to those who stayed.
Iowa is part of the "heartland," symbol of all that’s wholesome, home of Radar O’Riley and the Music Man. (Cue chorus of Iowa Stubborn.) And of course politicians and pundits love to idealize small towns as morally superior to the heartless big city. A small town in Iowa is supposed to be the realest of Real America, filled with people who are hard working, honest, generous, hard working, self-reliant, practical, and did I mention hard working?
In reality, a lot of people in Oelwein aren’t working at all, and that fact is essential to understanding the rise of meth. Family farms are going broke; three quarters have been bought out by corporations. As for other jobs, Reding offers the example of Roland Jarvis. In 1990, Jarvis was a high school dropout living comfortably on $18/hour at the Iowa Ham factory, which employed 800 of the town’s 6000 inhabitants at its peak. In 1992, the company was bought out by Gillette, which busted the unions, yanked the wages down to $6.20/hour, and got rid of all benefits. Jarvis was working double shifts in a job with a 36% injury rate, ingesting more and more meth to stay awake. There came a point where it made more sense, at least in his mind, to go into the meth business. (As for the factory, it changed hands a few more times, reducing the number of employees until it finally closed, leaving the last hundred employees out of work.)
Financial devastation, and the accompanying emotional devastation, are a potent chemical combination in their own right. Add the fact that meth, like alcohol, is relatively easy to manufacture from locally obtainable ingredients, and its rise becomes almost inevitable. The Iowan who put these factors together and built a business empire distributing meth in the Midwest is Lori Arnold, who happens to be the half-sister of actor Tom Arnold. (Who knew he’d be the classy one in the family?). Like Roland Jarvis, she’d been working hard at low-paying jobs, and figured she’d found an easier way. The damage done by her business is easy to see; the damage done by some of the other corporations in the area is less obvious but still devastating.
Since at least the mid-1980’s, the DEA was trying to restrict the sales of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, but was thwarted by the pharmaceutical industry, which didn’t want to lose the profits from the sale of cold medicines. I started seeing meth-using teens while working in a group home in the SF Bay area in the early 1990’s. Meth abuse was "discovered" by The Oregonian in 2004, followed by much interest nationwide (invariably using the word epidemic). In 2005, the Combat Meth Act was passed, restricting the sales of meth’s crucial ingredients. Except, not so much: the law was watered down under pressure from the National Association of Retail Chain Stores (yep, it abbreviates to NARCS). By 2007, the number of home-lab busts was way down, and there were pronouncements that the epidemic was over. Followed by the obligatory contrarian articles claiming there never had been a meth epidemic in the first place.
Hard numbers on the prevalence of meth are hard to come by. I can tell you that in my line of work (Child Protective Services), the meth-related part of my caseload has held pretty steady over the last 15 years. Reding suggests that at least part of the media interest came because meth didn’t fit the stereotype about drugs, which are supposed to affect "inner city" (read: African-American and Hispanic) people, ones who can conveniently be defined as Not Real Americans.
Reding notes the limits of a law-enforcement approach. The number of home labs does seem to be down, which is a good thing considering how hazardous meth is to manufacture. (Roland Jarvis’s eventual fate, brought on by meth-induced paranoia and volatile chemicals, is not pretty.) But international drug cartels have been happy to fill the demand, as they were already doing with cocaine and heroin. Treatment for addicts is scarce in Oelwein: mostly they just get jailed for short periods, then kicked to the curb with no job (and a criminal record). And it’s worth noting that one of the people interviewed in Reding’s book – a prominent doctor who speaks eloquently of the damage he’s seen from meth – is himself addicted to everyone’s favorite legal drug, alcohol.
In contemplating what my life might have been, had my parents stayed and raised their kids in Iowa, I found my doppelganger in the book. Jamie Porter is a child protective worker who deals mainly with families affected by meth. CPS workers in Oelwein are independent contractors, and they’re not guaranteed any minimum number of hours. While the number of drug-affected families held steady, social service funds dried up, so Jamie got less and less work. She finally added a part-time job 40 miles away, doing the only work still available: tending bar. Here in California, I’m seeing the same drug-affected families (with a mix of meth, crack, and heroin) – but in an area with the resources to employ me and lots of others full-time, and offer treatment possibilities other than jail.
I have a few frustrations with the book itself. It was done almost entirely from interviews, so there are no footnotes or index. The history on meth was interesting, and I don’t doubt the claim that both sides were experimenting with it during World War II. But when Reding says it’s "widely believed" that Hitler had a meth problem – well, I can see the similarity in the paranoia and manic rantings, but I’d still like a solid source.
Oelwein is doing a little better these days. The mayor managed to revitalize the downtown by (don’t tell the teabaggers) raising taxes on businesses, and the improved atmosphere attracted new customers and then new businesses. There are now more treatment options for addicts, and the sentencing model has moved toward monitoring them on the outside while allowing them to hold jobs.
You can call it an "epidemic," or not. But as with any disease, we’d be wise to take a hard look at the conditions that helped create it.