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The dramatic story of the methamphetamine epidemic of the 1980s as it sweeps the American heartland--a moving, very human account of one community's attempt to battle its way to a brighter future. Crystal meth is widely considered the world's most dangerous drug, but especially so in the small towns of the American heartland. Journalist Reding tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people. As if this weren't enough, an incredibly cheap, longlasting, and highly addictive drug has rolled into town. Over a period of four years, journalist Nick Reding brings us into the heart of Oelwein, tracing the connections between the lives touched by the drug and the global forces that set the stage for the epidemic.--From publisher description.… (mehr)
This started out being so entertaining (meth-crazed meth cook melts face and fingers!) and interesting (Lori Arnold, sister of comedian Tom Arnold, was a meth drug lord) and then it was like... not anything anymore. I'm like, look, okay I wanted to read a book about meth. METH. and then like about 2/3 of the way though it turns out to be about salt of the earth, midwestern, small town Americans and their (admittedly, tangentially meth-related) drama. I'm like, no I don't care! OMG why am I reading about this guy's relationship with his girlfriend? Goddamn it, they aren't doing meth! I want METH! Come on. I just need a little bump until Breaking Bad comes back on.
Also, the chapter titled "Inland Empire" was confusing. Well, not the content. The title itself was confusing. I supposed it meant the meth empire was an "inland" empire, being that it was all in the midwest and shit. BUT. As a Southern Californian the inland empire is a specific region of California, ie Riverside ect. So when you title a chapter "Inland Empire", and start it off talking about Long Beach and Orange County, I expect you to eventually start talking about... you know, the freakin' inland empire. But instead Reding continued to talk about Long Beach. BEACH. I mean, that's as far from inland as you can possibly get. ( )
Oh little town of Methlehem, how still we see thee lie Far from deep dreams of blissful sleep killed by the silent sighs Yet in thy dark streets pineth, that ever thirsting high The hopes and fears of all thy tears are met in meth tonight.
The hopes the song of methamphetamine brings are supplied by the drug’s concocting with “anhydrous ammonia [that] can burn through human tissue to the bone.” Pursuit of those hopes by meth users is accompanied by “bleeding skin-sores as your pores struggle to open and expel the drug…internal organs shrunken from dehydration; vast areas of the brain that according to CAT scans are completely depleted of neurotransmitters.”
Something is amiss when something like that not only can sell but can become the one thing that matters. Methland: The Life and Death of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding, is the story of that something in the town of Oelwein, Iowa, and elsewhere in America. It is quite a story and is especially so when we listen to residents giving voice to what they have experienced personally or have witnessed in family or friends, and to the confusions and fears they never expected to face. Something not easily borne. ( )
An important step in ending the systemic denial regarding the severity of the illegal drug problem in rural America. I appreciate Mr Reding's perseverance in writing a book almost nobody really wanted to read. I just wish his subtitle had been "How Big Ag Helped Turn America's Family Farms Into Crack Dens". ( )
A disturbing look at the role of methamphetamine in rural America and the toll it has taken. Focused on Oelwein, Iowa, Reding brings us the story of meth cooks, junkies, doctors, lawyers, and politicians and how their lives intersect and influence one another thanks to the devastation wrought by this drug. A fascinating book, but weakened a bit by a little too much repetition. ( )
This book was a recommended read from my Books-A-Million desk calendar, so I borrowed it from the library. It proved to be a fascinating study about the political, economic, and social factors that have led to the wide-spread epidemic of meth use throughout small-town America. By focusing on the small town of Oelwein, Iowa and getting to know the addicts, suppliers, doctors, lawyers, and lawmen there, the author made the battle against meth a very personal one. He also placed Oelwein in the larger context of meth abuse throughout North America with a primary focus on small towns. It was an eye-opening read, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking to understand more about this troubling epidemic and how people in all walks of life are struggling to battle it. ( )
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For most of those which were great once are small today; and those which used to be small were great in my own time...Human prosperity never abides long in the same place. - Herodotus, The Histories
Widmung
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To my wife and my son
Erste Worte
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As you look down after takeoff from O'Hare International Airport, headed west for San Francisco, California, it's aonly a few minutes before the intricate complexity of Chicago's suburban streets is overcome by the rolling swell of the prairie.
Zitate
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In many ways, it’s easier to get from New York to Los Angeles, or from Dallas to Seattle, than it is to get from anywhere in America to Oelwein, Iowa. Yet much of what there is to know about the United States at the beginning of the new millennium is on display right there, gossiping at the Morning Perk café, waiting for calls at Re/Max Realty, or seeing patients in the low brick building occupied by the Hallberg Family Practice. In their anonymity, and perhaps now more than ever, towns like Oelwein go a long way toward telling us who we are and how we fit into the world.
The idea that a drug could take root in Oelwein, however, was treated as counterintuitive, challenging notions central to the American sense of identity. This single fact would continue to define meth’s seeming distinctiveness among drug epidemics.
“We just didn’t have the money and the staff to help the kids that needed the most of it,” Gilson said, describing the events leading up to asking the police to patrol the halls. “On the one hand, I had an obligation to my teachers, who were frightened of their students. On the other hand, is there anything worse than calling the cops on your own children?” He went on, “We’re in Iowa, for God’s sake. We don’t do that.” And yet, he did.
...all across Iowa, meth had become one of the leading growth sectors of the economy. No legal industry could, like meth, claim 1,000 percent increases in production and sales in the four years between 1998 and 2002, a period in which corn prices remained flat and beef prices actually fell. Farmers, desperate to avoid foreclosure on their land, sold anhydrous ammonia (a common fertilizer) to meth cooks to make the drug. Others simply quit farming and went into the small-scale meth-manufacturing business. Meatpacking workers hoping to stay awake long enough to take on double shifts bought the drug in increasing quantities. As all manner of small legitimate businesses went bankrupt, meth labs opened in their stead.
...a long-term steady loss of tax revenue. In this environment, certain basic civic functions become indulgences. Keeping the streetlights on at night is no longer a given. Trials, which are expensive, are no longer economically feasible. Nor are lengthy incarcerations. As these problems extended throughout the county and state, there was simply no place to put meth addicts. The Fayette County jail was full. The local jail was full. The Iowa state penitentiary in Fort Madison was full.
Part of meth’s draw in U.S. small towns beginning in the 1980s is that it’s both cheap and easy to make from items available, in bulk, at the farmers’ co-op and the drugstore. The real basis of meth’s attractiveness, though, is much simpler: meth makes people feel good.
In 1992, Iowa Ham, a small, old canning and packaging company, was bought by Gillette. Overnight, the union was dismantled, and the wages, according to Jarvis and Clay Hallberg, fell from $18 an hour to $6.20. For Jarvis, who now had the first of his four children, it became more important than ever to work harder and longer in order to make ends meet.
Clay was worried about the increase in drug use as well; more and more workers, suffering from depression now that they’d lost two thirds of their income overnight, were turning to meth. The plant manager said he’d look into it. A week later, Clay was fired.
Not long after buying Iowa Ham, Gillette sold the plant to Iowa Beef Products (IBP); in 2001, Tyson bought the plant. With each sale, the number of workers was further cut and wages remained stationary despite rising inflation. In January 2006, Tyson closed the plant for good. By then, the initial workforce had been reduced from over eight hundred people to ninety-nine, a remarkable, devastating loss of revenue in a town of only six thousand.
...meth was a highly acceptable drug in America, one of the reasons being that it helped what Nathan Lein calls “the salt of the earth”—soldiers, truck drivers, slaughterhouse employees, farmers, auto and construction workers, and day laborers—work harder, longer, and more efficiently. It’s one thing for a drug to be associated with sloth, like heroin. But it’s wholly another when a formerly legal and accepted narcotic exists in a one-to-one ratio with the defining ideal of American culture.
In the metric that took hold of Oelwein at the beginning of the 1980s with the farm crisis—and extended through the next decade with the complicated demise of Iowa Ham—the ability to make something in your basement that promised work, success, wealth, thinness, and happiness was not necessarily too good to be true.
In 1987, the year that Cargill cut wages at its Ottumwa meatpacking plant from $18 an hour to $5.60 with no benefits, Lori Arnold sold a pound of pure, uncut crank for $32,000. This meant that with the very first ten pounds produced at her superlab, she had paid off the $100,000 initial investment in equipment and chemicals and had cleared a profit of nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or over a century’s worth of median wages for an Ottumwa adult that year.
In 2004 alone, Oelwein lost $147,000 in tax revenues. It cannot absorb the social and financial cost of malady in the way that Waterloo (which lost $2 million in revenues in 2004) can. Nor is the problem aided, Clay says unapologetically, by the inbreeding and lack of education endemic to a place that is literally shriveling up: “How ’bout the first people to leave are of course the smart ones, and the people with enough money to get out. What you’re left with—and I’m sorry, okay?—doesn’t qualify Oelwein High as a feeder school for Harvard, okay?”
Beavis and Butt-Head, Smurfers, mom and pop—meth users had entered the lexicon as caricatures, which ultimately stemmed less from the drug and more from the environs with which that drug was associated. Oddly, nowhere were the prejudices against—and parodies of—small-town meth addicts more explicit than in Oelwein itself, the town that, according to Clay Hallberg, Jay Leno once referred to in a Tonight Show monologue as “possibly the worst place in the world.”
What came into view is that pharmaceutical industry lobbyists had blocked every single anti-meth bill in the last thirty years with the help of key senators and members of Congress.
The message was that what was bad for the towns was bad for Washington, D.C., too; when it came to meth, everyone was working for the same thing. On a clear day, flying from New York to Los Angeles, or from Chicago to San Francisco, you might have looked at the small communities beneath the airplane in a different way, understanding better what they were up against, and in that way, you might have understood something of their vanishing place in the nation.
And the things that spurred this simultaneous rise and fall: the development of Big Pharmaceuticals, Big Agriculture, and the modern Mexican drug-trafficking business.
Using bills of lading to trace bulk loads of both raw ephedrine powder and finished pills that had been sent from their plants through third-party nations to Mexico, DEA was able to limit the number of countries through which ephedrine would travel to only those nations willing to keep serious records—all without significantly cutting into the profit margins of pharmaceutical companies.
...ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or pseudo, are identical; good crank can be made from both. But from a drug trafficker’s standpoint, pseudo is far superior. Ephedrine, as a licit pharmaceutical, has a strictly limited number of uses: first, as a stimulant used to bring surgery patients out from under anesthesia, and second, as a nasal decongestant. Pseudo, on the other hand, has for three decades been the dominant ingredient in cold medicine, 80 percent of which was (and remains) controlled by American companies. As such, the availability of pseudo in the world, along with its importance as a revenue source, is many orders of magnitude greater than that of ephedrine. And because pseudo is deemed the most reliable precursor for megadrugs like Sudafed, Actifed, and NyQuil, the drug lobby protecting pseudo is many times more powerful than that protecting ephedrine,
It wasn’t until the spring of 1996 that Hatch and Haislip finally agreed on language that was acceptable to both the government and the pharmaceutical companies: vendors of pill-form pseudoephedrine would be subject to DEA licensing and bookkeeping unless those pills were sold in the now-ubiquitous clear-plastic containers with aluminum backing. Hatch’s logic, it seems, was that the narco-empire built around methamphetamine would crumble in the face of the tamper-proof blister pack.
...by the time Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert in 2000, all research into a cold-medicine alternative ceased. Why should Pfizer worry about DEA when its predecessor had had such an easy time lobbying Congress?
As meatpacking plants employed illegals at abysmally low wages, the economies of places like Ottumwa suffered still more. Meantime, DEA had a continued lack of success fighting the meth industry, thanks to the powerful pharmaceutical lobby.
Cargill-Excel placed newspaper advertisements in the poor, industrial border towns of Juárez and Tijuana offering two free months’ rent to workers who could make it to Ottumwa from Mexico. For Cargill and the rest of the packing conglomerates, employing illegals would appear to have been the best of all possible situations, for the simple reason that these employees, lacking legal identification, didn’t technically exist, and therefore had no rights.
Tyson’s defense team successfully maintained that it’s too difficult for Tyson employees to determine who’s who among legal and illegal employees. The ruling institutionalized the notion that employers of immigrants are not beholden to offering the same rights to workers that other companies must, for the simple reason that they don’t know—and don’t need to know—who works for them.
In reality, says Constance, Marx’s countertheory has unfortunately proved more insightful. Strapped with the mandate to “grow or die,” businesses are encouraged to cannibalize competition until there are no longer many buyers and many sellers, but rather, many buyers and an increasingly limited number of sellers. The flow of capital is dammed up. Once competition has been annihilated, Constance says, the surviving companies, like Cargill, begin to effect political decisions through their enormous lobbying capabilities. The government no longer governs unimpeded: it does so in tandem with the major companies, just as Marx predicted.
Really, though, spending time with illegal immigrants in Iowa is all it took to convince me that, as long as there are jobs, there is no reason to think people will not cross the border to get them. In that way, talk of increased border technology seems only to work in tandem with—and as a cynical addendum to—an utter lack of interest in removing the real impetus to walk across the desert: Cargill-Excel in Ottumwa is always hiring.
In Koob’s opinion, much of meth’s danger lies in the drug’s long history of usefulness to the sociocultural and socioeconomic concepts American society holds dear, many of which stem from the pursuit of wealth through hard work.
The end of a way of life is the story; the drug is what signaled to the rest of the nation that the end had come.
OPEC, rich with a surplus of so-called petrodollars, was funding industry throughout the world—primarily in China, the Soviet Union, and Latin America—in the way the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank do today. Anxious to modernize their industry and infrastructure, these nations spent less money on food production, prompting U.S. farmers to—at the now-infamous behest of the secretary of agriculture—“feed the world” and “plant hedgerow to hedgerow.” U.S. food production was pushed to record highs. By the close of the decade, though, the gas crisis had abated, OPEC was lending less money, and U.S. farmers who’d overextended themselves in order to grow grain to sell to Argentina or the Soviet Union had to foreclose on their land. The farm crisis of the early 1980s was born, and followed by a massive rural out-migration.
All a drug needs in order to mutate is a body politic; the shift occurs where that body is weakest—where unemployment is high and poverty is rife, and people are disabused of their marginalization, or their “disconnectedness” from the “core.”
it was the National Association of Retail Chain Stores, which represents, according to Loya, the five major pharmaceutical drug chains in the United States: Target, Wal-Mart, CVS, Walgreens, and Rite-Aid. The organization’s acronym, Loya noted sardonically on the phone that day, is NARCS. While the Combat Meth Act was being debated in 2006, lobbyists on behalf of NARCS argued that a “stop-buy” clause in the legislation would make pharmacists and retail employees into policemen.... The counterargument, as Tony Loya characterized it, was this: “Does refusing the sale of alcohol and tobacco to minors amount to ‘policing’? “Yes,” Loya went on, “it does. And the drug chains have been doing that without complaint for years. So what’s the difference if they have to tell a few people that they can’t buy more than a certain amount of Sudafed? But the lobbyists insisted that any attempt whatsoever at keeping track of sales is a threat to their financial health. It’s just not true.” In the end, Congress rejected the “stop-buy” language.
it was strikes and gutters, as some people say in Oelwein: ups and downs, goods and bads.
Letzte Worte
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Suddenly I knew what I was looking at, and where I needed to go.
The dramatic story of the methamphetamine epidemic of the 1980s as it sweeps the American heartland--a moving, very human account of one community's attempt to battle its way to a brighter future. Crystal meth is widely considered the world's most dangerous drug, but especially so in the small towns of the American heartland. Journalist Reding tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people. As if this weren't enough, an incredibly cheap, longlasting, and highly addictive drug has rolled into town. Over a period of four years, journalist Nick Reding brings us into the heart of Oelwein, tracing the connections between the lives touched by the drug and the global forces that set the stage for the epidemic.--From publisher description.
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Also, the chapter titled "Inland Empire" was confusing. Well, not the content. The title itself was confusing. I supposed it meant the meth empire was an "inland" empire, being that it was all in the midwest and shit. BUT. As a Southern Californian the inland empire is a specific region of California, ie Riverside ect. So when you title a chapter "Inland Empire", and start it off talking about Long Beach and Orange County, I expect you to eventually start talking about... you know, the freakin' inland empire. But instead Reding continued to talk about Long Beach. BEACH. I mean, that's as far from inland as you can possibly get. (