Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

Nick Reding's Methland captured my attention for personal reasons. Like Reding, I grew up in a small rural town (population 2000) in the Midwest. Upon adulthood, I moved to a large urban area in the Intermountain West, prompting my parents to worry incessantly about the dangers that would surround me in the big city. In their minds, it was only a matter of time before some drug-crazed maniac would break into my bedroom in the wee hours of the morning demanding money and worse.
As predicted, my weekly calls home to Mom and Dad began to include stories of rampant drug use and manufacture; the twist was that the locus of the activity was on their end of the line. Tales of former classmates who were now in rehab or jail were surprising (or not, depending on the classmate), but the real shock involved tales of several farmhouses that had blown sky high in the course of faulty meth production. What was going on?
I began paying attention to meth articles in the media. Several reliable sources quoted statistics confirming the fact that drug use, and meth use in particular, was more prevalent per capita in small towns than in cities. It was becoming the not-so-secret scourge of Heartland, USA. I initially attributed the problem to the mind-numbing lack of opportunity and alternative entertainment in rural towns. (Every time my mom mentioned yet another teenage pregnancy, I would jokingly suggest that they take up a collection for a roller rink, and fast.)
Nick Reding puts all of the pieces together in an excellent investigative book that exposes the complex and seemingly unstoppable forces behind the epidemic, while also revealing its human cost through individual stories that will make you hurt. If you grew up in a small town, you know these people.
The heartland's struggle with meth addiction is largely rooted in a cataclysmic shift from small farm and ranch operations to corporate-run centers of mega-production. Animals are raised in centralized factory pens, fattened in giant feed lots, and slaughtered in megalithic processing plants. Grain production has been centralized on huge corporate farms where food is planted, harvested, and processed under the supervision of agribusiness giants like Cargill and Monsanto. This shift has devastated the morale and pocketbook of rural America. Former independent entrepreneurs have been reduced to the status of easily replaceable wage slaves. Local packing plants that used to pay their employees twenty dollars an hour plus health benefits have been absorbed by mega corporations that pay six dollars an hour and no benefits to a workforce that is powerless to demand anything better. Anyone who toured the Midwest farming country during its heyday, which peaked in the mid-1970's, would be shocked to witness the grinding poverty that permeates its small towns today.
The issue of poverty drives the meth market in multiple ways. The ingestion of meth can temporarily alleviate the depression and hopelessness of a single mother who just completed a double shift slitting chicken bellies at the local Tyson plant. The production of meth in rural basements, a relatively simple but risky endeavor, is a cottage industry that offers low startup costs and large returns to those meth cooks who manage to avoid arrest or incineration. Poverty and lack of decent employment tend to drive rural youths to the West coast and California, where their habit eventually hooks them up with big-time distributors who in turn employ them to funnel meth back to their home town in return for a cut of the cash and goods.
To make matters worse, large processing plants and pig farm factories actively solicit Mexican citizens to cross the border and work for subsistence wages ("First 6 months of housing provided free!"). Although the vast majority of these workers are husbands and fathers desperate to provide a higher standard of living for their families, a fraction of this workforce is inevitably involved in siphoning drugs from Mexico into Small Town, USA.
Corporate culpability doesn't end with agribusiness. Big Pharma has used its massive economic power and lobbying skills to fight meth regulation at every turn. Why waste a relatively modest sum of money adding an element to cold pills that will render them useless for meth making when only half of that sum can "convince" Congress to avoid requiring the additive at all? After all, they argue, they make a legal product for a legal purpose. Why should they have to spend one penny because some societal misfit may personally choose to commit a criminal act? Why indeed.
Ironically, one of the final reasons for meth's prevalence in the heartland is the work ethic of its people. Most drugs don't help work performance. Mention "severe drug addict" and most people envision a lethargic, unemployed couch surfer who lives off friends and relatives until they finally throw him/her out. In contrast, meth (at least initially) boosts concentration and energy, allowing the user to work two and three jobs, performing for weeks with minimal sleep until the inevitable crash. Small town rural people who pride themselves on hard work and self-sufficiency often succumb to meth as a temporary way to "hold it all together" while they work through a financial crisis (divorce, sick child, loss of benefits) that requires them to work long hours without relief. Temporary use is seldom temporary for long.
I've laid out the general framework of Nick Reding's book, but the real power of his work comes from personal interviews and the hard-to-hear stories of working people who have been destroyed directly or indirectly by the meth trade. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand meth addiction and, more importantly, the largely unreported societal malaise that is sapping the life from rural America. ( )

This was a riveting book that I didn't want to put down. The story of the meth epidemic is truly disturbing, and the author does a great job discussing all of the aspects of it. I like how he makes explicit connections to how unregulated capitalism helped spur on the rise of meth use. Immigration; NAFTA; corporate mergers; loss of labor unions, wages and benefits; lobbyists; big agriculture -- they are all big players in the rise of meth in America's small (and big) towns. While entirely unsurpr...more This was a riveting book that I didn't want to put down. The story of the meth epidemic is truly disturbing, and the author does a great job discussing all of the aspects of it. I like how he makes explicit connections to how unregulated capitalism helped spur on the rise of meth use. Immigration; NAFTA; corporate mergers; loss of labor unions, wages and benefits; lobbyists; big agriculture -- they are all big players in the rise of meth in America's small (and big) towns. While entirely unsurprising, as unregulated capitalism has created myriad problems in its wake, it's sad to read about such a drastic human cost. ( )

Meth as metaphor?

I anticipated reading Methland with some trepidation, since I graduated from high school in Oelwein, Iowa, and my mother worked as a nurse in Fayette & Black Hawk counties for over 20 years. But it was getting good reviews, and I was curious.

What impressed me about this book was the layering of complex issues in readable language. The use of specific people and places to illustrate the spread and effects of meth allows a general reader to understand the sociology of meth on a visceral level that a more academic book wouldn’t. It includes information on the development of methamphetamine as a drug and its chemistry and physiological effects, as well as sociological issues surrounding its regulation (or lack thereof), and the economic and political framework that allow its use, abuse, and distribution.

However, sources of this information aren’t included and, coupled with two factual errors about Iowa and Oelwein that shouldn’t have been missed, this made me wonder how accurate the information was.

Though the book is both readable and interesting, I have to say that I was disappointed overall. I kept asking myself, “What’s the point?” If Reding simply intends to lament the struggles of small town America coping with methamphetamine, he succeeds. But I expected more. And buried in the prose are hints of a thesis that isn’t systematically addressed in the book, let alone documented.

From the preface on page 16 : "The rise of the meth epidemic was built largely on economic policies, political decisions, and the recent development of American cultural history. Meth's basic components lie equally in the action of government lobbyists, long-term trends in the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, and the effects of globalization and free trade. "

Page 58 : ". . . I was beginning to see meth in America as a function not just of farming and food industry trends in the 1980s and '90s but also of changes in the narcotics and pharmaceuticals industries in the same period. . . And that meth, if it is a metaphor for anything, is a metaphor for the cataclysmic fault lines formed by globalization."

p. 109: "What continued to take shape for me was the portrait of a town that stood as a metaphor for all of rural America and its problems. That's to say that the evolution of the meth epidemic had occurred in lockstep with the three separate economic trends that had contributed to the dissolution of small-town United States. By looking closely at the events of 2006, one can see the parallel trajectories of meth and small-town economics - the one rising, the other falling - dating back to the days of the Amezcuas. And the things that spurred this simultaneous rise and fall: the development of Big Pharmaceuticals, Big Agriculture, and the modern Mexican drug-trafficking business."

Unfortunately, these statements are supported only anecdotally and references aren’t documented. I realize this is a popular book and not an academic one, but I’m not going to be convinced by statements like this that aren’t back up. I’d be interested in reading a reasoned argument, but this isn’t it. ( )

Not as depressing as I'd feared -- in fact, a fascinating portrait of how the American farm economy, with its emphasis on autonomy and self-reliance, has been transformed into a the top-down hierarchical world of a mining community. The methamphetamines are almost beside the point. Utterly believable. ( )

Methland provides a very thorough investigation of the methamphetamine infiltration on a small Iowa town. It is less about the product and more about the people. Methland would have been much more powerful with stronger and more detailed physical descriptions. I enjoy reads like Germs by Judith Miller, et al. and Biohazard by Ken Alibek. When I read medical or science-related non-fiction; I want to be haunted by it. I want to have nightmares. Methland just did not go there for me; it did not delve deep enough into the depravity. The sub-title of the book is “The Death and Life of An American Small Town.” maybe I just do not believe in small-town America. Or more likely for this city woman, Methland failed to provide me with an insider’s view on small town America. A skillful writer can place any reader anywhere. While author Nick Reding gets very involved in the town and its residents, parts of Methland read like a textbook or a long Op-Ed piece. I just cannot completely care enough about meth. To make Methland more effective for me, I needed a bolder before and more definitive after. Having one's life destroyed so completely by meth or another drug is a choice and I don't feel sorry for these people. We spend so much time and money and other resources busting meth cooks and dealers etc., yet other sources sprout up elsewhere. Where will it end? Am I callous? Maybe. Am I an urban, latte-sipping liberal intellectual with a master’s degree far detached from the working poor of the Midwest agriculture states? Absolutely. I understand the portrait of a small town and its destruction that Reding ventured to paint in Methland. There just is not a black and white. It is very gray. And with meth, the drug, one cannot expect it to be that way. ( )