Nathan Lein grew up on a family farm near Oelwein, Iowa, where “stubbornness is just part of the landscape.” Oelwein’s once-sturdy, farm-based economy has suffered, and from 1960 to 1990, its population fell 25 percent to about 6,000. Many family-owned farms disappeared, replaced by faceless corporate farms. Returning to Oelwein in his late twenties, in 2002 Lein became assistant county attorney “with a mandate to clean up meth.” In the economic vacuum created by the demise of family farms and falling wages at major employers (at Tyson meatpacking plant, to barely a third of their 1992 levels), good jobs disappeared, and methamphetamine manufacture and distribution became the only booming local enterprise, attended by increased crime, domestic abuse, and other pathologies. The situation was spiraling out of control. Reding relates how Lein and a few other local heroes determinedly fought back and reclaimed the town locals were calling Methlehem. Oelwein’s story has implications for other rural areas, especially in the Midwest, West, and South, where Reding’s tale should be vital cautionary reading.--Mike Tribby
Review
Methland tells a story less about crime than about the death of an iconic way of life. --DetailsMethland is definitely worthwhile reading. In some circles it should be required reading. This isn't just a small town issue or an Iowa issue. This is an American issue. --Oelwein Daily Register
What's most impressive about Methland is not only the wealth of information it provides but the depth of Reding's compassion for the individuals meth has touched: the heroes, the helpless witnesses, the innocent victims--and even the perpetrators--of this American crisis.--Francine Prose, O Magazine
A powerful work of reportage. . . a clear-eyed look at a scourge that continues to afflict wide swaths of American society--whether we want to acknowledge it or not--Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Vicious cycle" is not an adequate term. As Reding painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of Chernobyl-ish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer and more detached, while the poor get high, and finally, wasted.--Walter Kirn, New York Times Book Review
Methland is a stunning look at a problem that has dire consequences for our country.--New York Post
The strength of Methland lies in its character studies. As a social problem, meth is dull and intractable, as are all such problems; reduced, or rather elevated, to the individual level, it is piercing and poignant. Mr. Reding's heart is in the right place.--Wall Street Journal
Reding's group portrait of Oelwein's residents is nuanced and complex in a way that journalists' depictions of the rural Midwest rarely are; he has a keen eye for details. --Washington Monthly
Through scrupulous reporting and fierce moral engagement, Reding conveys the tragedy of the meth epidemic on both a mirco- and macroscopic level.--Village Voice
Methland makes the case that small-town America is perhaps not the moral and hard-working place of the public imagination, but it also argues that big-city ignorance--fueled by the media--toward small town decay is both dangerous and appalling.--Washington Post
This is a strong book, and it tells a complicated story in comprehensible, human dimensions. Like all good journalism, it's the hand holding up the mirror, the friend telling us to take a cold, hard look at ourselves.--Los Angeles Times
About the Author
Nick Reding is the author of The Last Cowboys at the End of the World, and his writing has appeared in Outside, Food and Wine, and Harper's. Born in St. Louis, he decided to move back to his hometown in the course of reporting this book.
From The Washington Post
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin created a small scandal when she told a North Carolina crowd, "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America." Apart from whatever political hay the left made of rhetoric elevating small-town Americans over their more urban counterparts, Palin's comments tapped into a central myth of our national culture -- that there is something fundamentally undiluted and authentic about small towns that is implicitly absent from larger cities. Small-town residents, the story goes, are honest, hard-working, religiously observant and somehow just more American than the rest of America. In his persuasive new book, Methland, journalist Nick Reding reveals the fallacies of this myth by showing how, over the past three decades, small-town America has been blighted by methamphetamine, which has taken root in--and taken hold of--its soul. Over four years, Reding studied meth production and addiction in Oelwein, Iowa, a rural community about 300 miles from Chicago. With a population of just over 6,000, Oelwein serves as a case study of the problems many small towns face today. Once a vibrant farming community where union work and small businesses were plentiful, Oelwein is now struggling through a transition to agribusiness and low-wage employment or, alternatively, unemployment. These conditions, Reding shows, have made the town susceptible to methamphetamine.
There is no more horrifying example of the drug's ravages than Roland Jarvis, who began using meth as a way to keep up his energy through double shifts at a local meat-processing plant. Apparently doing so was nothing unusual, and until the early 1980's, an Oelwein physician would routinely prescribe methamphetamines for fatigued workers. When the plant where Jarvis worked was de-unionized and his wages slashed by two-thirds, Jarvis went from an occasional meth user to a habitual user and then a manufacturer. One night, in a fit of drug-induced paranoia, he attempted, disastrously, to dispose of his cooking chemicals. In the ensuing fire, he was so horribly burned that paramedics could only watch while the flesh literally melted from his body and Jarvis begged the police to kill him. Reding's description of Jarvis now, using his fingerless hands to lift a meth pipe to his noseless face, is among the most haunting images in the book.
Reding tracks the decline--and, ultimately, the limited resurgence--of Oelwein, while also examining the larger forces that have contributed to its problems. He links meth to the gathering power of unregulated capitalism beginning in the 1980's. It was then, he argues, that one-time union employees earning good wages and protected by solid benefits, like Roland Jarvis, began to see their earnings cut and their benefits disappear. Undocumented migrants began taking jobs at extraordinarily low wages, thereby depressing the cost of labor. Meth, with its opportunity for quick profit and its power to make the most abject and despondent person feel suddenly alive and vibrant, found fertile ground. Meanwhile, in Washington, pharmaceutical lobbyists were working hard to keep DEA agents from attempting to limit access to the raw ingredients; ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, meth's core precursors, were simply too vital to the lucrative allergy-remedy market. Though he avoids making the argument in such stark terms, Reding positions the meth epidemic as the triumph of profits over the safety and prosperity of America's small-town inhabitants.
But meth hasn't always been seen as a menace. In fact, Reding explains, "methamphetamine was once heralded as the drug that would end the need for all others." First developed by a Japanese chemist at the end of the 19th century, meth was, by the middle of the 20th century, embraced by many in government and industry as a wonder drug perfect for, among other things, keeping up soldier morale. Several governments, including the United States, used it on their troops in World War II, despite studies showing that it produced "psychotic" and "anti-social" behaviors including "increased libido, sexual aggression, violence, hallucinations, dementia, bodily shaking, hyperthermia, sadomasochism, inability to orgasm, Satanic thoughts, general immorality, and chronic insomnia." Nonetheless (and overlooking the vexing question of how it's possible to measure satanic thoughts), meth continued to gain popularity, largely because of its ability to make people "feel good"--and industrious. "It's one thing for a drug to be associated with sloth, like heroin," Reding writes, "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."
Among the biggest culprits in the spread of the meth epidemic, Reding argues, are the media, which, he says, have gone from obliviousness to obsession to a premature declaration of the end of the meth problem, and finally the pronouncement that there never was a meth problem in the first place. "Meth just wasn't as interesting to report on once it could no longer be cast as a fundamentally American morality play," Reding argues. "In many cases, the postmortem became a witch hunt, as bloggers and newspaper columnists called into question whether the meth epidemic had ever existed in the first place." Methland makes the case that small-town America is perhaps not the moral and hard-working place of the public imagination, but it also argues that big-city ignorance --fueled by the media--toward small-town decay is both dangerous and appalling. Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
