Methland

“To look at them, leaning against the counter in the tiny kitchen, is to understand the connection between farming, itself an act of blind faith, and religion. If you can believe in a year’s worth or corn or beans, it seems, you can believe in anything.” 

Faith is a belief in things that are unseen. Farmers plant seeds with the expectation that they will become productive crops, which is an act of faith. Ironically, the meth trade becomes a staple of the economy, despite its withering effects. Meth is almost anti-faith, in that it strips away other forms of meaning in peoples’ lives, and makes them unlikely to believe in better futures for themselves. 

“I went from totally apathetic to totally gung-ho in about a week. We were going to fix this place. I really believed that. In some ways, I almost still do.” 

Nathan talks about Murphy approaching him in 2005 to help clean up Oelwein. From this early stage in the book, Reding foreshadows the lack of a happy ending for Oelwein. By the time he interviews Nathan, he has far less hope for Oelwein’s ability to thrive. His words are more pessimistic than his actions, however. By the end of the book, Nathan is contemplating a future term as mayor, which would give him the freedom to explore his own methods of improving Oelwein. 

“Recently, the husband of the woman who owned a local beauty salon had been hallucinating so badly one night that he accused his wife of having sex with a stranger in the bed next to him (she was hiding with her daughter in an adjoining room at the time), and then he tried to kill her. It was as though, said Murphy, a sense of nihilism had become endemic to Oelwein.” 

Murphy is opposed to the idea that only bad people and bad families are drawn to meth. The man in the story he quotes above is a man from a good, respectable family with stable careers. But his family has not been immune to the nihilism Murphy sees infecting Oelwein. The drug produces nihilistic results for the town and its users because it creates a world where only the drug has meaning.

“And sometimes I look at the guy who can't stop doing crank, and I just think, 'Fuck. It'd be easier to shoot the son of a bitch.’”

The law enforcement officers, doctors, and attorneys of Oelwein know how unlikely recovery is. Some of them believe that killing an addict could be an act of mercy, even though they do not act on the belief. This attitude reinforces the theme of meth-induced nihilism that pervades much of the book. 

“I don’t blame them. What else could you do with a man like me?” 

Jarvis describes the people who watched him burn after the explosion. His screams were so horrific that people wanted him to die, to end both the noise and his suffering. He empathizes. Jarvis understands that death may be the only sure way for him to get free of meth. He never speaks of a future in which he has gotten sober as if it could be a reality. 

“By the time I met him, he’d had four heart attacks. He couldn’t sleep and rarely had an appetite. Almost all his teeth were gone, and those that remained were black and decaying. He was in almost constant pain; his muscles ached, and his joints were stiff. Meth’s destructiveness extended, said Jarvis, to his children, one of whom, born at the peak of his parents’ intravenous meth use, was wearing a colostomy bag by the age of ten. Unable to shoot up with the finger nubs left him by the lab explosion, Jarvis had taught himself to hold a pipe and lighter so that he could resume his meth habit once again.” 

Nick uses Jarvis as his grimmest example of the hold meth can take. The drug has ravaged Jarvis’s body and has also affected his children. Rather than take his missing fingers and melted skin as a reminder of meth’s havoc, Jarvis finds workarounds for his impairments. He is either unwilling to learn from his injuries or unable. 

“Meth works on the limbic system of the brain, which is the brain’s reward center, as well as on the prefrontal cortex, where decision making takes place.”

As meth use increases, the drug literally begins to make decisions for the users. It impairs the decision-making process and rewires the brain to treat meth consumption as its most expedient need and greatest reward. A brain damaged by meth can suffer irreversible consequences.

“Tweakers are rats, crank is cheese, cops are cats.” 

Jarvis describes the relationship between the addicts, law enforcement, and the drug. His existence is a loop in which he, meth, and cops always wind up in the same house, which culminates in a new story that he considers funny, bad, or both. Jarvis’s characterization of himself is that of someone playing a role in a story from which he cannot escape. The rats chase the cheese because they cannot do otherwise.

“Contrary to what many people might think, the rural United States has for decades had higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than the nation’s urban areas. If addiction has a face, says Clay, it is the face of depression.” 

Larger cities may house more addicts, but they have lower percentages of addiction. Clay believes that depression occurs more in the rural United States. He drinks to distract himself from his own depression, but alcohol then makes him more depressed. Clay describes addiction as an attempt to distract oneself from harsh realities and an inability to find joy in normal life.  

“Jay Leno once referred to Oelwein in a Tonight Show monologue as ‘possibly the worst place in the world.’ Even Nathan Lein struggled with the temptation to see the people he prosecuted as ‘shitbags.’ In some ways it seemed that the meth epidemic only added to a sense of isolation in Oelwein, as though the world was happening everywhere but there.” 

In Reding’s opinion, Oelwein is a perfect example of the prejudices and parodies that get leveled against small towns in rural America. The tiny town, despite its isolation, is nevertheless fodder for jokes by late-night TV hosts. But the people who live there have more substance to them than the caricatures that make for such jokes. Nathan is in charge of prosecuting the most seasoned, recidivist meth users, and even he sometimes has issues labeling them as mere criminals and lost causes.  

“Instinct demands that we find something wrong with those who are addicted; the epidemic in effect tricks us into thinking that the relatively small number of addicts are anomalies, even as we acknowledge the drug’s large-scale presence.”

One of the paradoxes Reding sees in Oelwein is that the problem of addiction is obviously widespread enough to refute the theory that addicts are anomalies. But society’s view of the addict—often derived from the militaristic language of the War on Drugs—categorizes them as something alien to common experience. This occurs despite the fact that anyone can succumb to addiction under the right circumstances. 

“In meth’s meteoric rise into the national consciousness and its subsequent fall, there were many clues to its deeper meaning in American culture. The fault lines, whether or not they made headlines, still overlaid the national topography just as completely as before. And maybe more so. 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.”

Reding traces the rise of the Combat Meth Act of 2006 into the ensuing anti-meth blitz led by the media. However, later that year John Walters, President George W. Bush’s National Control Drug Policy Director, declared that the war on meth had been won. The media’s intense, brief focus on the meth epidemic made it seem as if everyone in America was at risk. After the stories died down, Oelwein—and many towns like it—was still left with a problem to solve, but the larger populace was no longer interested in the story or in continued efforts to fight meth. 

“The trick was to look like something in between a union town and a town that was downright criminally dangerous. Oelwein had to appear complacently impoverished but nonetheless like a nice place to raise a family.” 

With zero excess revenue, Murphy’s plans to bring new families and businesses to Oelwein are nearly impossible. The appearance of social order had to take precedence to convince people that Oelwein would be a safe place to live. On the business side of the equation, Murphy needed to attract enterprises to Oelwein that would pay better than the meth trade and that would not be in constant danger of closing down. Bad jobs and poor treatment by employers are part of what opened the door to Oelwein’s meth problem in the first place. 

“You have to plow some dirt in order to raise a crop.” 

Farming involves turbulence and a mild form of destruction. Nathan’s analogy refers to the methods of Oelwein’s police force, which has a reputation for violence. He knows that passive cops would not be obeyed, respected, or effective in Oelwein. Clay mourns what he sees as the cops’ lack of integrity, but Nathan believes that harsher methods in the short-term may produce better results over the long-term. 

“When one is forced to choose between blaming the addict and blaming the system that created the addict, it can be difficult to blame the former.” 

Jamie spends much of her time dealing with the ways meth addiction ravages families. Three of the five members of Roland Jarvis’s family are in jail in the summer of 2005, all on drug-related charges. When those drug charges will keep them in jail for years, Jamie knows that the incarcerated Jarvis men cannot spend that time helping their families in any way. It makes her wonder if, given the nature of the penal system and its drug enforcement policies, some people are actually beyond help. 

“The ability to influence the governmental decision-making process is something the U.S. food and pharmaceutical industries share with the five Mexican DTOs.” 

The pharmaceutical and agricultural industries in the United States embody Marx’s contention that in a capitalist economy, businesses must “grow or die.” Businesses cannibalize their competition, and by absorbing them they create a market with many buyers and few sellers. The DTOs work the same way. Conglomerates that make astronomical profits gain the ability to work in tandem with the government in terms of influencing policy, which is true whether it is a massive company like Cargill or a drug trafficking organization.

“You can’t simply prove something to be true or false if the means of confirmation are easily questioned.” 

Reding believes that the media drew the wrong conclusions about the meth epidemic. Determining how many addicts there are is problematic unless there is consensus on the point at which a user becomes an addict. Self-reporting is also notoriously unreliable. But in Reding’s view, the media structures its reporting with the goals of increasing and retaining viewership. Rigorous methodology is not their concern. 

“Rural America remains the cradle of our national creation myth. But it has become something else, too—something more sinister and difficult to define. Whether meth changed our perception of the American small town or simply brought to light the fact that things in small-town America are much changed is in some ways irrelevant.”

Despite his interest in Oelwein’s history, Reding is most concerned with future results. The media’s coverage of the meth epidemic—combined with the haphazard, misguided directives of the Combat Meth Act—put more national focus on rural America. But when the administration claimed that the war on meth was over, people outside of non-rural America stopped paying attention as if the problem had actually been solved. 

“Somewhere along the way companies grew to have no respect for the people whose lives their products perhaps intended to improve, refusing to provide workers with a decent wage or health insurance. Despite this, people fight to endure, just as they always have. And as they fight, some percentage of them will look to a drug that falsely promises help in that cause.”

In the 1930s, many doctors viewed meth as the miracle drug of the future. Their intentions were good, but the consequences of meth’s creation would be dire for later generations. Reding sees a similar dynamic in the ways that corporations changed over the course of the 20th century. Companies that may have initially had their workers’ and consumers’ best interests at heart can grow so large that they come to view their workers as expensive inconveniences and their customers as endless replaceable. 

“I’m not anyone but me. When you’re a shit, you think you’re other people. You think for other people. All I have to do is not that. The rest’ll work out. The thing is, I could never believe that. I didn’t how. But now I do.” 

Clay’s sobriety changes his perspective on himself. Alcohol has placed a buffer between him and himself and made it easier for him to focus on others. The hard work of introspection and change is only possible for him when he is sober. Clay’s sobriety gives enough clarity to form a new plan for himself and to simplify his conflicts. It also shows him that other addicts can achieve a similar change if they give themselves a chance to experience sobriety. 

“In a way, it seems that, like all these people, the rural United States has been fighting for balance since the early 1980s and for acceptance in a nation intensely divided between the middle and the coasts. In the last decade, meth has become an apt metaphor for the division.” 

Nathan’s desire to be liked, despite his insistence that he dislikes everyone he meets, rings false to Reding. He sees it as a need for acceptance, coming from a man who does not know exactly how to pursue it. The view of meth as a small-town drug, and that meth-heads are all rural hillbilly caricatures, has exposed the divide between the middle of the country and its coasts. If rural America has to fight for acceptance in a country it is part of, it is unlikely to get the support it needs from a government that must prioritize it.

“The very notion that innocent, tiny Buck might be victimized by his father’s past was still enough to make Major want to go and finish himself off with one last, superlatively freeing crank overdose.” 

Major used meth to cope with emotional challenges, general anxiety, boredom, and more. Now that he knows his son may always be at risk because of him, Major has a constant trigger in his life. No amount of time sober can prove that he has control over his addiction. Major’s sobriety will require extreme vigilance for him to maintain it.

“Here we are, the most technologically advanced nation in history, and we have thousands of people writing hundreds of thousands of names in notebooks. We pass a law, and then we basically tell these huge companies that they’re not responsible for complying. It’s stunning.” 

One of Loya’s greatest frustrations is that he knows the United States government has the ability to curb the meth problem. However, beholden as it is to the pharmaceutical industry, the government will not force retail chains such as CVS and Walgreens to help stop the sale of meth precursors. The companies have no incentive to stop, because the money they produce for the pharmaceutical industry guarantees the government’s compliance.