Why Midwestern Small Towns Have Been Ravaged by Meth Addiction

By Charles Homans, Washington Monthly. Posted July 24, 2009.

In an early scene in Nick Reding's Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, a former meatpacker turned small-time methamphetamine cook in Oelwein, Iowa, named Roland Jarvis, inspired by a paranoid hallucination involving black helicopters, pours the hazardous chemicals comprising his home meth lab down the drain and then lights a cigarette, inadvertently blowing up his house and melting off most of his face. When the local police sergeant -- a high school classmate of Jarvis's -- arrives on the scene, Jarvis begs him to shoot him. No one -- the cops, the paramedics, Jarvis himself -- quite knows what to do. None of them has really been here before.

This, in a nutshell, is what scared Americans about methamphetamine when it began to seep into the periphery of the national consciousness, building into a full-blown panic by the mid-2000s. The drug itself, a powerful stimulant, is unpleasant enough, but as Reding observes, "[i]n truth, all drug epidemics are only in part about the drugs." What allowed meth to capture the public imagination so fully was the way in which it attacked the stories that Americans told themselves about the primordial decency of the heartland. Aside from its ease of manufacture -- you can make meth out of readily available industrial and pharmaceutical products, enabling a twenty-first-century variant on the moonshiners of earlier generations such as Jarvis -- the drug's most novel aspect was its clientele: the same predominantly white small-town residents who had watched the urban depredations of crack cocaine from afar and told themselves that they weren't that kind of people. "We're in Iowa, for God's sake," a former Oelwein high school principal, explaining his decision to request police patrols of his school, tells Reding. "We don't do that." In mainstream America's Rockwellian imagination, police officers in towns like Oelwein were supposed to be stopping high school kids from making out in cars on prom night. In the meth age they suddenly needed bulletproof vests and hazmat training.

An August 2005 Newsweek cover story proclaimed meth to be "America's Most Dangerous Drug," which is highly debatable -- there are gaping holes in the statistics cited by both the alarmists and the skeptics. As Methland's title suggests, Reding, a magazine writer, tends toward the former. His account of meth's rise in the rural Midwest does not skimp on the grisly details; he paints a noir-ish picture of the region in which DEA agents set up meetings with drug informants in abandoned county airports, and vultures look on hungrily as detectives exhume the bodies of murder victims hastily stashed under semi trailers.

But Reding's ultimate aim is more subtle than that: he wants to situate the meth phenomenon as part and parcel of the broader economic and social forces that transformed the rural Midwest, in often wrenching ways, in the late twentieth century. The drug's Middle American evolution, he argues, was a basically rational product of a global economy that in many respects has not been much more forgiving to rural America's residents than the drug trade. "[M]eth has always been less an agent of change and more of a symptom of it," he writes. "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."

Methland consists of two loosely braided narratives, one wide angled and the other tightly focused. The first is an account of the twenty-year rise of methamphetamine in the rural Midwest, a story that actually begins some time earlier: in the decades following World War II, when the region played host to a dramatic increase in agricultural productivity. Thanks to advances in pesticides, fertilizers, and bioengineering, heartland exports boomed, and farmers in the Midwest eager to sell in expanding global markets began borrowing against what seemed like a limitless future. But when commodity prices fell in the early '80s, states like Iowa and Nebraska found themselves in deep financial trouble, and a cascade of farm foreclosures ensued. Meanwhile, industrial agriculture corporations like Monsanto and Cargill, which had grown enormous off the spoils of the Green Revolution, were rapidly gathering under their corporate umbrellas as many links of the production and distribution process -- trucking companies, grocery stores, and other once-independent enterprises -- as they could. By the mid-'80s, once-robust regional rural economies were reduced to a patchwork of company towns, little different on paper from the corrosive resource-extraction economies of Appalachia's coal-mining country.

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Charles Homans is an editor of the Washington Monthly.

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