In 1980 I left Kansas to go to college in Iowa. A lot of things caught my attention about Iowa, for example, that the people really are very nice. I also noticed that there were a lot of drugs. One of them was “crystal methamphetamine,” or “crystal meth” for short. I’d never heard of it before (which is not surprising), but I quickly learned that, while not as fashionable as coke, it was inexpensive and widely available. Lots of people did it. It made them feel good. I left Iowa in 1984 for California, and with it any thought of crystal meth.
“Crank,” however, remained, ever ready to make people feel good when they had nothing much to feel good about. And as Nick Reding explains in Methland. The Death and Life of an American Small Town (Bloomsbury, 2009) America’s midland didn’t have much to feel good about in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Globalization was hammering the industries that had long supported places like little Oelwein, Iowa, the subject of Reding’s attention. Light manufacture, meatpacking, and agriculture were all in decline. Wages were dropping, poverty rising, and people were leaving for the coasts (as I had). Misery loves company, but there was less and less company to be had in Oelwein. Misery, however, also loves drugs, and there was plenty of meth to go around thanks to a peculiar alliance between: 1) big pharma–which opposed any legislation to limit the sale of the essential over-the-counter ingredient in meth; 2) south-of-the-border drug cartels–who took said over-the-counter ingredient and made massive quantities of meth; and 3) some down-on-their luck Iowans–who arranged for the import of said drug. In some ways, meth did what it was supposed to do: it made sad people happy and tired people strong. But it also destroyed the lives of users, their families, and their communities. The bi-costal press reported that the hicks of flyoverland had been possessed by a new kind of “reefer madness.” The rest of the story–globalization, lobbying by big pharma, the drug cartels–it missed for the most part. Nick Reding didn’t, and we in Iowa owe him a debt of gratitude.
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Are you a professional pillow fighter or a 9-to-5 low-cost time travel agent? Or maybe real estate sales on Mars is your profession? It doesn't matter. Whatever it is you do, however complex or intricate, monday.com can help you organize, work a straight, and make it more efficient. monday.com is the one centralized platform for everything work related. And with monday.com, work is just easier. monday.com for whatever you run. GoodaMonday.com to learn more. Hello everybody and welcome back to New Books in History. I'm Marshall Poe, your host. Each week we pick a new history book that we find particularly interesting and we interview the author of that book. This week I'm very pleased to say we have Nick Redding on the show and we'll be talking about his book, Methland, The Death and Life of an American Small Town. As some of you may know, this podcast is hosted at the University of Iowa, the History Department at the University of Iowa right here in Iowa City. This book is about a small town in Iowa, all wine, and its problems with the drug methamphetamine. But the book is really about a lot more than that because the methamphetamine epidemic, if we can call it such, is really, as Nick says, a symptom of larger difficulties that the American Midwest is going through. And what I mean by that is the decline of certain light industries, the vertical integration of agriculture and the difficulties of the meatpacking industry. These were the enterprises that really made the American Midwest the prosperous place it was and they've been in decline for a while. And again, one of the results of that is that people turn to drugs and in this instance, crystal meth was the drug they turned to. And Nick does a terrific job of putting all of the elements of this story together so that it might begin in all wine, but it stretches into South America and Southern California and into China and into places very far afield, all of which, through globalization, end up affecting the 6,000 some people that live in all wine. I very much enjoyed talking to Nick today and I think that you'll enjoy the interview. Here it is. Hi, Nick. Hi. How are you today? I'm good. Good. Where are you exactly? I am in St. Louis, Missouri. St. Louis, Missouri. Are you in St. Louis proper or a suburb of St. Louis? I am in the city itself. Really, that's right. That's interesting. I know many people who don't know St. Louis very well don't know that it has a lot of suburbs. Yeah. It's like when people say they're from Kansas City, they almost never are. Anyway, in fact, I'm not from the city of St. Louis either. I'm from the county which is this gargantuan sort of thing. Exactly. Well, I should tell our listeners that we have Nick Redding on the show today and we'll be talking about his terrific new book, "Methland, the Death and Life of an American Small Town." I should say by way of introduction that we have a big tent here at new books in history and if it's about the past and it is well-written and interesting, we will probably treat it and in this case we're going to be talking about events that while they started many decades ago, really transpired. That is the story transpired in the 80s, 90s and the early knots and Nick does a terrific job of telling this particular history. There are a lot of journalists who I would call historians and I think Nick is one of them because he does a little digging and he finds out exactly what the historical origins of what in this case was. I don't know whether to call it a meth epidemic but certainly some tragic instances in which meth played a part. So having said that, Nick, let me ask you to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. Okay, well, I'm a journalist. I live in St. Louis like we said and I'm from sort of the general area and I went to I left here when I was 18 and I went to college in Chicago and then lived in Colorado and then Chile and Patagonia for a while and then I lived in New York for 13 years and just just moved back last year. And how did you become interested in this sort of long form as they call it in the trade journalistic writing? You know, when I was a English major in college and I had a, I don't know, I guess a minor or something in creative writing and when I left school I figured that I would never write anything because I couldn't imagine how anybody could really make a living and one way or another I ended up in in New York and actually had a fellowship to NYU for fiction writing, not because I wanted to be a fiction writer but because I wanted to get to New York and there was a little money offered for this fellowship and I took a job as a magazine editor and eventually after editing other people's stories I decided that I would like to do to writing myself and that because I was no good as a fiction writer I would try journalism. How did the, let's move into a discussion of the book, how did the idea for the book occur to you? You know, and there's, it's a little bit of a long story that I will try not to make too long but that's okay, we have the time. Okay, good. Back in 1999 I was living in, I wrote, my first book was about, I spent a year living with a family of gauchos, of introduced semi-nomadic cowboys and I was in Chile and Patagonia, mostly people think of Argentine Patagon. In any event I was literally sitting against the fence one day in Patagonia and a gaucho came riding up, he was taking some horses over, darts in fine border to sell and we started talking to one another and throughout the course of a couple hours of talking he said that he had a brother who lived in Idaho and I thought that was impossible. I mean this is a place where there's not even a road, never mind consciousness of the United States or specifically Idaho. I thought, he said no, no, there's a rancher there who my brother works for. So when I got back from Patagonia I was curious about how a guy, how a gaucho kid would end up there. So I called this rancher and sure enough he had a guy working for him by the same name as the gaucho had said. So I went out, it turns out there's this whole importation business of these gaucho kids to work on American ranches. So I went out to a place called Gooding Idaho to look at all this and write a magazine story about it. When I got to Gooding, the very first night I went to the bar to have a hamburger and the place was like a free-for-all. It was a Friday night and everybody was very obviously high on something. And I didn't know what meth was. I had no idea where it came from or anything. And that's what this town of Gooding Idaho, 1286 people, was just awash with methamphetamine. And I was so, I mean I was fascinated. I didn't know how that could be or why. And so eventually I spent a lot of time in Gooding, same as I would ultimately do in Old Wine Iowa. Following some characters lives, tried to sell a book. Nobody would buy it. But I couldn't really let go of the story. And so eventually I ended up selling a book about Old Wine Iowa and the meth problem there. So it was this sort of long-term fascination that finally found a way to roost. And how did you find your way to Old Wine? Why Old Wine and not some other small community in one of these other states? You know, because in between Gooding and Old Wine, I also tried to set up shop in a place near where I grew up. And set up shop, meaning I found a couple addicts and some people who were willing to talk. And when it came down to it, none of them were willing to let me write a book about them. And so as I searched and searched for a new place, I eventually ran across a quote in a newspaper by the guy who turns out to be the town doctor of Old Wine. And I just called him on the phone. And we got along very well. And it turned out that he was very connected to the kinds of people that I needed to talk to me. His brother was the public defender. And he was friends with the prosecutor and the mayor. And because he was the doctor, he was the person who was saddled with taking care of all the mathematics in town. And really, I went to Old Wine because I found people who were willing to let me follow their lives for the three and a half years, but it took me to, you know, to do this book. Actually, it's funny because there's a analogous sort of thing that sometimes happens in archival research. You come upon something that seems a little bit odd or perhaps promising to you. And then you fly to some place and look at the archive and see that pretty much everything you want is right there. It takes a long time to find that though. It's only happened to me once, I think, in my entire scholarly career that I found something like that. So I know just what you're talking about. Let's talk a little bit about the history of methamphetamine itself. You trace that a bit in the book. Could you help us understand that a little? Yeah, and I think that there has been, and in some ways there continues to be the feeling that meth is a new drug. And that, in fact, is not true. It was first synthesized in 1898 in Japan, and it was considered by the 1920s and 1930s. It was considered in the United States to be kind of a miracle drug. There were about 27 different ailments for which meth was prescribed, and the breadth of these ailments was considerable from erectile dysfunction to meth was supposed to cure alcoholism and depression and anxiety. And eventually it was considered to be sort of like during World War II, it was it was given in great numbers to soldiers, US soldiers, British soldiers, German soldiers, and Japan, a Japanese law. I mean World War II was sort of fought on meth amphetamine, and the link with that is because meth, you don't have to eat or sleep with meth, and so if you if your job is to march all night and fight all day, and then march all day to next night, meth is sort of the perfect drug. Yeah, well, I mean, I imagine that some of our listeners, if they may not know it, but they've probably encountered other sorts of amphetamines in popular culture, for example, bennies, as they used to be called. Ben's a dream, I think, is Ben's a dream. Yeah, and that dream is another one. Yeah, that there were actually lots of these, and then, you know, they became it used to be prescribed quite frequently as a diet pill, and and dextetrim, actually, had an amphetamine, and it was over the counter until pre-recently, and if I'm not incorrect, there is a rolling stone song about amphetamine abuse by women called mothers, the male pals. Yeah, exactly. So we don't think about these things as much as we, you know, as much as we probably should, but they're they're in our culture. Another thing that people I don't think realize is that ecstasy is a derivative of amphetamine, MDMA, and it was also synthesized, actually, this, in this instance, by German scientists at the sort of around the turn of the century, and it was given in one form or another to German soldiers in both World War I and World War II. So the story of amphetamines is not a new one at all, but it's a wide-ranging one. They've been they've been used very extensively for a long time, and even today, I believe it's the case that air force pilots are given some sort of amphetamine to increase alertness. Yeah. So there's a company in Westchester, New York, manufacturers that, and they also manufacture something called death oxen, which is given to people who are more badly obese or anarcho-leptic, and it is nothing more than methamp. It's pharmaceutical methamphetamines. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, this stuff, you know, and it does have its uses that we'll talk about in a little while, you know, how well it works, and if it works at all, but they've been widely used, and that is because we should probably say this to our listeners who don't have any experience. Hopefully they don't. The sort of thing is they do actually make you feel euphoric, don't they? Yeah, and that was, you know, that was one reason you read newspaper archives from the early part of the 20th century when methamphetamine was, again, sort of considered this miracle drug. The number one attraction was that it made everybody feel good for a very long time, for 12 hours or 18 hours, and that was the part of the initial attraction. Yeah, I'm reminded of a story. I don't know if it's true about Sigmund Freud when he first encountered cocaine. Cocaine? Yes, and he wrote some letters while on cocaine in which he said, "I believe that if everyone in the world was given cocaine, there would be world peace." You can see that even very smart people can fall victim to the wilds of these drugs. So it's a long way from a lab in late 19th century, early 20th century, Japan to old wine, Iowa, and cooking it up in your bathtub or however they do it. How do we get from the one to the other? How do we, let's say, non-pharmaceutical, illegal methamphetamine first make its way to the Midwest or to the United States? And that's a great question. I would just add one more thing in terms of historical context that people, you know, they talk about the methamphetamine epidemic as though it is a one-time thing in the United States in a recent phenomenon, but after World War II in Japan there was an enormous methamphetamine problem because they had huge stores of the drug and they no longer had the soldiers to give it to and they were an industrializing nation. They had a lot of rebuilding to do and Japanese workers were given methamphetamine. The same is true in Germany and the same is true in the United States. I mean, you think about sort of what the stake was of World War II. It was in some ways who was going to win the battle to industrialize the quickest and the most effectively and therefore dominate the world economy. And so things like the American auto industry and the American agricultural industry to some extent, these were fueled by what was the legal use of a drug that kept people awake for a long time and allowed them to work a lot. And that provides some context for how you know a small town in Iowa dating back to the 1960s and the 70s and the 80s methamphetamine was a very acceptable part of work a day life in the meat packing plant or amongst the long haul truckers or the railroad workers and these of course were the industries along with farming that made the mid-west sort of profitable for a long time if you will. And but eventually methamphetamine was sort of demonized for its what are now it's very obvious bad effects and but that didn't take away the idea that people still wanted it that they were still addicted to it. And so pharmaceutical engineers who were largely based in southern California began a black market of making a stronger illegal form of methamphetamine. When a farm crisis happened in the 1980s and a lot of mid-westerners left the Midwest to go to the booming labor markets predominantly of southern California. Some of them got involved with these pharmaceutical industry chemists and these the bike gangs that were distributing the drug and they sent it home. I was going to say it was it was at least to my recollection in the 1970s called crank or biker dope. Why is that? I think because you know for whatever reason these bike gangs were the ones who initially went into business with these pharmaceutical company engineers and the bike gangs were sort of the distribution force. I mean you know everybody thinks of like you know Charles Manson and stuff like that in the 70s and 80s and this was a this was a factor a cultural factor throughout the western and mid-western United States these bike gangs. I think it was called crank because I think they would hide the drug in the crank case of their motorcycle. What you could do yeah I can see how that could happen that that's that's interesting. I do associate it if you read hundred s Thompson's book on the Hells Angels I'm not sure that methamphetamine comes up but I would suspect that it does and he's talking about the Hells Angels of the 1960s. I don't really know I don't recall the book very well but you mentioned this interesting connection between people moving to southern California and then hooking up with these these sort of rogue chemists and and and the person that you talk about is if I recall correctly Laurie Arnold is that right? Yeah and and Laurie is the sister of the comedian Tom Arnold and Laurie was married to a a bike gang leader of the one of the you know majors in mid-western bike gangs and Laurie was the you know so I mean at the time you go back to this was in 1987 and by now a lot of towns just like Laurie's had been had lost tremendous amounts of revenue because the farm crisis had forced people to foreclose the meat packing plant had been taken over and wages had been cut and the railroad left so the three bases for economic life in many of these towns all three of them had had gone away people had a lot to feel bad about and methamphetamine offered they you know this sort of long-lasting euphoric high it was very very cheap and and it was was coming from California to which Laurie had connected herself in in a in a as a business person um and she became a huge provider and ultimately a manufacturer of the drug yeah I want to come back to her for a second but you know there are certain ways in which my personal story interacts with the story or crosses paths with the story that you tell I know that I first heard of uh meth or crystal meth in about 19 I think it was about 1983 in Iowa actually when I was going to college and then I encountered it again in Arkansas of all places and this dovetails completely with what you say I was working in a saw mill it was a very rough place in Fayetteville um and the guys there did all kinds of what we just called it speed then just speed and everybody did it before they worked their shifts and I have to say you know I'm not um exactly a wilting flower but the manual labor that I had to do there during that summer working at the saw mill pretty much convinced me that I was not cut out from manual labor but these guys would go at it for eight hours and uh I was truly astounded by by what I saw and and I did I remember coming away thinking that you know it was a good thing I remember they would take they would take they would take speed and then they would shove their mouths full of uh chewing tobacco yeah I was like these this summer combination was a good they didn't drink coffee or anything like that didn't eat coffee there was speed yeah chewing tobacco and they would go and work they would they would work these big repetitive tasks for eight hours and I just remember being totally astounded by this as a kind of a 19 or 20 year old I didn't understand how people could do it and uh now I do understand how people could do it largely thanks to your book so let's pick up the story again with Laurie Arnold 1987 and her um uh her uh biker gang husband um so she begins to travel to California and bring this dope back and she finds that there's sort of huge demand for it yeah and she in fact she um being uh sort of the brains of the operation she actually dispatches her husband to California to um I'm sorry that's okay don't worry about it um she uh sends her her husband to California uh every seven to ten days to bring a big load of methamphetamine back and what she had done is um Laurie's a high school 10th grade dropout and at the time she was in her early 20s um and she had done meth she loved it there was a big market for it already in the town of Batamua Iowa for the reason that you know like like the saw mill that you're talking about they'll um these people who were doing these brutal meat packing jobs had been doing meth for quite a while um but what Laurie was able to do was to hook up with the Mexican drug traffickers in southern California who by that time it started to take over the mess business and they were making a stronger and cheaper version of it and so Laurie wasn't satisfied to wait to uh she wasn't satisfied to have her connection in Des Moines Iowa she wanted to go right to the source so she would send her husband uh himself fueled on meth on these cross country drives every seven to ten days to bring as much dope back as as he could um eventually she bought a car dealership and hired dozens of people to be running to California and back for her um and then she decided that she didn't want to just sell meth in Iowa she wanted to sell it everywhere so she bought a horse farm and 52 race horses and in the guise of going to horse races and buying and trading and selling horses from Kentucky to North Dakota and over to Utah and into Colorado basically all over the middle of the country what she was doing was she was selling large quantities of meth did she think of herself as a drug dealer i mean because remember drug beaters did not have a good reputation in the 1980s yeah um she um in her letters to me she's we wrote hundreds of pages of letters to one another while she was in federal prison and and um she thought of herself as kind of a robin hood sort of um doing her town a favor uh by making everybody feel good and by selling a drug that allowed poor people to work harder and make more money um she did not think of herself as a drug dealer in fact she's very proud of the fact that she contributed large amounts of money to the county sheriff's office and to the local police and did all of these sort of i don't know do good or kinds of things around town um you know i mean i think that's a fairly common pathology among drug dealers yeah let me ask you kind of a challenging question i guess um at least it challenges me uh is this just on her part rationalization or is there some substance to this argument well i think lory certainly would say that there's substance to it and i think that there are some people around the town lyla who probably remember her fondly for the reason that she was an economic force in that town um you know i mean i think that the parallel and i'm i will maybe not so artfully or maybe artfully dodge your question it's a hard fight by by pointing out that um you know in mexico for instance now um one of the reasons that the government is deeply ineffective in combating the drug trafficking organizations that lory Arnold helped to put into place and we can get to that later um is because the drug traffickers are the ones who keep the street lights on at night who keep the schools open who keep people employed and they do all of the things that the government is financially unable to do and there is a tremendous amount of um sort of a feeling of filial obligation and gratefulness in mexico to these drug trafficking organizations my guess is that there was some of that around the tom lyla in the early 90s for lory yeah no i imagine that's true um i imagine that's true and it's it's interesting because you know there are lots of drugs that are like this that are given to people by doctors but they tend to be able to be used in a sustainable way the thing about math i think in all street and feta means and i would also include cocaine in this category is they cannot be used in a sustainable way is that they start people on a downward trajectory very quickly and inexorably and they i mean i have seen it myself and people i was just saying who i know well and it is not something that you can do in the long term and expect to survive very long because it makes you completely irrational that's all that's all i can say about it is it makes you completely irrational you got nuts on those um it may make you feel good for a while but you definitely go nuts on it and i guess she had to know that so i um yeah i don't know how i feel about it so let's uh well look you know what lory would say is that she was selling very pure high-class methamphetamine and it was the people who were cooking it in their bathtub who was making everybody crazy now yeah maybe i don't know you know i i don't know enough about the synthesis of methamphetamine to say anything about that but uh yeah i kind of got it too let's talk about a person that i believe she sold dope too and that was uh rollin jarvis is that right did she sell dope to rollin or did he get it on his own uh you know she did um rollin was one of the people who she encountered now uh rollin was uh a meat packing worker up in ole wine, Iowa so we're talking i don't know 200 miles north or 150 miles north i guess at the tamwa but you know lori Arnold's reach in her day was far beyond just Iowa and um she was in fact involved with some kind of middling traffickers up in ole wine and so um she was in that way was also involved with rollin who was not only an addict but he was a prolific small-time cook himself um and uh you know it more it was fascinating to me actually the more i would get into this i would meet people all over the place who knew all of these people in a little tiny town in Iowa i mean i can meet them in california and arizona and um and it really would give credence to the uh i guess the enormity of the business mm-hmm yeah no i i i've i've had similar sorts of experiences let's let's talk about uh rollin jarvis's um story he he was no angel but he was in a certain way an upstanding citizen before the end wasn't he he worked in a meat packing plant maybe you could talk a little about him yeah yeah um you know so so again we'll go back to 1987 and and uh at that point um there was a sort of what you might call a boutique meat packing plant in in ole wine this was before meat packing plants were all taken over by the same few companies in any event uh it's called iowa ham and uh of the 7500 people in all wine iowa iowa ham employed two thousand of them uh which is uh and that's not to say two thousand of the working age people that's two thousand of the inhabitants which is a staggering statistic um and uh rollin was one of those workers and uh rollin was uh young and he was uneducated and he was making 18 bucks an hour and he wanted to uh he wanted to make twice that be able to work double shifts at a physically grueling job and he started doing methamphetamine which initially was uh prescribed to him by one of the doctors in the county and um as it again we're back in fayette drill arkansas what you saw right and um you know sort of rollin story takes a turn for the worst when the meat packing plant gets sold to jalette and jalette disbands the union and cuts the wages by two-thirds overnight from 18 dollars an hour to five dollars and sixty cents and uh at this point rollin is doing more math to be able to work harder to make less money and it's not long before he does the math and says well i can make math and sell it to the other idiots who are going to keep doing this job and i can make a lot of money not an not an not an illogical calculation i should say there's also a moment here where my story intersects again it just occurred to me when i was in high school this was in the late 70s early 80s um a career option for some of my high school compadres was to do what rollin did and and we called it throwing hands yeah and when i saw that in your book i hadn't heard that expression for you know literally decades and this is rolling Jarvis through hams and i knew exactly what that was yeah because of the big meat packing plants in Wichita you could go and throw hams and make you know you could make 12 to 13 14 dollars an hour to start this was back when the minimum wage you know was was 260 or something or 325 and right and you could just walk into this meat packing plant and make above 10 dollars an hour so it was a career option for a lot of people i knew people did i never did it but i i knew people that threw hands so so rolling gets deeply involved in this and begins to make it maybe you could talk a little bit about how one makes meth amphetamine um so so meth is a purely synthetic drug and the importance of that is that there's no there's no crop to harvest you know so you the drug is not uh it's not victim to the vagaries of of weather and seasons and things like that um the other thing that's important about meth is that it's number one component is pseudofedron and pseudofedron is the drug uh that cold medicine is made from pseudofedron is why pseudofed is called pseudofed um and it's also the drug that in cold when you take cold medicine you feel a little bit jumpy um and you know a little buzzy um that's that's because of the effect of the pseudofedron and um so you know to make meth essentially if you're rolling Jarvis and you're doing it on a relatively small scale you're taking pseudofedron either in powder form or you're taking cold medicine and you're crushing it up into powder and then you are um extracting the pseudofedron from it by pouring hydrochloric acid onto it um and then adding uh things like denatured alcohol and Coleman lantern fluid and and hydrocemonium which is a nitrate compound that's used as a fertilizer i mean there's nothing in it that is natural in any way yeah so it also sounds very dangerous it's very dangerous and i mean Roland is the sort of classic example because he was uh and the Roland you were talking about you know a drug that sort of knows no bounds Roland is locally famous for one time having stayed high on meth for almost an entire lunar cycle 28 straight days during which he claims he never slept more than five to ten minutes at a time that right there would almost be enough to kill you i mean that's like you know that's like one ton of mobile stuff you know but of course he was in any event the i think one can begin to imagine the sort of psychological degradation that takes place when people don't sleep for that long of a period in one night Roland decided that uh there were heads growing on the limbs of the trees outside of his mother's house he used to cook meth in his mother's basement and uh these heads somehow related to him the message that uh the police were coming to take his lab away so he ran downstairs and he started pouring all these really toxic chemicals down the flood drain uh including hydrochloric acid and uh then once he was done with the job he made the mistake of lighting a cigarette and he basically blew himself up and uh you know so it's indeed a dangerous way to make a living when you're dealing with all these chemicals then he went to jail is that correct well first he went to the burn unit in in Iowa that the Iowa City or the University of Iowa Hospital right right here in Iowa City I know where it is and he was uh he was there for three and a half months he was I believe Roland was 37 at the time in those three and a half months he had four heart attacks and he had skin grafts on 78 percent of his body he had by the time he got the hospital his nose was gone his fingers were all melted off and he somehow survived all of this and went back home and the very first thing that he did was to get high um and at that point you know he'd been in and out of jail and he continues to be in and out of jail let me ask you this I actually worked a little bit in um working I guess I'd say I'd worked with people who have had dependency problems um and and I know how difficult it can be what were what was treatment widely available either in the sort of professional form or in the narcotics uh anonymous or or alcoholics anonymous form was that widely available to to meth edicts in places like old wine uh in old wine today has a population of about sixty six hundred people and in that town there is um exactly one chemical dependency counselor uh so I think the answer's a resounding no yeah right and yeah no it's interesting I know an n-h chapter or anything like that no I think there's an n-h chapter in independence which is about 12 or 14 miles away yeah um you know I mean the meetings are certainly available but in terms of any sort of like extended outpatient treatment or never mind inpatient treatment there is zero yeah no we have extended outpatient uh in in the Iowa City area and I used to live in Ann Arbor and I know that they have it up there in Michigan but I wasn't surprised to learn that it's completely unavailable and a place like all-line and extended outbreak uh outpatient or inpatient can actually be quite a quite effective in in my experience um so the thing you know the the thing is that that when if you're a town like old wine and you uh have lost the three basic economic pillars of your the three the three the three pillars of your economy then uh simple things like keeping the high school open or keeping the street lights on at night are no longer foregone conclusions where in the hell are you going to come up with money for treatment programs yeah no that's that's that's exactly right I mean I yeah they're very blessed in Ann Arbor I can tell you that I worked I worked with them a little bit and um they they uh they do a fine job in an Iowa City that are our programs available a lot of programs available um but I certainly can understand why they might not be available in a place like old wine and and without them I I just don't think that's you know I I don't think these people had a chance let's let's talk a little bit about um the the people that were trying to keep the lights on and um trying to keep people like rolling Jarvis away from the drugs and treating him and I'm thinking of three people in particular I guess they are Larry Murphy he's the Mayor is that right of all one yeah and then there's um Nathan Leon yeah he's the prosecutor in the county right assistant county prosecutor and there's Clay Halberg Halberg Halberg Halberg and he was he's the local doctor let's let's start with um mr. Halberg who is a or dr. Halberg who is kind of an amazing character in and of himself yeah um so so Clay is the son of the old wine the guy who was the old wine town doctor for you know 40 years before him or something like that he was Marcus Welby by your description basically he was the the country doctor out of a Norman Rockwell poster he he pretty much was and uh you know right down the you know delivering babies and barns yeah right stuff and he was also the county coroner for a while so he sort of had the he had both endpoints of the content you will cover you know and um uh so you know Clay was one of uh five or is one of five children all of whom were adopted which I think is interesting um and uh Clay is is a one half of a set of twins um and uh him and his brother left town to be educated and ultimately the Clay's twin went to law school and Clay went to medical school and then both of them I mean this is typical of you know of the seven the late 70s when people you know things were sort of going downhill and people were leaving these towns and in big numbers uh but Clay and his brother did something uh kind of remarkable which is that they came home um out of the sense of of obligation and and to to make things better and his brother took the job as the county public defender and Clay sort of took over the mantle from his father as the the town general practitioner and um you know fast forward to when I met him and by then his brother had moved away because he was so tired of meth addicts gathering on his porch at two in the morning wanting to know why they had why he hadn't gotten their friends out of jail and at Clay at that point by 2003 0405 90% of what he was seeing in his office was somehow related to meth and it took a great toll on him and he you know the toll that it took on him actually it took the form of a dependence itself didn't it yeah and and and Clay uh became an increasingly profound alcoholic as time went on um and in fact you know back to our treatment discussion uh when Clay got sober he chose to um drive down to Iowa City a couple nights a week to attend meetings there now that is not not the longest drive in the world but it's gotta be what 85 miles on the bottom right yeah um one way you know so I mean you know even Clay even the doctor himself couldn't find a way to be treated in his own town yeah yeah that that that is a remarkable irony but he did get clean though didn't he he did and Clay has been sober I believe three and a half years well congratulations to him so let's let's talk about another your book is full of these amazing characters um Nathan Leon who I guess I have to ask this I have young children and I'm wondering whether they're going to be uh I'm pretty tall myself whether they're going to be tall but Nathan's parents are what like six foot and five six or something and he's six nine is that right yeah well yeah his mom's about five nine dad's about six foot oh yeah I mean they're not small I know but they're about six nine no so Nathan's a big guy and and he uh he why don't you tell us his story you know Nathan's story is not dissimilar to Clay's in some way um uh he uh also went to college where and not now Nathan Clay grew up in town the son of the of the town doctor which is certainly I think uh anybody would agree is a relative position of privilege uh Nathan grew up on a 480 acre corn and bean farm about 12 miles outside of town in a hundred and some odd year old house um and uh also had several siblings I believe he says four brothers and sisters in many events um Nathan uh put himself through through college where he uh you know he graduated and and went on to law school um in in diana so he sort of like clay he kind of got out you know um and then uh he went on to get a master's in law and uh but then um decided to come home and um when he did come home he had uh it was contacted by the mayor Larry Murphy and um offered the job of assistant county prosecutor and and and really the mandate that was given to him and to the prosecutor's office this was back in 2002 was to clean up methamphetamine because the mayor at the time had a had a plan that if all line was ever going to make any sort of economic come back they would have to be able to lure business from outside of the town and outside of the region and they were never going to be able to do that if uh people like will and jarvis were blowing their houses up yeah and so the mayor you're talking about is Larry Murphy who again is uh a pretty remarkable person he's he's right out of uh the kind of typical america I don't know if it's typical but he's he's a booster in the best sense of the word he is and and he's from uh he's from Dubuque, Iowa um and came from this very large Irish Catholic family almost all of whom I think he originally had nine siblings and there are seven surviving or something um all of them involved in either state politics or some form of you know Larry's a guy who organized his first labor union I think there were two members him and his brother at the age of 15 and a grocery store in Dubuque and you know 1962 or something but that's just a kind of sort of you just want me to sort of can do guys you know um and he served for a long time in the state senate um and ran for governor and was he was considered to be kind of a shoe end uh and you lost at the last moment and uh at that point he decided he would uh he wanted to be the mayor of his adopted hometown of Olwan. Yeah and so he's got plans and he's got Nathan and Clay uh on board with this and uh then there's the chief of police and I don't recall his name. It was another Jeremy Logan. Yeah Jeremy Logan exactly maybe you could say a few words about him. Well and and there again it's a this interesting story where you know Jeremy Logan was a hometown guy who um was a sergeant in the police force uh the police force of Olwan again you've got this town that has lost all the bases of its economic of its economy and the police force had this reputee it was it was Olwan had become known as a really rough town and um the police force had this uh almost like legendary reputation for impropriety and uh Logan is a sergeant and Murphy is in his first term as mayor and there's this scandal about the chief of police and then suddenly there's a scandal about Logan having to do with a young girl in town and it was sort of obvious that the chief of police was sort of smearing Logan's name and uh or maybe it wasn't obvious you know it was a big dust up in town you know and somehow out of it Logan the accused sergeant turns up to be it turns out to be the police chief um he gets the job Murphy just fires the old chief and gives Logan the job and again um the the the deal was you're now the police chief and your number one thing is you've got to get small lab meth production out of here I guess I was going to say one one one um thing that occurred to me was that there was a in terms of crafting the story there's there's a way in which you could have almost set it up a little bit high noon like except in this instance Gary Cooper convinces everybody to get on board with protecting the town and I'm thinking of Murphy and Leon and Halberg and and Logan together trying to clean the town up but you know things are never that simple because you're not sure who's wearing the white hat and who's wearing the black hat and these people all live cheek by jowl and and I guess you know one thing that occurred to me while I was reading the book is that this is really a very tough problem we use this phrase cleaning up quite cavalierly at least I do but you know like my wife I believe is a member of the ACLU and I don't think she would like what they did at all um yeah and I think most Americans especially the bicosal Americans would not uh would think that this was what they did in order to clean the town up was really quite inappropriate how did they negotiate it themselves well um you know and I don't think that they did anything illegal no I don't either no I don't think um and the reason they didn't is because Murphy and and Logan were very careful to include the county process the county attorney and the assistant county prosecutor on everything that they did to make sure and now when I say everything that they did it sounds somehow you know like drumroll please or something like that all they did was sort of the small town version of what Rudolph Giuliani did in New York when I was living there which is to say that we've got big problems like a high murder rate and the way we're going to tackle it is to make sure that we don't let any of the small crimes go unnoticed because that will lead us to the perpetrators of the big crimes worked great in New York I I think that Giuliani is sort of safe and personified but I will never be willing to disparage him for the job that that he did in New York I mean when I first moved there it was a mess and within a few years it wasn't but and I think that's kind of true in old wine except you know there um you know they had a lot of people who were cooking meth in their cars and trucks as they drove along and the reason is because meth production stinks literally and these people would drive around in hopes of dispersing the smell so you had this mobile army of meth cooks all around the town and the county so I think logically they started pulling over cars and trucks for any legal reason that they that they could for any violation you know whether it was speeding or whether it was being five miles an hour over to speed limit or having a broken tail light which is an interaction of the law and that allowed a police officer to then approach the vehicle and you know they were cooking meth then it was fairly obvious and uh you know so I don't see any I don't see that what they did was ran afoul of anything um but people in town did that that's the problem and what did they say well people in town said uh you know you're uh you're acting like you're the police chief of chicago you know you're acting like we're all criminals and you're acting like five miles an hour over the speed limit is a problem that hasn't been a problem in our town for 50 years you know what's your what's what's your deal and uh you know when I first got there people were very divided over this um they were very divided over the idea that um that the police would be suspicious of their own kind mm-hmm but so let me just one of the most interesting thanks to me as somebody who rides his bike all the time I live in Iowa City it's a small town I ride my bike to work I ride my home uh at one point they banned right am I correct about this they banned uh bicycle riding downtown that's right and and and and um so you've got people who are manufacturing meth and their homes so the the the police uh start to get a handle on that so these people come out of their homes and they start cooking meth and their cars and trucks the police start to get a handle on that so these meth cooks figured out a way that you don't even need a lab to cook meth all you need is a 20 ounce pepsi bottle and they would strap it to the you know like at the mountain rack or whatever it's called on their mountain bikes and they would ride around cooking meth and fed me I I very distinctly remember the first time I went to old wine it was it was uh May 9th of 2005 and it's about three o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday I was driving around one of the neighborhoods and there were these these kids riding their bikes cooking meth and so anyway the city council said at the very least we cannot have this happening on Main Street you know nobody's ever going to come here and open new stores or whatever if we've got kids riding around cooking meth on their bicycles so you cannot ride your bike downtown anymore mmm that's amazing so uh the these these efforts on the part of Murphy and Leanne and Halberg and Logan and and the rest of that sort of civic leaders they they prove successful you know they they prove very successful in terms of actually on on both fronts and both fronts being number one getting meth out of out of town or the object parts of meth out of town and number two luring business um and um you know at one point the old wine police were uh dismantling one meth lab every three days uh within six months they got that down to zero uh that's a I don't know then you I mean I've read a lot of statistics on what places have been able to do with their math problem and I don't think I've ever read I don't think I've ever heard of success that quick and that complete um and um yeah and and they they were able to get a bunch of companies to move up not a bunch but three or four they've added a lot of work problem of course is that you know small lab meth manufacturer only comprises about 15 percent of the market the rest of it is brought by major drug trafficking organizations and you know as doesn't matter how many civil liberties you're willing to infringe upon the old wine police are not going to get a handle on the Ariana Felix organization yeah no they're not but there was success also on a number of fronts uh on a kind of national I don't know if it's a national level or not but I was buying um some cold medicine this uh I guess it was January or something in cold season and I was buying some Sudafed or something and they make you sign for it now right is that true all of the United States or is that an Iowa thing well you're you have to sign for it everywhere but um whether you can either do it in a computerized manner or you can do it where you literally sign your name in a log book I signed my name in a log book and that is possibly the most ridiculous thing in the world I mean because you know the idea is that people can't buy more than a certain amount of cold medicine and then go make it into methamphetamine well you know are we really prepared as taxpayers to pay the police to go through hundreds of thousands of names and hundreds of thousands of pages of log books I don't think so no no no it's it's just foolishness yeah it's all thanks to the pharmaceutical lobby yeah we even get a chance to talk much about the pharmaceutical lobby but they did a good job of protecting um one of their uh treasures and that is the kind of cold medicine trade um true yeah they did a nice job of that so where um where does methamphetamine stand today in the United States is it increasing or decreasing or uh is there anything generally we can say about it well it appears to be you know math use has not gone down uh the amount of methamphetamine available appears to be stable what it's being made from and where it's being made um has changed a little bit it's still due to a bedroom but a lot more of it is actually coming from crushed up cold pills um part of the reason being that this law was so incredibly ineffective um and I think that you know I think that are a realist who would be looking at this from you know DEA's perspective um would say right now it's in a holding pattern waiting to explode again because it's not going to take long for these big trafficking organizations to to figure out how to how do you uh increase their sales again and and or increase them from this sort of from from this from the the plateau that the market seems to be in so I don't know that's not very hopeful but unfortunately it's just true yeah well I mean I think the thing that bears saying is that the structural conditions that um brought about the uh increased demand for methamphetamine are are still with us I mean I can tell you you certainly know in Missouri and I know in Iowa that it's not as if small towns like old wine are prospering I mean we talk about it's funny because we talk a lot in Iowa about things like alternative energy and ethanol and wind power and things like this um as if they were going to save these places and they're not that they might help but I I do know that um yeah it's um it's a it's a tough time for the fly over territory uh I mean we're resilient people and we'll we'll weather the storm but um it's a tough time let me let me just say one more thing or ask you about one more thing what one of the uh as a kind of someone who formerly dabbled in in journalism himself uh one of the messages of your book is that the national press just missed this story entirely or maybe not entirely there's a fellow in Oregon I guess that did a good job with it um but but mostly they they told a kind of a strange tale of um sort of whacked out midwesterners um uh getting high on this kind of new dope and then the story was dropped I also remember there was a lot of discussion of uh what was called meth mouth yeah as if that mattered at all but anyway maybe you could talk a little bit about the the way in which it was covered in the press well you know I think that you know the to me and what this book is about is that meth is not the problem anywhere whether it's an old wine or a come war down the street here in Greenville Illinois that really it's just a symptom of a larger economic problem essentially and that economic problem is is based on uh basically late stage capitalism vertical integration of the industries that provide revenue to much of the middle of the country and um now essentially suck revenue out of these places because they've vertically integrated and and and and math is just sort of a mess to me was a a chance to look at those things um so when newspapers from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times and everybody in between including the Des Moines Register wrote for two and a half years about Roland Jarvis essentially you know wrote about the guy making meth in his house they just missed an opportunity to see it for what it is which is not a problem it's the symptom or an a symptom you know and then you know there was this backlash um in the media where all the sudden after so much coverage then the coverage became well there never was a meth epidemic meth has been overblown meth is a is meth is a big nothing and that too completely misses the point you know which is that meth is a symptom and and and the problems are much more complicated and profound and far reaching and so you know you say well where is old wine today and where is meth today well you know meth meth remains stable but the problem is that the economic difficulties and the and the sociocultural difficulties of a place like old wine Iowa haven't changed at all and there doesn't appear to be any chance of that changing and so you know meth is going to continue to be a problem there you know it just is that simple yes that's a kind of a sad note to end on but i believe you're probably right about that i'm sticking it out here in the midwest though and i met you know we see what we can do i ain't going nowhere um the um we've taken up a lot of your time today let me ask you or um nick let me ask you our traditional final question on new books and history and that is what is your next project what are you working on now do you have a book in the works or a magazine article or something like this um you know i i have a an idea that i'm i haven't quite fully hatched yet but i i what i'd really like to do is to take uh some of the um some of the ideas in math land and expand them a little bit more and and what i mean by that again is this uh what i think is the association between um you know what i would call late stage capitalism and particularly with the meat packing industry being a prime example and u.s. immigration policy and drug trafficking and um and i would like to to write more about that so i think i've got a place that i'm going to land next and it is not very far from where i live here in st. louis and um and uh i think that's i'm that's a little bit vague but i haven't quite figured out my way into it yet but i i think that that i think that some of those ideas uh i would hope deserve another and and bigger canvas to to for you know to to paint on or whatever no i'm sorry no it's good i yeah well i i hope that you're uh i hope you complete the book soon and i hope that you agree to be on the show again when it comes out i'd really appreciate that well nick readying it's been um great to talk to you today the book is methland the death and life of an american small town the small town being oleine iowa just a little bit north of where i sit right now so nick thanks very much for being on the show we appreciate it yeah pleasure with all mine okay take care bye bye you've been listening to an interview with nick readying author of methland the death and life of an american small town i'm marshal po the host of new books in history i hope you have a great week [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] You
In 1980 I left Kansas to go to college in Iowa. A lot of things caught my attention about Iowa, for example, that the people really are very nice. I also noticed that there were a lot of drugs. One of them was “crystal methamphetamine,” or “crystal meth” for short. I’d never heard of it before (which is not surprising), but I quickly learned that, while not as fashionable as coke, it was inexpensive and widely available. Lots of people did it. It made them feel good. I left Iowa in 1984 for California, and with it any thought of crystal meth.
“Crank,” however, remained, ever ready to make people feel good when they had nothing much to feel good about. And as Nick Reding explains in Methland. The Death and Life of an American Small Town (Bloomsbury, 2009) America’s midland didn’t have much to feel good about in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Globalization was hammering the industries that had long supported places like little Oelwein, Iowa, the subject of Reding’s attention. Light manufacture, meatpacking, and agriculture were all in decline. Wages were dropping, poverty rising, and people were leaving for the coasts (as I had). Misery loves company, but there was less and less company to be had in Oelwein. Misery, however, also loves drugs, and there was plenty of meth to go around thanks to a peculiar alliance between: 1) big pharma–which opposed any legislation to limit the sale of the essential over-the-counter ingredient in meth; 2) south-of-the-border drug cartels–who took said over-the-counter ingredient and made massive quantities of meth; and 3) some down-on-their luck Iowans–who arranged for the import of said drug. In some ways, meth did what it was supposed to do: it made sad people happy and tired people strong. But it also destroyed the lives of users, their families, and their communities. The bi-costal press reported that the hicks of flyoverland had been possessed by a new kind of “reefer madness.” The rest of the story–globalization, lobbying by big pharma, the drug cartels–it missed for the most part. Nick Reding didn’t, and we in Iowa owe him a debt of gratitude.
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