Methland

In September 2006, as America’s meth problem finally gained national attention, Congress passed the Combat Methamphetamine Act. By the end of 2006 the government proclaimed that the war on meth had officially been won.

Three years earlier, the writer Steve Suo wrote his first story about meth in the Oregonian in an effort to determine why there was so much meth in Oregon. His subsequent articles chronicled Director for the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control Gene Haislip’s fight against ephedrine, as pharmaceutical lobbyists fought to avoid regulation of the drug. While the government mandated that ephedrine could not be imported into the United States in powder form, it made no stipulations about ephedrine pills. The drug runners simply began crushing ephedrine pills, not missing a step in their production schedules. At the same time, the NAFTA treaty made it harder to enforce border security, according to Reding.

In 1993, thanks to Haislip’s advocacy, a bill passed that limited ephedrine pills as well. This reduced the purity of meth by a substantial degree. However, pills containing pseudoephedrine—a variant of ephedrine that could also be used to make meth—remained unregulated. This made the worst 15 years of meth history possible.

By 1996, the Amezcuas were incarcerated. Five major drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) took their place and soon took charge of the entire value chain. They switched to pseudoephedrine with red phosphorus, known as Red-P. Meth became more powerful and more addictive. The DTOs expanded their empire using what Reding calls the world’s most profitable legal drug. Meth, he writes, “is linked in a one-to-one ratio with fighting the common cold” (114).

Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah fought against pharmaceutical regulation. Hatch didn’t believe the evidence showing that pseudoephedrine was used to make meth. Haislip’s latest preferred bill stalled for a year while meth production increased.

The consolidation of the pharmaceutical industry occurred in parallel to the growth and networking of the five DTOs. The DTOs monopolized the American drug market because of their access to pseudoephedrine.

The firm Warner-Lambert developed a nasal decongestant with a technology called mirror imaging that could have been an alternative to pseudoephedrine. Mirror image pseudoephedrine was just as effective. Drug companies could have used another drug for cold medicine, but with the help of lobbyists, they did not. By 2000, research into alternative cold medicines was dead. By 2002, “meth lab numbers in Iowa topped one thousand for the first time” (118). 

One of Oelwein’s most important pieces of undeveloped property is a 250-acre area called the Industrial Park (IP). By 2006, Murphy was ready to show the property to potential developers. He believed the IP would be the keystone of Oelwein’s economic recovery plan. The IP is bookended by a baseball field on one side and a club called the Sportsmen’s Lounge on the other. In the 1950s, the club opened with money fronted by the mafia, whose presence is a fixture of Oelwein’s history.

When Reding meets him, Murphy is 55 years old. After putting himself through school for a journalism degree, Murphy worked in a slaughterhouse in Davenport, Iowa. He understood why people in Oelwein turned to using and making meth, and the decay of Oelwein breaks his heart. Now he wants Oelwein to be an attractive option for prospective businesses. He thinks that a success with the IP will buy him the time he needs to consider more sides to the equation of Oelwein’s meth problem. If Oelwein had more revenue, Murphy might be able to create a treatment facility, as Clay often suggests. Murphy’s primary goal is to restore dignity to Oelwein.

After taking office, he empowered police chief Jeremy Logan to use aggressive methods to combat meth. Before becoming chief, Logan disagreed with his predecessor’s lax attitudes and quickly instilled an aggressive culture in his men. Clay believes that Logan’s men are too rough and that they often ignore people’s rights during arrests and raids.

In the spring of 2006, Oelwein enters what Murphy calls Phase II of its economic recovery. The first task is to improve a seven-block stretch of the downtown area. Murphy plans to install new sewers, gutters, streetlamps, and trees. He also wants to install a new septic system to encourage businesses to relocate to Oelwein, once conditions are more sanitary. For two years, Murphy raises enough money for the improvements, in addition to a new library with Internet access. 

In 2001, Nathan moved back to Iowa. He fell in love with a woman named Jenny, and they moved in together in the town of Waterloo. His parents disapproved because, in their eyes, living together before marriage was a sin. They would not speak to Nathan as long as he was unmarried and cohabiting with Jenny. Nathan calls this dilemma the Girl Problem. Though angry with his parents, Nathan still respected their judgment. He was also committed to helping them keep the farm in their lives, so he was torn between a sense of anger and a sense of duty.

Murphy offered Nathan the assistant prosecutor job in 2002. Jenny stayed behind in Waterloo when Nathan moved to Oelwein. He and Jenny slowly grew apart. In 2005, Nathan’s half-brother David dies. David was Nathan’s closest confidant, and his death was crushing. Instead of taking Jenny to the funeral in California, he takes a woman named Jamie who works for the Iowa Department of Human Services (DHS). After the funeral, he tells Jamie many of the secrets he kept for 28 years, and a new era in his life begins.

The major frustration in Jamie’s job is that she sees the same cases over and over and cannot demonstrate change. It is a challenge common to many social workers. She works in a town with inordinate percentages of people who need help, but the town’s poverty means that there is less money to treat their issues.

Nathan does not tell his parents that he and Jamie live together. Financial support for DHS reaches such a low point that Jamie loses her DHS work for a year and takes a part-time job at a bar. She does not understand Nathan’s secretiveness about their relationship or why he won’t take her to the farm. Nathan believes that his parents will eventually turn on her and drive her out. He is finally in love with someone to the degree where he is unwilling to subject her to his parents’ scrutiny and judgment.

In 2005, a cop pulls Clay over for driving drunk. Clay becomes belligerent and lets the difficulties of the past year get the better of him as he rants at the officer. In return, he receives an Intoxilock device on his car which prevents him from driving while intoxicated and is required to attend AA meetings. He is skeptical at first, but in May of 2006 the meetings begin to change him. When Reding visits him that spring, Clay is at the beginning of sobriety. 

Reding gives the history of the Cargill agriculture company and how it consolidated the meat packing industry between 1991 and 1999, while Lori Arnold was in prison. Upon her release, she took a job at the meatpacking plant. While she was incarcerated, the DTOs streamlined their use of undocumented immigrants to transport drugs and to install themselves at the meat packing plants, always looking for new customers.

Many of the White addicts did not like buying meth from Mexican dealers. They resented what they saw as undocumented Mexicans taking the American meat packing jobs. Lori saw an opportunity to act as a middleman, helping the Mexican traffickers wrangle the White drug market, but she couldn’t risk it because of her parole. Cargill placed ads in Mexican border towns, offering two months of free rent to workers who could reach Ottumwa from Mexico.

One evening, Lori smokes meth for the first time in eight years. Days later, she sells a small amount. Two years later, she had enough money from selling meth to buy a nightclub. Then she sold meth to an undercover cop and returned to prison for seven-and-a-half years. However, her links to the DTO ushered in a new era of meth distribution.

It is unclear to Reding how the DTOs expanded so quickly until he speaks to two DEA commanders who tell him about Operation Snowcap. He writes: “Operation Snowcap was the code name for DEA’s 1987 multinational cocaine-control effort in Central and South America” (156). By lowering the amount of cocaine that Colombian cartels brought into America, Snowcap sent the cocaine instead to what were, at the time, much smaller Mexican operations. The Colombian drug empire now depended on Mexico’s help to get its product to America. This allowed the Mexican DTOs to control the price of cocaine in exchange for moving it for the Colombian cartels.

The DTOs now had enough money to buy their own precursor drugs to make meth. A DEA official tells Reding that the DTOs have more lobbying power in America than any legal business. 

After Christmas of 2006, Murphy’s Phase II is complete. Oelwin’s Main Street is renovated and repaved. The streetlights are refurbished and the seven blocks are clean. In the Mexican restaurant Las Flores, Reding eats dinner with Murphy, Clay, and Nathan. The restaurant is a sign of Oelwein’s “growing but largely invisible” (168) Mexican population. 

Although Clay has been sober for five months, he struggles with his job at the hospital. He believes the hospital and insurance systems suffer from a lack of oversight. Hospitals in the rural United States begin replacing doctors with Indian immigrants who will work for less, and they outsource patients’ tests to Mumbai and Australia to be analyzed.

Overall, the city feels more secure to Reding. Thanks in part to the Combat Meth Act, Oelwein has come to represent a more hopeful vision of rural U.S. towns. Measured by the number of labs that had been dismantled, “meth had all but ceased to be an issue around Oelwein” (174).

Pfizer begins using a chemical called phenylephrine in its cold formula which cannot be used to make meth. As a result, the nine companies that make pseudoephedrine reduce their production, limiting the supply for traffickers. Pseudoephredrine imports to the U.S. are reduced by two thirds.

Two other reports confirm meth’s reduction. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health stated that meth use dropped between 2002 and 2006. The report Monitoring the Future, funded by the University of Michigan, reported that meth use in the previous six years leading to 2006 had declined significantly.

Nathan’s legal cases are not declining, however, nor are the meth-related issues of Clay’s patients. Meth has not vanished; rather, it has “reasserted its genome” (177). Diagnosing a meth epidemic is as difficult as citing the origin of an epidemic like the flu. Meth’s destructive nature is difficult to quantify empirically, although specialists frequently rank it as among the worst drugs. Self-reporting is unreliable, particularly with something as potentially stigmatizing as illegal drug use. And even if someone admits to using meth, defining the point at which addiction begins is debatable.

Reding previously spoke with a special agent overseeing the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He said:

The Combat Meth Act will only take the little bit of the meth business away from the dipshits with the Bunsen burners and the Budweiser chemistry set and give it to the only people who’ve known all along what to do with it: The Mexican DTOs (179).

The agent believes that any victories over meth are illusory and temporary. The system of government and the economy make the production and flow of meth possible, and until the system is fixed, there is no real chance at defeating the epidemic.