The dramatic story of the methamphetamine epidemic as it sweeps the American heartland — a timely, moving, very human account of one community's attempt to battle its way to a brighter future.

Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. Methland tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people. As if this weren't enough to deal with, an incredibly cheap, longlasting, and highly addictive drug has rolled into town.

Over a period of four years, journalist Nick Reding brings us into the heart of Oelwein through a cast of intimately drawn characters, including: Clay Hallburg, the town doctor, who fights meth even as he struggles with his own alcoholism; Nathan Lein, the town prosecutor, whose caseload is filled almost exclusively with meth-related crime; and Jeff Rohrick, a meth addict, still trying to kick the habit after twenty years.

Tracing the connections between the lives touched by the drug and the global forces that set the stage for the epidemic, Methland offers a vital and unique perspective on a pressing contemporary tragedy.

"Using what he calls a 'live-in reporting strategy,' Reding's chronicle of a small-town crystal meth epidemic-about 'the death of a way of life as much as... about the birth of a drug'-revolves around tiny Oelwein, Iowa, a 6,000-resident farming town nearly destroyed by the one-two punch of Big Agriculture modernization and skyrocketing meth production. Reding's wide cast of characters includes a family doctor, the man 'in the best possible position from which to observe the meth phenomenon'; an addict who blew up his mother's house while cooking the stuff; and Lori Arnold (sister of actor Tom Arnold) who, as a teenager, built an extensive and wildly profitable crank empire in Ottumwa, Iowa (not once, but twice). Reding is at his best relating the bizarre, violent and disturbing stories from four years of research; heftier topics like big business and globalization, although fascinating, seem just out of Reding's weight class. A fascinating read for those with the stomach for it, Reding's unflinching look at a drug's rampage through the heartland stands out in an increasingly crowded field." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

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." Outside of whatever political hay the left made of rhetoric elevating small-town Americans over... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) 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, hardworking, 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 1980s 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 1980s. 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. It was used by several governments in World War II, including the U.S. military, 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.

David Liss is the author of six novels, including "The Devil's Company," which will be published in July.

Reviewed by SocietyReview By David Liss, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Methland tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa, which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been affected by one of the most dangerous drugs in the world.

The dramatic story of the methamphetamine epidemic as it sweeps the American heartland--a timely, moving, very human account of one community's attempt to battle its way to a brighter future.

Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more true than in the small towns of the American heartland. Methland tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people. As if this weren't enough to deal with, an incredibly cheap, longlasting, and highly addictive drug has rolled into town.

Over a period of four years, journalist Nick Reding brings us into the heart of Oelwein through a cast of intimately drawn characters, including: Clay Hallburg, the town doctor, who fights meth even as he struggles with his own alcoholism; Nathan Lein, the town prosecutor, whose caseload is filled almost exclusively with meth-related crime; and Jeff Rohrick, a meth addict, still trying to kick the habit after twenty years.

Tracing the connections between the lives touched by the drug and the global forces that set the stage for the epidemic, Methland offers a vital and unique perspective on a pressing contemporary tragedy. 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. Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered to be the most dangerous drug in the world, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the small towns of the American heartland. In Methland, journalist Nick Reding tells the story of Oelwein, Iowa (pop. 6,159), which, like thousands of other rural communities across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people. Now an incredibly cheap, long-lasting, and highly addictive drug has rolled into town.

Through four years of reporting, Reding brings us into the heart of rural America through a cast of intimately drawn characters. Trafficker Lori Arnold is the queen of Midwest crank. Roland Jarvis is a former meatpacking worker who blew up his mother's house while cooking meth. Oelwein's doctor, Clay Hallberg, feels his own life falling apart as he attempts to put that of his town back together. Nathan Lein, the son of farmers, is now the county prosecutor, struggling with what Oelwein has become.

Methland is a portrait not just of a town, but of small-town America on the brink. Centered on one community battling for a brighter future, it reveals the connections between the real-life people touched by the drug epidemic and the global forces behind it. Methland provides a vital perspective on a contemporary tragedy, ultimately offering the very thing that meth once took from Oelwein: hope. 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 Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of Methland, Nick Reding's unnerving investigative account of . . . Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself . . . Reding] introduc es] a cast of local characters whose trust it must have been a feat to gain, so wobbly and troubled are their lives. Nathan Lein, the crusading county prosecutor, is the 28-year-old son of pious farmers who's come back to Oelwein to help clean up the meth mess after obtaining degrees in philosophy, law and environmental science . . . Manning another fortress against the siege is Dr. Clay Hallberg, Oelwein's leading physician . . . In the tradition of James Agee's writings on Depression-era sharecroppers, Reding displays the faces of the damned in broken-capillary close-ups . . . Too many scenes of sulfurous agony might chase away the most calloused, ambitious reader, so Reding recounts these nightmares sparingly, surrounding them with stretches of patient journalism tracing the convergence of social vectors that made the meth plague nearly inevitable and its eradication well-nigh impossible. He details, with blunt statistics and apt anecdotes, the vanishing of educated young males from rural Iowa, as well as the butchering of middle-class jobs at the local packing plant . . . '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 Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally, wasted . . . What's clear is that the golden rolling heartland that Americans used to think symbolized stability beats fitfully and irregularly still and almost certainly remains inclined to seek out sources of chemical optimism. And no one, least of all Reding, who knows what's what on an intimate, human level as well as on the astral plane of globalism, can tell us where it will all end.--Walter Kirn, The New York Times Book Review 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

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.--The Wall Street Journal

A central myth of our national culture . . . Small-town residents, the story goes, are honest, hard-working, religiously observant and somehow just more American than the rest of America . . . 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 . . . 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 . . . He] 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 . . . began to see their earnings cut and their benefits disappear. Undocumented migrants began taking jobs at extraordinarily low wages, thereby d