‘Methland’ dispels small town myth

A central myth of our national culture has been 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, hard-working, 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, in 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 more than 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. 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 tracks the decline —- and, ultimately, the limited resurgence —- of Oelwein while 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 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.

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.

Nonfiction

Methland: The Death and Life of An American Small Town

By Nick Reding. Bloomsbury.

255 pages. $25