Beth Rickers, Worthington Daily Globe

OELWEIN, Iowa — Nick Reding’s book is filled with colorful characters: an addict who blows up his mother’s house; a doctor battling his own demons while he tries to save his patients; a mayor determined to revitalize his deteriorating town; a former gang member struggling to overcome his drug habit; even the sister of a famous comedian who reigns over a drug empire.

But Reding didn’t write a fictional novel. “Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town,” is based on four years of research and interviews with the residents of Oelwein, population 6,126, located in northeast Iowa. And the problems that are de-tailed in the book — not just the use of crystal methamphetamine but the economic, cultural, political and social problems that Reding realizes are interconnected with the use of that drug — are all too real.

“When I first started out, I had the idea that I would write a book about a small town with a meth problem, as opposed to writing a book about meth,” Reding explained during a recent phone interview. “I sort of set out to figure out what was going on and was sort of surprised by where it went.”

A resident of St. Louis, Mo., who spent a decade in New York City before returning to his home, Reding has connections to both Iowa — his dad grew up in Algona — and to Worthington — he is the nephew of Jan and Russ Rickers, the son of Jan’s brother. By the time he paid his first visit to Oelwein, he’d been observing the rise of meth, particularly in rural areas, since 1999. As he traveled for various writing assignments, he noticed the drug’s expanding influence.

“I really wanted to write this book, and for a long time, I had a very hard time selling it,” Reding recalled. “In fact, my first agent wouldn’t even try to sell the proposal I had written. Her exact words were, ‘Nobody knows what meth is, and nobody cares about small town America.’ That was back in 2001. I wanted to sell the book, because, first, it did keep coming up everywhere I went. No. 2, I thought it was a good story.”

In the face of those rejections, Reding put the concept on the back burner for a while, but his interest was rekindled upon when coming face to face with two meth addicts — from very diverse backgrounds — at a bar during a hunting trip.

“Meeting those two guys really changed it for me,” Reding said, “from, ‘Wow, this is a good story,’ to — I don’t like the term moral obligation, but that is what it really felt like.”

As a result of his initial research and some happenstance, Oelwein became the focus of the book.

“By 2005, many law enforcement officers were being quoted in newspapers predicting that the state of Iowa would soon take over from my native Missouri as the leading producer of so-called mom-and-pop methamphetamine in the United States,” writes Reding in the book’s prologue. “For this reason … I’d been focusing my research on the state from which half my family comes, and which seemed poised to become the newest meth capital of America. One day, while poring over archived newspaper articles in The Des Moines Register, I came across an interesting quote made by a doctor in the northeast part of the state. I called the doctor one after-noon from my apartment in New York City. We talked for an hour and a half, during which the doctor began to change my thinking about meth as a crime story to one that has much more pervasive and far-reaching implications. What struck me most was his description of meth as ‘a sociocultural cancer.’”

That doctor, Clay Hallberg, lived in Oelwein. And soon Reding found himself en route to the community, the first of many visits over the next few years. Hallberg became one of the central characters in “Methland,” along with Nathan Lein, an Oelwein native who returned home to take the job of assistant county prosecutor, a job that entails prosecuting countless meth-related cases.

Then there’s Roland Jarvis, the meth addict and cook who, in his drugged paranoia, blew up his mother’s house in the winter of 2001.

“A divorced 35-year-old father of four who’d been making meth since the mid-1990s and using the drug since he was 16, Jarvis had been in jail all but three of the last 10 years. He did not want to go back,” Reding relates about the incident. “So bottle by bottle and container by container, he poured down the floor drain in the floor of his mother’s basement the chemicals he had stored there: anhydrous ammonia, Coleman lantern fluid, denatured alcohol and kerosene. Finally, he poured two gallons of hydrochloric acid down the drain. Then he lit a cigarette.”

The resulting explosion almost burned Jarvis alive, incinerating his fingers and his nose as well as melting the skin off his body.

Although she isn’t from Oelwein — instead hails from Ottumwa to the south — Reding also got to know Lori Arnold, sister of co-median Tom Arnold, through a correspondence while she was incarcerated in federal prison. In the late 1980s, Arnold ran a meth-making and distribution empire in Iowa.

“She was, she says, one of the main employers in Ottumwa, and a benevolent one, at that,” Reding writes. “She donated plenty of money to the local police and to the county sheriff. She planned to open a day care center and video game arcade next to the Wild Side, so local kids would have somewhere to go while their parents were in the bar. Together, Lori and meth were an antidote to the small-town sense of isolation, the collective sense of depression and low morale that had settled on Ottumwa since most farms went belly-up, the railroad closed, and the boys at the meatpacking plant lost their jobs.”

There are a lot more stories that Reding shares in “Methland” that drive home the point that meth is a real problem in the heart-land of America and one that is intertwined with other problems, including the consolidation of agricultural industries and immi-gration. Although he initially had a hard time generating interest in the book’s premise, it has done well since publication in June, debuting at No. 22 on The New York Times nonfiction best-sellers list in July. It has been reviewed favorably in major newspapers and magazines around the country.

In Oelwein, however, not everyone is a fan. Some residents claim that Reding sensationalized their community’s meth problem. And even though he details the community’s tactics toward revitalization of the town, some say the book has hampered those ef-forts.

“I actually went to Oelwein on July 20 to have sort of a town hall meeting to address this whole thing,” Reding said during the phone interview. “We had planned to do that a long time before the book came out. It was only fair that people get to tell me to my face what they think. In some ways, the town is the principle character. I think the reception was pretty harsh, but by the time the three hours was done of them asking questions, I think it turned out really well. I haven’t gotten any more death threats.”

During the course of his research, Reding developed strong friendships with both Hallberg and Lein and continues to talk with both men on a regular basis. Another “benefit” that came out of the book was a pilgrimage to his dad’s hometown of Algona.

“That was honestly on the top of the list of the best things to come out of this book was to go to Dad and Aunt Jan’s hometown for the first time,” said Reding, who hadn’t been there since he was a lad too young to remember. “It was the perfect opportunity and one of the coolest days I have spent doing anything in my whole life.”

Reding said “Methland” had generated politicized reviews on both sides of the spectrum, but he didn’t start out with any agenda except trying to expose the meth epidemic that exists across the country, its causes and implications.

“I think my No. 1 hope would be that people understand that it’s just a symptom of a much larger reality, that in many ways, eco-nomically and socially and culturally and politically, there are some really major problems in the United States, and a lot of them begin and end with the way we treat our own people in terms of how we pay them and what we pay them and for what we pay them,” he said. “I always hope that people would understand it is not morally or ethically acceptable for some businesses to operate in the manner in which they do. Meth is really an excuse to see that. That’s what I would hope.”

By Elizabeth Taylor

October 31, 2009

In Oelwein, Iowa, Nick Reding found the bleeding heart of the nation. Most may regard this part of the world as “flyover country,” but Reding saw it as an iconic place where a town four square blocks, with fewer than 7,000 residents, 13 churches, a refurbished Main Street and a new library could be a prime example of how the drug war had come to rural America.

Reding came upon this story about a decade ago, in the course of working on another one. He found himself in a bar with some night road workers, high on meth, and was compelled by what he heard. It took Reding several years to interest a publisher, but undeterred, he continued his effort. He eventually moved from New York to St. Louis, not far from the town where he grew up. Oelwein, with its crumbling economy and falling tax revenue, had became a premier distribution hub and a production facility for meth, a drug that basically could be made with fertilizer, cold pills and what Reding calls a “ninth grade knowledge of chemistry.”

What began as a search for the effect of a drug on one town led to an exploration of how the hollowed-out Midwest was fertile ground for methamphetamine and why it was so resistant to eradication. Over four years, Reding immersed himself in Oelwein and wrote about an ensemble of locals. He writes with care and sensitivity, with a keen eye for the subtle nuances in behavior as well as an ear for the cadence in regional Midwestern accents that distinguish the players in this drama. Reding portrayed a town full of perplexing, inspiring and very real characters: a doctor with demons, a struggling mayor, an addict who blows up his mother’s house and even the sister of an oafish comedian who once reigned over a vast drug manufacturing and distribution system.

Much like the contradictory heartland, this book explores the idea that heartbreak and redemption can coexist in small-town America. “There is a real sense of hope,” Reding explains. “Nowhere is the sense of self-reliance and resilience stronger than the heartland, but that is a lot of onus to put on a town. A town can’t always save itself when what they’re part of is flawed. Just as a meth addict can’t save himself in a place where there is no treatment, there are no jobs.”

Winner of this year’s Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction, Nick Reding’s wonderful book, “Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town,” evokes elements of “Winesburg, Ohio” in its depiction of small-town life, but with a very modern twist. “Oelwein is fundamentally a small town grappling with an era of globalization,” Reding says. “Meth is a symptom and a lens of that.”

Kyle McAuley interviews Nick Reding, December 2009

The writer on his book Methland, why newspapers got the meth crisis wrong, and how the “middle of America” will pull itself out of a twenty-five year bust.

Between 1983 and 2005, U.S. newspapers called seventy separate American towns the “Meth Capital of the World.” Following a late 2004 report in the Oregonian detailing the flourishing domestic methamphetamine trade, the media seized on the drug and its prevalent use in rural areas. It was pronounced an “epidemic.” But like a tweaker’s high, interest burnt out quickly, and these same papers started questioning whether meth was really as dire as urban addictions to heroin or crack. The Oregonian received a nomination for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, but lost to a New York Times series on fatal accidents at railway crossings. Small-town America, and reports of the meth epidemic, disappeared.

Nick Reding sought to change that. His Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town traces the four years he spent in Oelwein, Iowa, a town of 6,776 with one of the worst meth problems in the state. As before, the media is agape. “The madness stalking tiny, defenseless Oelwein may eventually come for all of us,” the New York Times Book Review declared in an article this summer. “Reding’s unflinching look at a drug’s rampage through the heartland stands out in an increasingly crowded field, ” Publishers Weekly belched.

But reactions like this reverse Reding’s priorities, putting the meth problem first and the town second. Reding first learned of Oelwein (pronounced OL-wine) through an article in the Des Moines Register where a doctor from the town called meth “a sociocultural cancer.” “That’s a smart thing to have said about meth,” Reding thought. He made a few calls and got the doctor on the phone on a Saturday. That Wednesday, he was driving north from Cedar Rapids to Oelwein. Over the course of Reding’s time there, the doctor, Clay Hallberg, became one of the principal characters in Methland, giving Reding a window into struggles to combat the town’s widespread meth addiction even as Hallberg struggled with his own alcoholism.

Reding describes the process of slowly gaining access to his characters’ private lives as a winding trail of phone calls and meetings. Often, the right person was just the one willing to talk most—someone like “Roland Jarvis” (lawyers requested his real name not be used). Jarvis is a meth addict whose rickety lab blew up his parents’ house, melted off most of his face and skin, and burned off his fingers and nose. “I’d be a liar to tell you when I first met Roland,” says Reding, “that I didn’t think that from a journalistic standpoint it was a home run.”

As a native Missourian, Reding doesn’t hide his love for the heartland and its people. The Colbert Report had cancelled an interview a few days before we spoke, but he didn’t seem to care. “It’s sixty-two degrees here during the day, the leaves are changing, bow season opened up a week ago, and I would much rather be here to hunt and hang out with my son and my wife.”

—Kyle McAuley for Guernica

Guernica: In the book, you talk about Oelwein as just any other American small town. How did you choose Oelwein? It couldn’t have escaped your notice that Iowa is where politicking starts.

Nick Reding: The only assumptions I made regarding Iowa’s place as a supposed bellwether was that people might give whatever I found there more credence—which, of course, I wanted. [But] I read a quote by Clay Hallberg one day describing meth as “a sociocultural cancer,” and thought, “Oh, that’s a smart thing to have said about meth. I wonder if he’ll pick up his phone.” That’s how I found Oelwein.

Guernica: What do politicians stand to gain in places like Oelwein that you or the media at large doesn’t?

Nick Reding: By definition, anything that’s covered over and over is no longer news; it’s old news. By contrast, doing right by the little guy out there in Oelwein is a favor that always sells in politics.

Guernica: Your book reads like you have a lot of sympathy for Oelwein.

Nick Reding: Writing is an exercise in manipulation—not in the negative sense, but clearly you have to define what you think, and then convince other people to see things the same way.

My friends’ reaction was fucking offensive. It was basically like, “What do you care about a bunch of trash making drugs in Iowa?”

Guernica: How, then, did you find your way into these people’s living rooms, into their private lives?

Nick Reding: A classic case is Roland Jarvis. I mean, he has fucked up in a lot of ways. He has done some really bad things. But at the end of the day, he’s a pretty good guy. He’s an easy guy to spend a few hours with. He’s a smart guy, got a good sense of humor.

Guernica: How did your colleagues react to the idea of you writing about meth in Iowa and Idaho?

Nick Reding: There were basically two reactions. One was, “Why would you want to go to Gooding, Idaho, again?” They’re my friends, so I don’t think about them as being jerks, but I’m a little bit loath to say what they said because it was fucking offensive. “Why do you care about a bunch of trash making drugs in Iowa?” The other reaction was, “Wow, I bet you’re gonna see some fucked up things.”

Guernica: There came a point in 2005 or 2006 where there was a suspicion that the meth epidemic was overblown.

Nick Reding: I think I probably clicked my heels a little bit when I heard people say that the whole thing had been overblown. To me, I had plenty of proof that was bullshit.

Guernica: Is it fair to say that you believe that the media tends to neglect small towns? In reviews, you’ve been called an “alarmist.”

Nick Reding: It’s not like meth is the fault of NBC and ABC and Reuters. I think they certainly could have dug deeper, but by not doing so, they sure allowed me a great little vein to mine. The meth epidemic had been oversimplified into one thing, which was, “Isn’t it crazy that people can make a drug in their sink?” I think the reaction was less to meth and Middle America than it was to the uni-dimensional nature of the coverage. And when people started to say, “Okay, where’s the evidence for this?” they discovered that the evidence was deeply flawed. One of the only sources of evidence about a drug epidemic comes from “studies,” which are themselves scientifically and logically flawed. So of course it looks like hocus pocus. Very few reporters are actually spending four years in Oelwein, Iowa. That is the privilege of writing a book. It’s certainly not the money. If you can get yourself in that position, you can get a good long while to look at something.

I thought, “Okay man, if everything goes right this guy is basically going to let me into his life. Then what am I going to do? Is it okay that I’m going to this man’s house in hopes that he’ll open up to me and that someday he’ll be reading about himself?”

Guernica: I’m reminded of how there was doubt in the eighties that AIDS was real or that it affected people other than gay men until more studies were done and media coverage intensified. Meth, though, is not in your bloodstream forever. Will we come to a point where there isn’t any doubt that it’s a public health problem?

Nick Reding: I think it is considered a public health problem, but there are caveats, some of which still exist with regard to AIDS. On some level, AIDS is still considered to be the disease of the “other.” Take black urban males and Hispanic rural males. There’s a correlation between those two demographics and rising AIDS infection. And yet it’s easy to say, “But I’m not a Hispanic rural male.” It’s the same with meth. At the same time we are able to say, “This is a public health problem.” We’re able to think, “This is a public health problem for a bunch of fucking tweakers.”

Guernica: As a writer interviewing tweakers, you’re essentially doing the opposite of making them “other.”

Nick Reding: I remember calling Roland from my motel room. I’d finally got him on the phone, and he said, “If you want to talk to me, you better come over.” I pretty much wanted to throw up the whole time I was driving to his house. I wasn’t looking forward to it. I didn’t want to meet him, man. I didn’t want to go in his house. I don’t know why. I wasn’t scared of him. I didn’t think less of him. I think that’s a reaction people have to new situations no matter what you expect. I thought, “Okay, man, if everything goes right, this guy is basically going to let me into his life. Then what am I going to do? Is it okay that I’m going to this man’s house in hopes that he’ll open up to me and that someday he, and a lot of other people, will be reading about himself?”

Guernica: But that’s your vocation.

Nick Reding: You’re not there because everything is going so great in Roland Jarvis’s life. Whether or not we got along with each other, I was still writing down everything he said. The intimacy of it is a little sickening.

Guernica: I listened to a public radio panel where you were on with an addiction counselor and the Deputy Director of San Diego’s Health and Human Services Agency. People would call in and talk about their or their friends’ experiences with meth addiction.

Nick Reding: In a lot of these radio interviews, people treat me as though I’m an addiction counselor. I’ve thought on a few occasions, “This feels a little irresponsible when people say, my son is on Ritalin, does that mean he’ll be addicted to meth?” My wife always says, “How come nobody asks you about your book?” (Laughs)

Guernica: Your book begins and ends with scenes of airplane travel. In the second, you’re flying from San Jose to JFK, and three hours into your flight, you’re trying to pluck Oelwein out of the cluster of lights dotting the heartland. Did your work on this book have a similar trajectory? Did working on Methland make a lot of the impersonal aspects of the meth epidemic personal for you?

You’re not there because everything is going so great in Roland Jarvis’s life. Whether or not we got along with each other, I was still writing down everything he said. The intimacy of it is a little sickening.

Nick Reding: Yeah, beginning most profoundly with a night in Greenville, Illinois, where I decided I would try to sell this book again. It was one of the few really clear moments with this book—and, honestly, in my life, period. I met these two guys [one of whom was an aspiring meth dealer], and that was it. I felt like I knew all of a sudden the context into which they fit. Doing the reporting for the book reacquainted me with a place that I had left half a lifetime before. I left home when I was eighteen and came back when I was thirty-six. I was looking for the place that my home occupies in the world—and what space do I occupy? Why is it that I’m yearning for this again? That flight from San Jose to JFK in August of 2005 was like the bar in Greenville, one of those defining, clear moments. I have some real misgivings about having my personal whatever in the book. But when I was writing it, there was this melding of my own path with the story. You spend four years with these people, and it becomes complicated. Are they characters in the book, or are they your friends? It makes me a little queasy to see how much of me there is in this book, but that’s just how it came out. It felt right to me.

Guernica: So what happens to the place you’re from? What happens to small towns?

Nick Reding: I don’t know what happens. That’s what this next book is going to be about.

Guernica: How are you framing this next book?

Nick Reding: That’s what I’ll be trying to do for the rest of the day and probably for the rest of the month—frame it in a true and logical and saleable way. One of the fascinating things to me is that a town like Oelwein is doing pretty well. They have completely succeeded in getting all of their small-time lab production out of town. Where has it gone? It’s gone to the next town about eleven miles away. Around here, you can have a town that’s doing fine and a town ten miles away that will probably not have any people left in it in twenty years. This is a bust cycle, and it is not to be viewed as the end of the middle of the country, but I think it is to be viewed as one of a long series of cataclysmic changes. So the question is, “Where do we go from here?” My guess is that the ones that are going to make it will do so through fairly intense localized diversification. Will that mean that some of them become railroad towns again? I don’t really know what the answer is, but I know what the questions are.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: I don’t know how much of what’s on the internet is true, but I read that some residents of Oelwein were pretty angry about the book, in part because they hadn’t had access to copies of it yet and were relying on media coverage. Have things calmed down as more residents have read the book and become aware of Methland’s broader concerns?

Nick Reding: I think that things have calmed down significantly. Early June, the Oelwein librarian and mayor and I don’t know who else decided they wanted to have a townhall meeting, knowing that there would be a reaction to the book. It was set for July 20th. The book came out in mid-June, and by July 20th there were a lot of really mad people. I was getting all kinds of threats, lots of emails. Oddly enough, few of them came from people who lived in Oelwein, it was always from people who had lived in Oelwein and moved away twenty-five years before. That’s based on the emails and phone calls I got. The threats, I don’t know who they came from because they were, you know, too big of a coward to tell me who they were.

In any event, we had this townhall meeting, which I thought was a good idea, because the town’s the number one character in this book. All 6,000 or 7,000 people didn’t agree to let me write about their town, so I thought they had a right to tell me what they thought about the book. As it turned out, it was one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had. There were three television crews, four hundred people showed up, and they just asked me questions for three hours. There was a lot of hostility, but what became very clear very quickly was that most of them hadn’t read the book.

Oelwein doesn’t have a bookstore, the library had three copies of the book, and by the time I got to town there was a forty-six person waiting list for those three books. The nearest bookstore was forty miles away and they were sold out. Amazon was sold out. Nobody could get the book. What they relied on were book reviews and stuff on the internet, all of which concentrated on Roland Jarvis and said nothing about Oelwein’s recovery. It was a roomful of people who thought I had told the world that Oelwein was the most meth-addicted place on earth, and hadn’t had a chance to find out otherwise.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: I’ve read a little bit about that townhall meeting. How’d it go?

Nick Reding: It was intense. It turned out great, though. About halfway through this elderly lady stood up with the book in her hand and I thought, “oh man, I’m about to get reamed by an eighty-year-old woman.” But it turned out that what she said was, “if you haven’t read the book you have no right to criticize. And if you have read it and you think every word isn’t true then you’ve got your head buried in the sand.” As soon as she said that it kind of opened the drain valve on all this other emotion. The sole addiction specialist in the town of Oelwein came up to the front of the room and just reiterated what the woman said. And then a cop stood up and said the same.

One of the weird things is that the only person I wrote about who won’t acknowledge the book in any way is the police chief. So, at this townhall meeting there was no police presence. There was no acknowledgement that it had ever taken place. Had I been able to plan it knowing that, I would have done it differently, but I still don’t know what his deal is. He hasn’t said he’s mad, he hasn’t said anything.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: You forged relationships with a few of the residents of Oelwein that seemed more than strictly journalistic. I’m thinking mainly of Nathan Lein and Clay Hallberg. Have you kept in touch with any of those folks since finishing the book?

Nick Reding: Yeah, I have. In fact, at this townhall meeting Clay was on one side of me at the table and Nathan was on the other. The mayor was supposed to be there, but he wasn’t. I consider all three of those friends. Nathan and Clay, in particular. Now that I don’t write down everything they say we’ve been allowed by circumstance to become friends.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Have you gotten any sense of how they’ve received the book? Did they feel that Oelwein was fairly represented?

Nick Reding: I’ll tell you, when I got the very first copies of the book I sent one to every person who was a major character in the book. I was really, really nervous about that whole process, but particularly about Clay and Nathan. I mean, we talked ad nauseum over the course of four and a half years. I sent them my first book and said, “imagine that the two main characters are you guys. Are you sure it’s okay that I say this? Are you sure it’s okay that I say that?” And every time they’d say, “well, yeah, I told it to you.” But I knew that nobody’s ever prepared to be written about, and nobody’s ever prepared to read about themselves. Because who could be? And, frankly, I joke with them now because with all the publicity the book’s gotten, I’m in their shoes. I mean, I told them, “you’re never gonna be prepared,” but I wasn’t either.

In any event, I sent a copy to Clay and Nathan and I told myself that I wasn’t gonna call them. That if I wasn’t hearing from them it’s because they hadn’t read it or they’d read it and needed some time to cool down. But I couldn’t resist after ten days and I called Nathan and said, “y’know, did you get the book or what?” And he said, “when I saw that the first two words of chapter one are Nathan Lein, I became angry.” So I said, “well, what did you think? I mean, the whole book is Nathan Lein. You’re the main character, man.”

Anyway, the point is that Clay and Nathan and I have remained good friends, but there was a period in there where we had to work at it a little bit. They were both kind of shocked. But Nathan has said repeatedly that everything in the book is one hundred percent true. And Clay said the biggest thing that I’m proud of, that he actually learned things about the town that he grew up in that he didn’t know. He also said that the portrayal of him in the book actually made him want to close the family practice and devote himself entirely to working in the emergency room.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer:  What do you think about the media reception to Methland thus far? It could be just me, but it seems like a disproportionate amount of coverage has concentrated on the more sensational stuff, especially Roland Jarvis’ story of blowing himself up in a methlab.

Nick Reding: People like to keep things simple. The only paper that really covered all of the stuff in the book is the only remaining freestanding weekly book review that I’m aware of, The New York Times Book Review. That’s because they’ve got the space to write that long of a review. Most papers don’t, so they concentrate on the most pyrotechnic parts of it. That’s my only explanation for it.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Did you consciously balance the sensational elements with the more analytic material?

Nick Reding: Yeah, I did what I thought was the most honest portrayal possible. I’d be a liar to tell you when I first met Roland that I didn’t think that from a journalistic standpoint it was a home run. I mean, it just was. If you’re gonna hitch your buggy to anybody it’s gonna have to be Roland. It was the same way when I met Clay, because he was probably the most quotable person I’ve ever been around, and I found the dichotomies of his life fascinating. The same with Nathan. And, frankly, the same with the mayor.

But back to the Roland thing. The parts of the book that were the most interesting to me to report on were the big picture stuff and the everyday lives of the non-addicts. But I knew that I had to come up with a face for meth, and that’s Roland. And I had to come up with something that would keep people reading, so that it was not just too much economic analysis. So, enter Roland.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Some of your critics have latched onto claims that Methland is rife with factual inaccuracies. As far as I can tell, there aren’t that many, and they’re pretty minor – misidentifying the largest city in Iowa, for instance – but they’ve created a bit of a furor on the internet. What’s your reaction to these claims?

Nick Reding: Well, I’m embarrassed that I called Iowa City the largest city in Iowa. It’s embarrassing. It’s a mistake. I don’t really have any defense for it, except that I was wrong and it’s easy to fix in the paperback. The reality of the book business is that every hardcover has errors that are fixed in the paperback. The other reality is that journalism is less about fact than it is people’s opinion about fact. For instance, are there 6,126 in Oelwein or are there 6, 772? Well, there are two different census figures. So, if I pick one of those and exclude the other, which I have to do, than am I a liar? I wouldn’t say so, but I have to pick the one of those that I think is right.

But it gets more complicated the more you get into it. There was a whole section of the crowd in the Oelwein townhall meeting which was made up of former and still-using tweakers. There was a guy who said when I was signing his book that he had just gotten out of prison 16 hours before, and he was tweaked out of his gourd. No question about it. Not that his physical attributes should be used to prove the fact that he was tweaking, but he was an Aryan nation white guy, shaved head, Nazi tats, super-muscular, hardcore tweaker, and he was telling me that the book was right on. And the thing that was so interesting about it was that there were people five feet from him who wanted to say that there is no meth in Oelwein, Iowa. To those people who are willing to look at the tweaker next to them and say there’s no meth, well, my book is a lie. That’s when opinion as fact comes into play. So, my reaction is to look at it philosophically and say, “okay, I understand your point, but I’m not swayed by it.”

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Here in Denver, we’ve seen the Montana Meth Project’s billboards popping up all over town. One of my favorites shows a picture of a bloody sink and a razor blade with the tagline “NO ONE THINKS THEY’LL TRY TO TEAR OFF THEIR OWN SKIN. METH WILL CHANGE THAT.” What do you think of the efficacy of that sort of scare campaign?

Nick Reding: You know, I’ve been asked that question before and I really don’t know the answer. I would frame my answer by saying that anything that people wish to try, I would never criticize. Their hearts are in the right place. Because we’re talking about a problem that is really a symptom of a much larger one, I think that whatever you do that only treats the topical nature of the problem is ultimately not gonna have an effect on the cause. But I would never criticize someone for doing what they think is right.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: They always seem kind of reductive to me, in that they don’t talk about any of those larger problems, and make meth only an issue of personal culpability, removing the socioeconomic side. It seems a kind of sleight-of-hand.

Nick Reding: What’s frustrating, and it hasn’t happened yet, but I know it’s going to, is that people are going to say, “well, look, Oelwein came back, so really it’s up to these places to take care of themselves, to fix themselves.” I can already hear Representative Souder saying that exact thing. That’s gonna be their political takeaway, I fear, to say “look, if only you try hard enough you can lift yourself up by your bootstraps.”

Well, you can’t continue to do that ad infinitum when the sky is being lowered closer and closer to your head. If you have no room to stand up, bootstraps or not, you can’t do it. That’s what I’m bracing myself for.

If, in fact, anybody continues to give a shit about this book, which they may or may not.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Along with the billboards, we’ve also been subjected to lots of rhetoric by public officials claiming that meth is uniquely addictive and destructive, more so even than crack-cocaine and heroin. I’ve lived through too many drug scares not to be a little skeptical. What’s your take, having studied it for four years?

Nick Reding: I don’t think there’s a way to prove that one way or another. I think any addiction specialist would have a hard time proving that any one drug is more powerful than another. However, to me, it’s reasonable to suggest that something that keeps you more profoundly high for a longer time is, in fact, very possibly more addictive than something that doesn’t. And meth definitely fills the bill. There’s no comparison to crack or cocaine in that way. The longevity and intensity of the high just isn’t comparable.

But does that mean that everybody who does meth once is addicted? Of course not. I’ve met all kinds of meth addicts. I’ve met very few meth addicts who don’t have most of their teeth. That whole meth-mouth thing is bullshit. I’ve met recreational users of meth. I’ve met people who’ve been long term every-now-and-again users. But, also, I would say that a disproportionate number of people who are addicts went through every other drug first, and when they finally met meth, that’s where the buck stopped. I think that speaks very strongly to its power.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Rumor has it that you had to change the names of a few of the folks in Methland, and named one of the town’s worst addicts after one of your publisher’s lawyers. Would you mind telling the story?

Nick Reding: Yeah, I did. I had sent the final draft in and the book was done. I mean, I know that when a book is done the first thing you get is a publicist and the second thing is a lawyer, but the book was done. And I did not anticipate, and nobody I knew anticipated what ended up happening, which was that three days before Thanksgiving this guy calls me and says that, “hey, I’m the lawyer and if I don’t put my stamp on this manuscript it won’t get published.” To which, I said, “okay, well thanks for making it clear what the stakes are here. What can I do for you?” Well he told me that the entire book constituted an invasion of privacy, and the only way to get around that was to change the name of the town, the state that it was in, and the names and physical attributes of every person in the book, which are about twenty-five people. To which I responded, “are you kidding me?”

It was terrible. We’d just moved into this house. It was like a hundred and something years old and it was getting cold, just before Thanksgiving, and we had a bunch of squirrels living between the second and third floor. I would be at home, on the phone, talking to this guy, and listening to these goddamned squirrels running back and forth in the floorboards. My wife was pregnant, and we had all these unpacked boxes. There was a lot going on and I didn’t need that on top of it. Plus the buck opener was on Thanksgiving Day, and I wanted to be ready.

Anyway, I’m a pretty even-keel guy, or at least I try to be, but we spent days arguing on the phone about it. And he never got riled up, but there was one point where he said, “I can understand why it is that you are feeling emotional; however I would feel better if you would stop referring to me as Mr. Unethical Shitbag.” I’m really a pretty mellow guy, but I’d just got to the point where I just, I referred to him as “Mr. Unethical Shitbag.”

Anyway, what we argued down to was only changing the names of about four people. So, just because I wanted to follow directions to a T, I named one of them after him. And when I called him and told him his only reaction was, “touché.”

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: You have been quoted as saying that Wild Turkey is the unofficial sponsor of Methland. Have you always been a bourbon man?

Nick Reding: I have always been a bourbon man. You have to be if you’re from Missouri; it’s an obligation. And I still am a bourbon man, but I don’t get a chance to drink it as often as I would like. Not to put too serious a spin on it, but as you’ve probably read in my book, my wife is a recovering alcoholic, so bourbon is something we don’t keep in the house. Which is good for everyone, probably. But, you know, occasionally I’ll get let out of the coop and have a little bit.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Lastly, what do you have in the works for your next project?

Nick Reding: It’s gonna be a book about immigration, and it’s gonna be centered in the middle of the country. But to be honest with you, I’m trying to keep my book proposal as vague as possible, to give myself as much wiggle room as possible as I go. I’m not being coy, but that’s about all I know.

Reding’s account is a nuanced look at meth, a drug almost ignored for two decades by the big-city newspapers as it ripped through small-town America, and how the efforts to combat meth were horribly bungled by federal policymakers and stymied by pharmaceutical lobbyists.

Reding stumbled into the story in 1999, when he was on assignment in Idaho and found himself late one night in a bar full of road workers high on methamphetamine. Reding started researching the devastating

(Jim Carr, The Denver Post )

effects of meth on small towns in the American heartland.

Reding attempted to put together an earlier book project, but a New York literary agent cut him down. “My agent at the time told me, ‘No one knows what methamphetamine is, and nobody cares about small-town America,’ ” Reding said in a telephone interview as he drove from his home in St. Louis to Oelwein to start his book tour.

Methamphetamine was developed by a Japanese chemist in 1898 but was made popular by the Nazis during World War II. Often referred to as “crank” or “ice,” the highly addictive drug allows users to stay up and work for days straight. Made from pseudoephedrine and harsh industrial chemicals, the drug has devastating health consequences for its users.

Reding persevered and found Oelwein, a dying farming town of 6,000 that had been ravaged by the methamphetamine addiction and where the local cops were busting a meth lab every four days.

Starting in 2005, Reding spent three years visiting Oelwein, meeting an amazing cast of characters, from Clay Hallberg, an alcoholic doctor whose family practice was swamped with meth addicts, to Nathan Lein, a county attorney prosecuting meth-related crimes, and Larry Murphy, the mayor of Oelwein, who was desperately trying to save his dying town.

Reding hung out with addicts and drug dealers, including Lori Arnold, the sister of comedian Tom Arnold, who once ran a multimillion-dollar meth ring in nearby Ottumwa.

The book details families ripped apart by addiction. In 2003 and 2004, Iowa authorities found more than 700 children living in homes where meth labs had been broken up by the police. Reding documents horror stories of neglected and sexually abused children, as well as children born with serious health problems due to their parents’ meth use.

Complex picture

Reding’s portrait of Oelwein is not simplistic and involves such major players as the big agricultural conglomerates and the big pharmaceutical companies. Conglomerates like ConAgra were responsible for gutting the good union meatpacking jobs in Iowa. The major pharmaceutical companies have refused to stop making cold medicine with pseudoephedrine, which would wipe out domestic meth labs.

Reding started reporting on Oelwein after he met Clay, the philosophical family doctor. “I got a call from Clay. I knew from that moment that Oelwein was my town. Clay told me, ‘You come out here and if I think you’re OK, I’ll introduce you to people like Roland Jarvis, who is basically a poster boy for meth addiction.’ ”

Jarvis’ is the story of the death of industry and the rise of meth in Oelwein. Twenty years ago, Jarvis started doing meth to work overtime at his meatpacking plant to pay for his wedding. The union was then busted and his hourly wages were slashed from $20 a hour to $6. He started making meth in his mother’s house, and in a paranoid accident, blew up the building, burning off his nose, most of his fingers and skin. When Jarvis is not in jail, he still smokes meth.

Small-town diseases

For Reding, meth becomes the symptom of despair over the economic malaise that has gripped small towns after they were stripped of good jobs and the family farms were almost wiped out.

But Oelwein may have found its own new beginning. In the past several years, a heavy-handed police chief named Logan busted many of Oelwein’s mom-and-pop meth labs. The mayor then pushed through $10 million worth of public works projects and the revitalization of Oelwein’s tiny business district and industrial park.

While Reding was covering Oelwein, meth finally got its moment in the national media, including a cover story in Newsweek and a long series of hard-hitting articles in the Oregonian newspaper. As quickly as it was picked up, meth was dropped as a news story. After the press flurry, there were cries that the “meth epidemic” was all a media creation.

Despite major Mexican drug gangs importing hundreds of millions of dollars of high- quality methamphetamine into the U.S. every year, the federal government’s Office of National Drug Control Policy has declared “the war on meth” was won. “When meth was on the verge of its biggest comeback, in 2007, that the war on the drug would be declared over was indicative of the federal government’s unwillingness to deal with reality,” Reding said.

After the mayor’s economic plan, Oelwein has undergone a small economic miracle, adding 600 jobs in the past several years. “They have a biotech firm making cancer drugs out of pigs’ ears with $20-an-hour wages,” said Reding.

Despite Oelwein’s new jobs, there is still plenty of high- quality Mexican meth around and plenty of meth addiction. “Has the economic resurgence in Oelwein caused the amount of meth to go down?” asked Reding. “One would have to say no.”

The grim statistics that indicate that meth is still causing great tragedy in Oelwein can be seen in the children being taken from their parents and/ or put under court supervision.

“Nathan Lein told me that as of June 15, of the 50 cases in his county of a ‘child in need of assistance,’ 37 involved methamphetamine,” said Reding.

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Methland author, Nick Reding was featured on July 8th edition of All Things Considered. Click here to listen to the interview.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: One of the things I like most about Methland is that it draws a complicated picture of the conditions that create methamphetamine use. Methland is not only about the spread of methamphetamines in the heartland, but also the economic decimation of the region, of which rampant methamphetamine use is a symptom. Were you surprised at the level of complexity of the issues surrounding meth use once you started to dig in?

Nick Reding: Yeah, I think I was. When I started out in 1999, I was much more interested in life in a small town with a meth problem, than I was in the idea of meth in a small town. So for me interest in the town came first, and meth came second. That’s the book that I ultimately was able to write, but that’s not the book I was able to sell. The one that I sold was meth as a true crime story. And that’s a very simple story. Find somebody who goes to jail and figure out why. I went through four iterations of that book and it wasn’t working for the reason that I didn’t want to be writing about meth in that way. I wanted to be writing about the town first and meth second. So ultimately my editor and I were able to get our minds together and change that.

When I first started reporting on this I had no idea what kinds of forces were out there in the world bearing down small towns. That was surprising to me. As I reported this meth thing and kept trying to do it as a crime story, I kept realizing that it was those things bearing down on Oelwein that were driving the meth market. So it was kind of a double eye-opener I got through the eight years it took me to write this book.

The ultimate conclusion to me was that meth was really a symptom of a larger issue. And that issue is one of economy. I was truly kind of amazed at how the economy and the everyday life of a town in Iowa are affected by those national, and really global, elements. And the meth market there is affected by those exact same things, so that they’ve become so interwoven together that they’re almost the same thing.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: For those who haven’t read the book, could you describe a little about some of the broader issues that affect the meth epidemic? The impact of corporate farming, illegal immigration, globalization, etc.?

Nick Reding: Really what it comes down to is that between the vertical monopoly and the economic consolidation of the food business, people are being paid less and less for jobs in that industry. So, if you pay people less and less, then there are fewer people who are willing to do this stuff, and people start to leave towns like Oelwein because they can’t make enough money. As people leave, and wage rates fall, there is less tax revenue, and as there is less tax revenue, you become less able to educate your children or even keep the streetlights on at night – in Oelwein even that was not a foregone conclusion. And then these food business companies, to cut the bottom line even further, bring in illegal immigrants to work. Because if you technically don’t exist then you have no rights, and the company can pay you whatever they want to, and you have no legal recourse to do anything about any sort of abuse. This further reduces the bottom line, and it further impoverishes the town. And as this is happening, organized crime in Mexico is using the same illegal immigrants to distribute their drugs.

In Oelwein, Iowa, the effect is that the wages are low, the people have left, there is no tax revenue, and the people who have come to take the few remaining jobs contribute absolutely nothing to an already battered economy, and are bringing in drugs. It’s a kind of perfect cycle of economic and social degradation.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Illegal immigration is a pretty hot button issue, especially around Denver right now. Have you met any resistance because you’re pointing out some of the realities that some don’t want to admit exist at all? Things like drugs coming in via illegal immigrants?

Nick Reding: Y’know, if I can sell it, that’s actually what my next book is gonna be about, and I’m kind of holding my breath over the next two weeks to see if that’ll work. But I expected for there to be much more conflict about that aspect of Methland, and, for whatever reason, nobody has really brought it up, except a few people have said that they didn’t realize that was a part of what was going on. I expected there to be a lot more angry people on both sides. People have been mad about enough other stuff that I don’t know what would stop them from being mad about that.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: What have people been most mad about?

Nick Reding: Interestingly, a lot of people who live in places like Salt Lake City, places that are not small towns by any means, have given me a lot of shit. I mean I’ve gotten a lot of emails that say “shame on you for writing about a drug in our small town.” And it’s funny because that sense of ownershio comes from guys in towns like Salt Lake City, which has to have a million people, and is a thousand miles away from Oelwein, Iowa, and is culturally very different. It’s kind of amazing. I’ve gotten a lot of negative stuff just for the fact that I’ve associated a drug with a small town.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: So it’s almost a sense of ownership about the myth of the small town rather than the small town itself?

Nick Reding: I think that’s right, yeah. And this is just my sort of theory, but I believe it’s because many of us, or our parents, or our parents’ parents, have come from these places and have either moved to the coasts or the Denvers or the Kansas Cities or the Salt Lakes of the world, and have brought with us this idea that everything is okay and will remain okay in the place we came out of. The only way I know how to explain that is that we all know the place we came into is not okay. Everybody accepts that things are fucked up Compton, Watts, the Bronx, Houston, wherever. We accept that things are not okay there, but we have a real hard time accepting that things are decidedly less okay in Oelwein, Iowa.

And that’s the truth. Statistically there is much higher likelihood of unemployment, of drug addiction, of household abuse, of all these things that we have somehow tricked ourselves into associating with the urban United States, in the rural United States. To me the whole trick is economics, and I don’t know why people don’t see that. Maybe it’s because they don’t spend time there. Or just because they don’t want to see it.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: The story of Oelwein seems almost ubiquitous. The decent jobs relocate elsewhere – usually overseas – and the small towns and medium-sized cities that depend upon them are left to go to hell. The solution seems fairly obvious to me: decent jobs need to be created to provide decent local economies. However, that would mean the dismantling of the global economy as we know it. Do you think there’s the political will in the current administration to take a serious run at agreements like NAFTA that create that global economy?

Nick Reding: I agree with you one hundred percent. I think that we are in a state that I would call late-stage capitalism where our economic system no longer adheres theoretically or realistically to a capitalist dynamic. It’s an oligarchic dynamic. What they don’t tell you in the manual of capitalism is that it has to be restarted every now and again. That’s what Theodore Roosevelt did, to some extent. But at this point all we’re doing is proving Marx right.

Is there political will to address some of these things? I don’t know. I think the man has got so many fucking problems right now that if he can see clear enough to kind of call a spade a spade on this I think it would be astonishing. I mean, the good news is that finally, after ten years, we’re beginning to look at domestic issues again as though they matter instead of these fucking wrong-headed wars. I think that there’s hope in that. But politics doesn’t support a culture of complexity. Politics supports a culture of simplicity. They have to say that meth is the problem; it’s actually not these other nineteen things that fit together, because if they admit it’s the nineteen things, well, then they have nineteen problems instead of one.

Whether it’s a question of political will or just a question of getting an SUV to do what a race car should do, government is slow and plodding and requires simple answers. For that reason I’m not sure anybody will see their way to doing what you and I think needs to be done.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Do you think it’s even possible to radically reform economic policy in such a way as to create and retain jobs in places like Oelwein?

Nick Reding: I think it’s possible to do, not through will, but through long-term reorganization. I’m thirty-seven, and in my lifetime things have reorganized themselves in the way that we now call globalization. Did somebody have the blueprint somewhere thirty-five years ago? I doubt it. But things have reorganized themselves. So I think it is possible. But it’s not going to happen because we say we need to correct this and here’s how.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Opposition to globalization is almost universal outside of Wall Street and Washington, and yet the concept has become nearly beyond criticism in the mainstream media. What do you think accounts for this disconnect?

Nick Reding: My guess is that it’s the same answer as the question about political will. If you completely rejiggered your manufacturing line from beer to bowling pins, and you’ve retrofitted all of your equipment from beer bottles to bowling pins, it’s hard to admit it’s not working. What’re you gonna do, retrofit to something entirely new? This is what we’ve committed to, a global economy. This is how we run things. The motivation to see that through is immense.

That would be one way of putting it. A more cynical view would be that we’re gonna run the ship into the fucking iceberg whether or not we know it’s there. And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I don’t think people are that evil. But I also think that government is run in one town and despite the fact that it’s run by people who are supposed to be representing the state of Indiana, for instance, or the state of Iowa, they spend the bulk of their time in a place that has nothing to do with Indiana or Iowa. I think it’s impossible for them to see the everyday effects of policy, so I think in a lot of ways their information is not up-to-date.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: What were you reading while you were working on Methland? Did you take a look at any other books dealing with the rural working class, like Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting with Jesus or Jim Goad’s A Redneck Manifesto?

Nick Reding: I’ve never even heard of those books, but they sound interesting. I actually kind of made it a point not to read much of anything that was not just part of the reporting. The reason is that when I wrote my first book, I loved Cormac McCarthy and I read a lot of his work, and when a friend read that first draft, he told me, “wow, you would win a Cormac McCarthy contest, but we have no idea what Nick Reding sounds like.” That was sort of my cue to start that book over.

The takeaway for me is that I am easily influenced and vulnerable to other people’s voices, and I’d best not read anything while writing one of my own books. So if it wasn’t some research oriented kind of shit, that or the New Yorker, I didn’t read it.

INDT Benjamin Whitmer: Did or do you have any interest of the anti-globalization stuff by Naomi Klein or Noam Chomsky?

Nick Reding: I do now, in this window between books, but I can’t tell you I’ve read them, because I haven’t. I’m the most poorly-read writer anybody will ever meet. I don’t read. I read the New York Times every morning, and I generally get through the New Yorker every week, selectively. If I read fiction, I read short stories. I haven’t finished a book literally in years.

The only defense that I have for myself is that I kind of know what I see and I try to figure out on my own what I think about it. I don’t read a lot of other people’s theories about how the world works. I just have this deal where I try to go out and figure it out on my own.

Reports of clandestine labs that could be set up anywhere, deadly explosions caused by the dangerous and toxic chemicals employed in these labs, the rapid spread of meth and advertising featuring horrific physical disfigurement caused by the drug fueled a widespread panic over methamphetamine. Worse yet, the meth problem didn’t seem to be confined to the urban ghettos that, at least within the public imagination, most other drugs are. Meth was everywhere, and it was on the brink of tearing society apart.

Journalist and author Nick Reding, whose book Methland (Bloomsbury, 255 pp, $31) chronicles one American small town’s struggle against methamphetamine at the height of the media panic surrounding the drug, spent parts of four years in Oelwein, Iowa—in what Reding calls America’s Midwest “flyover zone” between New York and Los Angeles—documenting the effects meth had in a rural environment, effects which are, he argues, far more devastating than in urban areas.

“In terms of the number of addicts per capita, there’ll never be more meth addicts in the state of Iowa than there are in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco alone,” he says over the phone from his home in St. Louis, “but Los Angeles and San Diego can absorb the associated costs of meth addiction much more than Oelwein, Iowa can, because they have much more access to tax revenue and funding and treatment and law enforcement and industry than a lot of the smaller places do.”

A significant part of the media sensation over meth, Reding explains, was due to the incredulousness of citizens over the fact that the drug was being used so heavily and was having such a devastating impact on American small towns.

“When you read media coverage during ‘03 and ‘04 and ‘05, the media was constantly, as I myself was, fascinated by the idea that there was a drug problem of any kind in the small-town United States,” he says. “I think in America everybody accepts the fact that in Compton or Watts or the Bronx or in Cabrini-Green in Chicago that things are not okay; they’re poor, they’re drug-addled. But it’s very difficult for us to accept that things might not be okay in Oelwein, Iowa—we don’t want to think about that. That’s one reason I chose to anchor this book in the small-town United States.”

In Methland, Reding introduces readers to some of Oelwein’s meth addicts, meth dealers and cooks, in addition to police, the town prosecutor and the town’s doctor, all of whom are attempting to thwart the scourge. In small-town America, Reding argues, the fact that wages are decreasing—which, as he shows, leads to individuals using meth for practical purposes so that they can work longer shifts—coupled with an already problematic lack of resources that continues to dwindle has led to the crisis he observed while in Oelwein.

“People don’t make any money anymore and there’s no tax revenue,” he says. “If there’s no tax revenue then things that people in other places take for granted such as how we’re going to pay the police force, how we’re going to keep the high school open, how we’re going to keep the hospital open, how we’re going to keep the streetlights on at night, those things are not forgone conclusions anymore; they’ve become difficult economic realities because you can’t do all of them anymore.”

Canada’s small towns have seen similar trends over the past decade. Even in a town like Drayton Valley, where the oil industry provides good wages to many in the town, meth made its presence felt. Referred to as “Drunken Valley” in a 2006 Edmonton Journal story about the town’s plans to clean up its image at the height of what came to be known as the meth epidemic, Drayton Valley struggled, as did many small towns in the area, with the social problems that come with drugs.

According to Liam C., a former addict and dealer who at one point was moving large quantities of meth through Drayton Valley, the town he lived in was characterized by the same type of circumstances which Reding spells out in Oelwein: the necessity of hard work and long hours combined with the lack of police resources to put a real dent in the problem once it started. When he was dealing, Liam explains, not only was he selling drugs to kids who wanted to party, he also serviced their parents.

“In Drayton Valley there were a lot of guys working out on the rigs,” he says, “so I’d have kids coming to me on the weekend to party and buy their drugs and then I’d have their parents coming to me on the weekdays and they would all be using it while working on the rigs to stay awake for their 12-hour or 24-hour shifts.”

And though the police would sometimes show up at the all-night parties he and his friends would throw, nothing much came of it.

“Like most small towns there were a few [RCMP] cars that go in and out all day that we’re sharing with 10 other communities,” he recalls. “It was pretty easy to get away with almost anything in a small town like that because there’s not police all over like there is in a city like Edmonton.”

Reding’s book is not simply an historical document of the ravages of methamphetamines on a small town, however: it’s also a treatise against what he sees as the important underlying factors in meth’s spread throughout the rural areas of the United States: the corporatization of American industry and the power wielded by corporate lobbyists.

Wielding large amounts of power within the American political system, pharmaceutical lobbyists have been behind the neutering of national bills that would closely monitor the amount of pseudoephedrine—one of the key components in methamphetamines—being imported into the country. Clinging to the free-market ideology, pharmaceutical lobbyists have long argued that such oversight is too stringent and would negatively affect their companies’ bottom lines. Through the efforts of these lobbyists, bills which began as something that could possibly be effective become nothing more than paper tigers.

“There’s this consistent idea in government that if you pass a law it will be fine, regardless of what it says. As long as it’s the ‘Combat Methamphetamine Act’ then it will combat methamphetamine,” Reding says. “If it had been passed in the form it had originally been written then it would have helped to combat methamphetamine, but honestly I think the blame falls squarely on the lobbyists who basically take all the usefulness out of these laws and it falls squarely on the legislators who allow it to happen.”

In addition to the failings of legislators in the United States and the self-interest of the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists, Methland argues that the corporatization of America and the conglomeration of agriculture and industry in rural areas shares the blame.

“If you’re willing to accept the fact that drugs follow poverty and that the rural United States is increasingly impoverished and there’s increased use of methamphetamine, then you [have to] look at why it’s increasingly impoverished; it’s as simple as the defining industries of that part of the country—which is agriculture and manufacturing—which have, over the course of the last 20 or 30 years, cut wages so incredibly and taken away all benefits. And the result in a place like Oelwein, Iowa is that there’s no money,” he says.

“You couple that with a collective sense of despondence and a drug that will make you incredibly happy and high and people start doing more of it,” he continues. “Add to that that it’s an easy drug to make and they can make it themselves and make pretty good money—since they can’t find a job anywhere else—then that certainly adds to the attraction of methamphetamine.”

While things are starting to look up in the small towns with the resources and wherewithal to fight back against meth—through sprucing up their downtowns and a number of other civic measures, both Oelwein and Drayton Valley have been able to reverse the decay which had threatened to overtake them—drugs continue to be a problem.

“They’re still kind of bucking the trend. Within the last year—as things have gotten a bit more difficult in a lot of places—Oelwein has really continued to prosper more,” Reding says of the current situation. “But the number of meth cases is steady—that’s the bad news.” V

“That problem is essentially that people can’t make money anymore to do the jobs that have kept places in the middle of the country going for a century,” he says during a telephone interview from his St. Louis home.

Meth “just sort of moves into the vacuum” as people struggle to earn a living now that farm and factory jobs have evaporated with the consolidation of the agriculture industry, he says.

In “Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town,” Reding uses Oelwein, Iowa (population: 6,100) — but he stresses that the same story is unfolding in rural communities throughout the nation. The book has earned strong reviews and is drawing national attention to the issues behind meth’s status as the heartland’s drug of choice.

“Meth doesn’t cause the problems faced by Oelwein … economy does, and meth is just the lens through which to see that,” Reding says.

The idea for the book came after visits back to his home state of Missouri and other Midwestern states in the late 1990s. At first, he was able to compartmentalize meth “into somebody else’s problem, somebody else’s part of America.” But, he finally had to acknowledge, meth was everywhere in rural America.

“Small towns are not the places of social and cultural and economic healthiness and well-being that I was raised to think that they are,” Reding says.

“To misrepresent it as only meth is the problem, or to misrepresent it even more horribly and say there is no problem, that’s kind of hopeless then,” he says. “When things are not well in rural America, where 20 million people still live, then it’s an indication that things are not well all over.”

Reding initially had a tough time generating interest for the book, and it took him three attempts to finally get a publisher to buy it.

Now, publisher Bloomsbury says 40,000 copies of “Methland” are in print. It debuted at No. 22 on The New York Times nonfiction best-sellers list on July 26 and was No. 30 on the latest list.

But while Reding’s book get national attention, some residents of Oelwein are criticizing it.

They say it sensationalizes stories, such as the one about a man who Reding says essentially melted his face and cooked his esophagus in an explosion after he poured meth-making chemicals down a basement drain and then lit a cigarette. Others say the book doesn’t do enough to show how the community has confronted its economic problems by bringing in new businesses and revamping the downtown area.

“He is right on as far as the problem of meth, but that’s the only thing I’ll give him credit for,” says 60-year-old Kathy Adams, a lifelong Oelwein resident. “I just feel like it didn’t do justice to Oelwein.”

Sally Falb, director of economic development at the Oelwein Chamber and Area Development group, says: “Something like this comes along and they feel it puts a damper on our hard work.”

Reding says he understands their comments, but after reporting on the town for nearly four years, he has no qualms maintaining that Oelwein’s economy and culture now are tied more closely to meth than to its longtime anchors of farming and small business.

While many other towns share the same problems, Reding says he had to focus on one community, and he chose Oelwein.

“There has to be a place to start, so it’s not to say that Oelwein is the only place or the worst place, but it’s just a place where the stuff that I wanted to talk about is all relevant and apparent,” Reding says.

And some people in Oelwein aver that Reding has it right. Among them: Dr. Clay Hallberg, a local physician and central figure in the book.

He says some people don’t want to talk about the area’s meth problem “any more than you would want to talk about … there being incest in the family.”

“I am not surprised by the collective denial that some of the people in the community have expressed,” Hallberg says. “If you did not work in the emergency room, if you did not work in the police department, if you were not with (human services), many things would seem normal and you would not be aware of the problem.”

Ultimately, Hallberg says, it’s more important to deal with meth’s victims and the town’s problems than debate the book’s merits.

Since the book’s publication, Reding has returned to Oelwein and faced skepticism and some hostility. But that won’t change his feeling for the town and its people.

“You can’t write 270-some odd pages of an intimate portrait of a place unless you like it, unless you have respect for the people there, unless you think they are dignified, which the people there are,” he said.

Today I interview the author of one of the year’s most talked-about nonfiction books, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. His first book, The Last Cowboys at the End of the World, was published by Crown in 2002. He has written for Harper’s, Food and Wine, Outside, Fast Company, and Details.

For those who haven’t read your book, how did you choose Oelwein Iowa as the setting of much of your book? And how did you find it? 
When I first started reporting on meth, it was in Gooding, Idaho, in 1999. I spent weeks in that town following a few characters, and I wrote a book proposal that my agent wouldn’t even attempt to sell. Eventually, in 2004, I wrote another proposal, this time about the town of Greenville, Illinois. I sold the proposal, and shortly thereafter the people I’d been talking to in Greenville said they didn’t want to be written about after all. So I started over, looking for a place to land, and ended up in Oelwein because I developed a natural rapport with Clay Hallberg who, five years later, people would read about as the main character of Methland. With reference to demographics, socioeconomics, and meth, all three towns are the same. Oelwein is no worse or no better than Greenville or Gooding. It was a matter of finding people with the stomach to be written about, at a time when publishers would be willing buy the rights to the book. 

Was there ever a point where you waffled over whether to specifically use Oelwein (as opposed to any other town?) At what point did you decide to pull the trigger? 
Once I talked to Clay, he introduced me to his brother, who is the former county public defender. Clay’s brother introduced me to the prosecutor, Nathan Lein. Nathan put in a good word for me with the police chief and the mayor. All of this happened in a matter of days, and I never looked back. A book has to begin and end with people, and as soon as I had all these willing participants, the hard part was over.

Did you ever consider, at any point during the writing of the book, using a fake name for the town or its people? Did you ever wish you had once it was published? 
I never considered it at all. To me, changing people’s names undermines the integrity of the relationship I’ve built with them. It takes incredible courage to be written about–to then change someone’s name, in my opinion, degrades that courage. However, Bloomsbury Publishing’s lawyer didn’t see it that way. He called me a week after I’d sent in the final manuscript–after four years of work, four fresh starts on the book, and never a word about changing anyone’s name. He said I had to change the name of the town; the state; and the name and physical description of every character (there are about 25 separate characters in the book). That was three days before Thanksgiving. We argued every day for hours on the phone for a week, and I finally got him to agree to keeping all the names and places real except four people: a bar owner and three meth addicts. It took me weeks to get over that; I don’t know that I’ve ever been so irate with anyone. What helped is that I re-named the worst of the addicts after the lawyer.

How difficult was it to clear the stories that you did use in the book?  Did the people who agreed to be interviewed need to sign anything? 
No one signed anything. A journalist’s notes are his de facto release. 

Did you feel that working on this book changed your attitude towards drugs and drug use? 
Only insofar as I had no idea when I started the book that drugs could be a metaphor for so many larger issues: globalization, corporate economy, immigration, etc. When I started out, I thought, like everyone else, that what made meth meth was that it could be made in the sink. Turns out there’s a lot more to it than that.

In researching the book, did you find anything that ties meth addicts together, in terms of what they get out of meth in particular? 
A lot of it is the high itself. Not everyone can stand to be so high for twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight hours at a go. There’s a kind of X Games, X-treme vibe among tweakers, like they’re at the top of the Darwinian drug ladder. Aside from that, I just think that when your town, your county, and your state is increasingly impoverished, and you think you have the answer to how to survive–make meth, stay high–you band together for the simple reason that you think you know something other people don’t, and are therefore wiser for it.

This may be a simplistic question but if meth seems to be a an agent of the type of change you discuss in towns like Oelwein, why do you think a stimulant, rather than depressant, has such appeal? You could argue that stimulants are more popular for people who need to party all night and work the next day, not in parts of the country where less is going on than there used to be. 
Stimulants are also–if they work for a day or more at a time–more popular for people who have to work double-shifts in order to make ends meet and can’t afford to sleep in between. There’s only one stimulant like that, and it’s cheap, to boot.

What were your scariest moments researching the book?
When I started the book over for the third time in three years and my editor got fired the next week. I thought the book would be orphaned at the publisher, and all my work–stretching back seven years, to my time in Gooding, Idaho–would be for naught. Fortunately, my editor, who’d been at Houghton-Mifflin when he bought the book, got a job fairly quickly at Bloomsbury. Once there, he bought the book from H-M. So Methland actually had to be sold twice in order to be published, at a time when selling a book once isn’t exactly easy.

Did you prepare yourself at all for Oelwein backlash? It’s funny (funny-strange, not ha-ha) how a lot of the negative reviews of the book are specifically from disgruntled citizens.
I don’t know how someone would prepare for that town hall meeting in Oelwein. That was intense. 400 people waiting to see what I looked like, ask me three hours’ worth of very pointed questions, three evening news crews. I’d received many physical threats in the days leading up to the event: that’s just a regular Tuesday, I guess, for Britney Spears, but for me–who’s only written one other book that sold 3,000 copies over four years and went out of print–it was all new. What came out during the meeting was that almost no one who was angry had actually read the book. Oelwein doesn’t have a book store; the nearest one is 40 miles  away. So all these people had read newspaper reviews that concentrated almost solely on the negative or sensationalistic aspects of the book: houses blowing up, people burning alive. They had no idea that Methland, in its final chapters, goes into enormous detail about how the town has turned itself around. Once that was established–by an elderly lady who stood up unprovoked in the middle of the crowd, brandishing her copy of the book and accusing her fellow townspeople of having their “heads stuck in the sand”–things went a lot better.

How did you prepare for the reading in Oelwein?
By having three beers and chewing half a tin of Skoal. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony…)

Did this experience change the way you might attack future projects? 
Not really. It’s not like people there were upset for no reason. They thought they’re town had been trashed! It was just up to me to go there in person and explain that that’s not the case. Or, as it happened, keep my mouth shut while an elderly woman explained that for me.

Did your research on Oelwein change your perception of your home town, St. Louis?
Yes. Saint Louis isn’t that much different, really. It’s been affected by all of the same trends in the last 30 years, which I didn’t know. I moved away when I was 18, and I didn’t grow up in the city, any way. I’m from the county, which is a completely separate world. In moving back here at a time when I’d just seen all of the forces at play in Oelwein, I saw my hometown with totally new eyes. 

What’s the deal with the City Museum?  Have you been there? It’s so weird.
The idea that a new busload of under-supervised teenagers gets dropped off there every five minutes during much of the year is a pretty effective deterrent in my book.

What was the hardest part of pitching/selling your first book? 
That no one wanted to trust the idea that I could write–or even effectively conceive of–an entire book. Why would they have believed that? I was 26 and hadn’t even written any magazine articles of note. How my first book ever got sold is beyond me–the proposal was only 12 pages long (my Methland proposal was 35 pages). Of course, the publisher’s risk on Last Cowboys was extremely limited, given how little they paid me.

Are you thinking about making your next project on a lighter subject? Like maybe the thriving caramel-corn industry in small towns? 
No, now that my mother is 75, I feel I have a continuing obligation to keep her anxiety level very, very high. It’s what keeps her so young and spry.

How does it feel to be the 238th person interviewed for Zulkey.com? 
It’s quite an honor. I’ll look forward to being invited back once my next book is sold and written, which shouldn’t take more than 10-15 years.

It was going to destroy the heartland, this methamphetamine epidemic, just as crack cocaine had done to the inner city. There was no George Bailey in this version of Bedford Falls. No John Mellencamp melodies on the soundtrack. Just toothless boys on bikes peddling some nasty stuff cooked up from cold medicine and farm products.

And then it all passed, as these things do, the damage done, leaving the impression of rural America as a broken land, scary. In the interim, the more traditional narrative, of country people somehow more authentic than city folk — “the best of America in these small towns” — came roaring back in the form of Sarah Palin.

In truth, neither of these images does justice to the complexities of small-town life. And neither version does anything to advance the cause of an honest rural policy, something that might help some of the worst casualties of global economic tumult.

People in small towns are more likely to be poor, more likely to lack health insurance, more likely, if they are young, to move out, according to government statistics. In the invisible margins off the interstate, the story about decline takes place in slow motion, rarely attracting a headline.

Palin may soon hit the speech circuit as a woman from another era with an itchy Twitter finger. At the same time, we have a much different look at modern rural life in a new book by the journalist Nick Reding — “Methland: the Death and Life of an American Small Town.”

Reding spent nearly four years charting meth’s course in Oelwein, Iowa, a town of about 6,000 residents nearly 120 miles northeast of Des Moines. There, the people who grow our food are argribusiness oligarchs, and the people who run our factories have cut their workers’ wages by two-thirds, dissolved the unions and shipped in illegals to work for a paycheck that would barely pay for dog food.

Meth is a symptom of this collapse, not a cause. And though its presence in small towns can be cancerous, it never took over rural America. The latest national surveys suggest that there are about 1.3 million regular users of meth — hardly an epidemic in a country where 35 million people said they had used an illegal drug or abused a prescription one.

Still, meth is different in at least one respect. Reding says it is “the only example of a widely consumed illegal narcotic that might be called vocational, as opposed to recreational.” It was given to starving Nazi soldiers to keep them in warrior mode on the Russian front. Now it’s a preferred stimulant for people working two jobs in low-wage purgatory.

“Rural America remains the cradle of our national creation myth,” Reding concludes. “But it has become something else, too — something more sinister and difficult to define.”

Of the 1,346 counties that shrank in population between 2000 and 2007, 85 percent of them were outside the major metropolitan areas, according to theCensus Bureau. Not far from Reding’s story, the town of Postville has lost half its population just in the last year after one of the largest immigration raids in Iowa.

Oelwein, like so many small towns trying to shape its destiny in an America that may have passed it by, has spruced up its Main Street, modernized its infrastructure and constructed a spec building ready for any employer who wants to move in. Alas, it’s the same story in thousands of Oelweins: if you build it, they won’t come.

When candidate Barack Obama made that comment about bitter people in small towns clinging to guns and religion, he was criticized as a clueless elite from the big city. No one paid attention to the first part of what he said:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration.”

Every president said he would do something about it, Obama continued, but never did.

The mistake that Palin made was to cast small towns as more virtuous, morally superior in their struggle. The mistake that Obama made was to speak the truth. She can continue to pander all the way to the bank. But he has a chance to make a difference in places that are neither methland nor mythland, just overlooked parts of the same country.