Nick Reding (13 page)

The move to pseudo was really the blockbuster moment in the modern history of the meth epidemic. That’s because the DTOs were
able firmly to tie the fate of their illicit product to perhaps the world’s most lucrative legal drug. This, really, is the
genius of the meth business. Cocaine and heroin are linked to illegal crops—coca and poppies, respectively. Meth on the other
hand is linked in a one-to-one ratio with fighting the common cold. Not only was the pharmaceutical industry likely to fight
harder against pseudoephedrine monitoring than it had regarding ephedrine, but the shear bulk of pseudoephedrine being produced
also made it difficult to track compared with the relatively small amount of ephedrine being manufactured. Add to that that
50 percent of the world’s pseudoephedrine was (and is) manufactured in China—a nation that has been increasingly unwilling
to negotiate with the United States—and Haislip’s dream of international cooperation in monitoring meth’s precursors had,
after a short and unprecedented victory, fallen completely apart.

Still, Haislip wasn’t done. In 1995, he proposed a bill stipulating that any company wishing to sell more than four hundred
tablets of pseudoephedrine at a time would have to get a license from DEA and would have to keep records of its sales—hardly,
notes Suo, a rigorous law. But it would have at least given the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control a place to start in the
inevitable task of identifying companies that diverted large amounts of pseudoephedrine to the meth trade. This time, it was
not Allan Rexinger who came to the aid of the big drug companies; it was Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, then chairman
of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Senator Hatch had a history of aiding the pharmaceutical industry, and had, among other things, supported legislation curbing
federal regulation of dietary supplements, namely Methedrine, a form of methamphetamine illegally prescribed by the billions
of pills during the 1970s and ’80s. What the Hatch camp wanted in 1995 was proof that pseudoephedrine was being used to make
meth. DEA had what it thought to be incontrovertible verification: nearly a quarter of all the meth superlabs it had dismantled
in the last year had already made the switch from ephedrine to pseudoephedrine. Even in labs that were still using the old
method, agents had founds bills of lading for bulk orders of pseudo, a further indication that the market was in the midst
of a dynamic shift. Hatch, though, didn’t consider this compelling enough, and he tabled the proposal by calling for more
investigation.

Haislip was distraught. Despite help from Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the bill languished with Hatch’s committee
for over a year—while the DTOs’ production of crystal meth went unhampered. It wasn’t until the spring of 1996 that Hatch
and Haislip finally agreed on language that was acceptable to both the government and the pharmaceutical companies: vendors
of pill-form pseudoephedrine would be subject to DEA licensing and bookkeeping unless those pills were sold in the now-ubiquitous
clear-plastic containers with aluminum backing. Hatch’s logic, it seems, was that the narco-empire built around methamphetamine
would crumble in the face of the tamper-proof blister pack.

The connection that Steve Suo doesn’t make explicit in the
Oregonian
is that the aggregation of the Mexican drug traffickers during the 1990s into five enormous DTOs mirrors the consolidation
of the pharmaceutical industry in that same period. As both types of organizations grew, they increased their market share,
their wealth, and their power. Warner-Lambert was subsumed by Burroughs Well-come, which was ultimately added, along with
Pharmacia, to the pharma-titan Pfizer. That’s to say, over a short period in the 1990s, fewer companies shared increasing
profits. In 2003, Fortune 500 rated the U.S. pharmaceutical business the third most profitable in the nation and valued the
industry at $593 billion. (That was the first year since 1995 that the industry had not been rated the number-one most profitable
American industry.)

A similar consolidation was occurring in the illegal drug business during the late 1990s. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the
American narcotics market was split between the competing interests of the Colombians, the Mexicans, the Nigerians, the Vietnamese,
and the Filipinos, among others. By 2003, 85 percent of all the illegal drugs sold in the United States—whether meth, cocaine,
heroin, or marijuana—were controlled by the five DTOs, each of which controls at least one major port of entry with the United
States.

The simultaneous growth of these two businesses had remarkable and tragic consequences for the modern meth trade between 1987
and 2003. Had DEA forced more oversight of the rapidly deregulating pharmaceutical industry—one that is hallmarked by its
production of cold medicine—the DTOs would never have had access to the drug they needed in order to make meth. Had the DTOs
not been able to make meth, it’s less likely that they would have so thoroughly monopolized the U.S. drug market.

One might ask if the drug companies should really have been made to monitor their imports simply because cold medicine happens
to be made from the same drug as methamphetamine. It’s a question that lobbyists like Allan Rexinger made a career of asking.
It’s also one that needn’t ever have been posed. For, beginning over a decade ago, American pharmaceutical companies could
have chosen to make cold medicine from something other than pseudoephedrine.

According to Suo, in 1997 a research team at the University of North Texas began testing a new nasal decongestant in dogs
and rats. The team was in the employ of Warner-Lambert, which the year before had taken over the manufacture of Sudafed and
Actifed from Burroughs Wellcome and added those lines to Warner-Lambert’s highly profitable antihistamine, Benadryl. By then,
Sudafed’s brand recognition was so widespread that the product, like Xerox to both photocopies and the machines that produce
them, had become synonymous with the industry of cold remedies. All three nonprescription medicines—Sudafed, Actifed, and
Benadryl—relied on pseudoephedrine for their manufacture. Fearful that pseudoephedrine would come under federal control, or
worse, that it would be outlawed completely by legislation being pushed by Gene Haislip and DEA, Warner-Lambert had developed
a new product based on a biochemical technology called mirror imaging. By Christmas of 1997, according to interviews published
in the
Oregonian
, trials on dogs and rats at the University of North Texas showed great promise for the drug.

Mirror imaging is a process whereby a chemical’s molecular structure is reversed, moving, for example, electrons from the
bottom of a certain ring to the top, and vice versa. Pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, and methamphetamine are already near mirror
images of one another. To make meth from ephedrine, it is necessary to remove a single oxygen atom from the outer electron
ring. Thus ephedrine and methamphetamine not only look the same under a mass spectrometer, but both dilate the alveoli in
the lungs and shrink blood vessels in the nose—hence ephedrine’s use as a decongestant—while raising blood pressure and releasing
adrenaline. The key difference is that meth, unlike ephedrine, prompts wide-scale releases of the neurotransmitters dopamine
and epinephrine.

What the 1997 tests at the University of North Texas showed was that, at least in lab animals, mirror-image pseudoephedrine
was equally as effective as regular pseudoephedrine as a decongestant. Unlike regular pseudo, however, the mirror-image version
didn’t cause any side effects to the central nervous system, such as high blood pressure and a racing heart: the common “buzz”
that one associates with cold medicine. Better yet for Warner-Lambert, mirror-image pseudoephedrine could only be synthesized
into mirror-image methamphetamine, which, according to the
Oregonian
, had no stimulant effects and could not then be made into regular meth.

Had Warner-Lambert been unable in the end to develop mirror-image pseudo—or to bring it to the market—it had yet another option
that would have significantly helped Haislip and DEA. Also in 1997, chemists at Warner-Lambert had begun experimenting with
additives that would make it impossible to extract pseudoephedrine from Sudafed. This combination would undermine the basic
building block of Nazi cold meth production, which is to pour anhydrous ammonia onto crushed-up cold pills in order to extract
the pills’ pseudo. On this project, researchers at Warner-Lambert had, according to the
Oregonian
, been working closely with DEA. Moreover, the additives were already FDA-approved. Therefore, any drug containing them would
not be considered new and would avoid the costly testing period mandated by the FDA. At the very least, manufacturing cold
pills with these additives might have reduced the ever-increasing legions of small-time cooks like Roland Jarvis in states
like Iowa, which at the time was seeing small-meth-lab increases of 300 percent a year.

If the cold pills with additives or, particularly, the mirror-image pseudoephedrine had come to market, the effect may well
have been enormous. Were the U.S. cold medicine market, the largest in the world, suddenly dependent on any new form of pseudoephedrine,
it stands to reason that the nine factories that provide all the planet’s pseudo would have begun producing large amounts
of the new meth-resistant drug. This in turn would have drastically reduced the amount of meth-ready chemicals available to
the DTOs. Either drug could have effectively accomplished what Gene Haislip and DEA had five times been unable to achieve
between 1984 and 1996.

Instead, by the time Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert in 2000, all research into a cold-medicine alternative ceased. Why should
Pfizer worry about DEA when its predecessor had had such an easy time lobbying Congress? In 2002, meth lab numbers in Iowa
topped one thousand for the first time, and were nearing two thousand in Missouri.

CHAPTER 7

THE COP SHOP

O
elwein’s difficult and unsure rebirth in 2006 began in the same place in which the town had been born 134 years earlier:
in a cornfield. In 1872, Oelwein was founded on land belonging to Gustav Oelwein, a poor Bavarian farmer, as a place for what
was then called the Rock Island Railroad to take on water and coal between Chicago and Minneapolis. The center point of town
was plotted at the intersection of Charles and Frederick streets, so named for Gustav’s two sons. (Oelwein’s principal thoroughfare
has three names—Charles, Frederick, and Old 150. Around town, all three are often referred to in the aggregate as “Main.”)
By 1905, the population had soared to 5,134 people, and Charles and Frederick were among the wealthiest men in the Midwest.
Driving south on Frederick Street today, you can still see the cabin where the Oelwein brothers were born. Heading farther
south after a dogleg at the Country Cottage Café, what is now South Frederick dead-ends at Highway 150. To the left is an
open parcel of land; to the right is a campground. Across Highway 150 is what might be the most important of all Oelwein’s
undeveloped properties—the 250-acre Industrial Park. By the spring of 2006, the IP, as Mayor Larry Murphy calls it, was ready
to be shopped to prospective customers and had unceremoniously been denuded of the corn that had grown there. Murphy foresaw
the IP as the bright, shining future of his beleaguered town.

Unlike Gustav Oelwein, though, who’d already contracted with the three separate arms of the Rock Island Railroad (the Burlington,
the Illinois Central, and the Minnesota), Larry Murphy did not know for whom he was preparing the IP’s land, which is bookended
on one side by the two baseball diamonds of the grandiosely named Oelwein Sports Complex, and on the other by the once-famed
Sportsmen’s Lounge. The idea was that, to reference one of Murphy’s favorite movies,
Field of Dreams
, if Oelwein cleared the land, somebody would come. The fact was that Oelwein had nothing to lose. And nowhere was this sentiment
more clear than in the decrepit presence of the Sportsmen’s, whose mixed history underscores both the hope and the danger
of a down-and-out place literally dying to grow bigger and stronger. It’s said around town that the Mob fronted the Pirillo
brothers the money to open the Sportsmen’s, thereby adding to an already long and storied connection between the Cosa Nostra
and the town that, in the 1950s, became known as Little Chicago.

Mafia history in Oelwein is taken today as a foregone conclusion. It’s a piece of the town’s cultural tapestry that’s at once
as obvious as the cornfields and the railroad tracks and as illusory as the fading memories of the rail workers who once rubbed
elbows with such American luminaries as Bugsy Malone and Jimmy Hoffa. Whether Little Chicago was really ever a cooling-out
place for mobsters who needed a few days away from the heat in the Windy City is arguable, though the stories seem too well
known, too oft-repeated, and too finely detailed to be false. These include how, for instance, the homes of three particular
Italian families were not only immediately rebuilt but were rebuilt in grander style shortly after the tornado of 1968 nearly
wiped Oelwein from the map. According to Clay and Nathan, those families—the Leos, the Pirillos, and the Vanattas—owned the
bars and the clubs on Main Street beneath which the gaming dens were located, replete with revolving doors and hidden rooms
dating back to Prohibition. The Sportsmen’s Lounge was founded by Dominic and Pete Pirillo shortly after they returned from
World War II; they’d served only after an Oelwein judge gave them a choice between the army and jail. The Sportsmen’s was
famed as much for the Pirillos’ twenty-four-hour slow-cooked prime rib as for the poker game that reportedly went on for five
decades in the back room, which regularly had an audience of what were politely referred to as “dancing girls.” Mafiosi, people
swear around Oelwein, would circulate between the Pirillos’ bar, the Leos’ Highway 150 South Club, and the Vanattas’ Pink
Pussycat, all the while unafraid that any of Oelwein’s three cops (one of whom was part-time) would give them up to federal
agents sent from Chicago.

The only undeniable truth in all the stories is that the more sinister side of the “good old days” has either been forgotten
completely or has come to be shrouded in the golden glow of longing. Today, the Sportsmen’s Lounge is little more than a hulking
afterthought. In place of the prime rib—which Larry Murphy remembers as being so tender you could cut it with a fork—there
is something called a Blooming Onion, which involves a Vidalia that’s been crosscut, battered, and deep-fried. And that’s
only when the Sportsmen’s is open, which doesn’t seem to be that often. The meaning of the place is palpable, if not quite
tangible, and is less about that particular structure than the era in Oelwein’s history it evokes. Clay Hallberg laments the
loss of the raucous Saturday nights of yore at the Pink Pussycat strip club, after which he claims Mrs. Vanatta would make
her girls sit in the front pew down the street at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Nathan Lein wishes that there was a strip
club somewhere—anywhere—closer than Waterloo. Seventy-five-year-old Herman “Gus” Gaddow, a former rail-man turned farrier,
thinks back fondly on the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, says Gus, people had good manners, and three cops were enough to keep
crime non existent. The implication is that no one stepped out of line for fear of having to answer to the boys from Chicago.
It’s in this way that the melding of Oelwein’s history and present circumstance provides a case study of the complexity of
trying to regain a throne that was perhaps epically tarnished in its heyday.

And so it seemed only fitting that the key to Murphy’s economic stimulus plan was the Industrial Park, kitty-corner from the
Sportsmen’s, where in March 2006 a gridded road system already cut the acreage into blocks. Among the weeds sprouting up now
that the farmer who once leased those 250 acres was no longer spraying herbicide, a sign read “Oelwein Industrial Park—Come
Grow with Us!” Murphy said the city had been courting a call center to lease the space, but it had two competitors: a similar-sized
town in Nebraska and a town near Mumbai, India. If the call center prospect fell through, there were bound to be other options,
said Murphy. It just wasn’t entirely clear what they might be, or when they’d make themselves available. Meanwhile, things
in Oelwein were growing more desperate every month. On March 17, 2006, Tyson had closed the doors of what had, a long time
ago, been the old Iowa Ham plant, costing the town another hundred jobs. Upon getting the news, Murphy chose to look at things
with his characteristic optimism. Rock bottom, he observed, provides a firm foundation. From there, Oelwein could do nothing
but push itself up.

Larry Murphy is fifty-five years old. A compactly built five feet eight, he has the sun-bleached blond hair of a road worker;
dry, ruddy cheeks; and an open, friendly face dominated by a wide nose and alert, mischievous blue eyes. He keeps his hair
short and wears aviator-style Ray-Ban sunglasses. Murphy put himself through school—first at tiny Loras College, in Dubuque,
Iowa, and then at Drake University, from which he graduated in 1975 with a degree in journalism—by working the graveyard shift
on the kill-floor of a slaughterhouse in Davenport, Iowa. Before the night’s work began, he says, he’d head across the street
to the bar with the axmen and the sledge-heads who’d worked at the plant for decades. They drank boilermakers—shots of whiskey
dropped into pints of beer—to help deal with a job that was by turns brutally boring and just plain brutal.

Murphy is a lifelong Democrat who makes his political home on a tightrope stretched between a staunch support of unions and
a solid rejection of abortion. He works at home, in the den of his house, in order to save Oelwein the money it would cost
for him to have a proper office. Political activism predicated on liberal fiscal beliefs seems less a calling for Murphy and
more a part of his genetic coding. He was in his twenty-fourth straight year of elective office in Iowa, including stints
as county supervisor, state senator, and now, mayor. One of his seven surviving siblings, Pat, had just become Speaker of
the Iowa House of Representatives after seventeen years in office. Murphy’s father worked at the telephone company in Dubuque
for thirty years and was a lifelong member of the Communications Workers of America. Murphy’s sister Margaret left a convent
in order to organize migrant laborers in California and Arizona on behalf of César Chavez. His brother David is a former welder
turned nurse, and his brother Bob is a negotiator for the United Food and Commercial Workers. Murphy himself organized his
first labor union, at a grocery store in Dubuque, in 1959, when he was fourteen years old.

Murphy said he had little trouble understanding why people with difficult, low-income jobs would do methamphetamine, and why,
once they’d lost those jobs or had their wages slashed, they’d turn to making the drug themselves. Murphy knew well the utility
of a little pick-me-up before beginning the graveyard shift at a slaughterhouse, even back in the day when you could make
a decent wage, get health insurance, buy a car, and put yourself through college doing that kind of work. It angered Murphy
that trends in the industries that had once buoyed towns like Oelwein now contributed to the numbers of people digging in
the trash behind the Conocostation. To scenes like this, Murphy still reacted with disbelief. Every time he saw a destitute
person in his town, it got his dander up. A proud, action-oriented Midwesterner, Murphy just couldn’t square what he saw now
with the little town he’d moved to in 1977. The rundown homes and the trash piling up on the lawns broke his heart. What bothered
him most were the kids who, abandoned by their parents and set adrift in the foster care system, flunked out of Oelwein High.
At that point, those same kids were summarily condemned to the Alternative School, which, for an astonishingly bleak 60 percent
of the students, was nothing more than a stepping-stone to jail. It killed Murphy, he said, that there was no money to help
the kids of addicts or their parents, beyond visits by underpaid and overworked DHS in-home caseworkers. That, or the Northeast
Iowa Behavioral Health Clinic, which had but one addiction specialist to minister to the needs of a town of over six thousand
people.

If Oelwein could just kick-start itself, said Murphy—if it could just get some decent business into the IP—there’d be time
to consider more sides of the equation. Maybe Murphy, given his extensive connections in state government, could create some
momentum for Nathan Lein’s idea that meth addicts serve five-year probationary periods, during which they have to hold jobs
and attend mandatory meetings with a counselor. Maybe, once there was more revenue in town, they could bring in an actual
treatment facility, as Clay Hall-berg had begged him to do. Some real treatment alternatives might help Oelwein nip drug abuse
in the bud, rather than simply treating its symptoms—even as those symptoms gained ineluctable momentum.

For now, though, that was all a pipe dream. There was no excess revenue for anything, never mind treatment. Murphy’s task
was to raise the town from the ashes. He had to build a foundation of decent economic growth, and he had to do it ASAP. Businesses
like the call center could afford to be choosy—every hard-luck town in the United States was courting them. In fact, Murphy
believed that most companies were looking for a certain modicum of poverty as a fail-safe against union organizing. If people
were desperate, they’d concede this essential ground to the company. Murphy understood the game. As he once put it to me in
an e-mail, he was “enough of a student of economic trends in the last two decades to understand [he had to] play on the edges
for wage and benefit rates.” The trick was to look like something in between a union town and a town that was downright criminally
dangerous. Oelwein had to appear complacently impoverished but nonetheless like a nice place to raise a family.

That meant that social order needed to take precedence, even if it involved taking a few un-civil liberties, and Murphy’s
sympathy regarding meth addicts was trumped by a certain mercilessness. No business was going to invest in a town with a bunch
of tweakers riding around cooking dope on their bicycles, blowing up their own homes, and shaking inside their overcoats as
they picked through the Dumpster behind the gas station. The trick, if Murphy could succeed in getting a handle on Oelwein’s
meth problem, would be to lure businesses that wouldn’t automatically reinvigorate the meth industry by offering substandard
jobs. Oelwein needed work, but it didn’t need the kind of work that had inundated Greenville, Illinois: half-time jobs with
no benefits at Wal-Mart or Super 8, which injected little revenue into the local economy. Oelwein didn’t need any more meatpacking
plants, either, which offered high worker-injury rates and minimal compensation. Bad jobs, Murphy knew, had gotten Oelwein
in trouble in the first place. Being treated poorly by employers, he said, had sucked the hope out of people’s lives. It made
meth seem like the only alternative. Nowadays, bad jobs came with the added burden of immigrant workers who couldn’t afford
their hospital bills and whose children had to be taught English by the already overextended schools. And yet towns across
the nation were clamoring for what ever jobs they could get. It was an almost impossible situation in which Murphy found himself.
Compared with this, his past battles as a liberal pro-lifer had been a cakewalk.

During 2004 and 2005, Murphy had done everything possible to run the small-lab meth business out of town as a means of preparing
Oelwein to rebuild. This was not just to compete with the towns in India or Nebraska that might lure the likes of the call
center. It was to compete with Oelwein’s more immediate neighbors. Nathan had told me, along with several other people, that
DHS workers in nearby Buchanan County—home of pretty, prosperous little Independence—had for years been recommending that
their worst cases move to Fayette County, and particularly to Oelwein, where taxes were low and the rental market was burgeoning.
A kind of economic cannibalism had set in following the farm crisis, the ravages of population loss, and the onset of the
meth epidemic. Towns, unsure of their own futures, hedged their bets, often to the detriment of their neighbors. According
to a local real estate broker, In dependence had effectively made Oelwein its ghetto. “Low rent,” the broker went on, was
synonymous with “meth lab.” It’s in this way that ridding Oelwein of its small labs became a kind of shoving match between
two city-states, with the de facto goal of running the people from Buchanan County out of Fayette.