Nick Reding (19 page)

In fact, by Christmas 2006, Oelwein had come to represent the hopefulness of thousands of small towns across the nation that
had seen major drops in the number of lab busts. The Combat Meth Act had been in place for six months, and national newspapers
had largely stopped reporting on the epidemic; the rural United States was no longer portrayed in the sour, Lynchian light
in which it had been cast since 2004. These were all reasons to celebrate, indeed, sitting in a booth at Las Flores as the
snow began to fall outside the window.

The basic functions of the Combat Meth Act were to limit the amount of cold medicine consumers could buy in the United States;
to allow the State Department to withdraw foreign aid from nations that fail to stop the diversion of pseudoephedrine and
ephedrine to the illicit market; and to impose quotas on how much pseudoephedrine and ephedrine U.S. pharmaceutical companies
could import. In a way, the Combat Meth Act accomplished what Gene Haislip, long since retired from DEA, had considered the
most important aspect of the battle against meth for nearly twenty-five years: to monitor the importation and exportation
of its precursors.

The quotas imposed by the Combat Meth Act set off a chain reaction of economic events that Haislip could have imagined only
in his wildest dreams. Fearful of restrictions on pseudoephedrine, Pfizer, the world’s largest cold medicine manufacturer
and the maker of Sudafed, began using a chemical called phenylephrine to make 50 percent of its cold products. Phenylephrine,
approved in 1976 by the FDA, cannot be made into methamphetamine. The switch caused the nine companies that produce the world’s
supply of pseudo to decrease their production, thereby reducing the amount of pseudo available for narco-traffickers to turn
into meth. According to one of the last meth articles written by Steve Suo for the
Oregonian
, U.S. drug companies cut imports of pseudo by more than two thirds in 2006, to 275 tons from 1,130 tons the year before.
The U.S. State Department convinced the Mexican government to halve imports of pseudo and to bar middlemen from the process,
causing North America’s aggregate imports of meth’s principal precursor to drop 75 percent between 2004 and 2006. Suo also
reported that, based on DEA statistics, meth’s purity had fallen to an average of 51 percent, down from 77 percent the year
before. The degradation in quality, Suo wrote, was a sure sign that far less meth was being produced. Mom-and-pop meth production
was down not just in Oelwein, but everywhere.

Also in 2006, drug czar John Walters unveiled a plan that would expand drug courts, in which addicts are monitored by judiciary
process for eighteen months and allowed to hold a job. (Nathan Lein, a longtime proponent of the drug courts, said their very
existence was an admission that the standard procedure with drug addicts—putting them in jail for short periods and giving
them little or no counseling—wasn’t working and resulted in high recidivism rates.) Walters allocated money for nationwide
anti-meth TV ads, the likes of which had shown great promise in a number of states, particularly Montana, where private citizens
had funded such campaigns in 2005. Walters also promised high-level trafficking prosecutions by DEA. The very fact that he
was trying—now that Congress had taken meth on—to catch up to the trend was itself a reason to feel good about what was happening
nationwide. And worldwide: the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs offered to broker deals between countries and pseudo
manufacturers; and the International Narcotics Control Board, in Vienna, initiated plans to halt shipments of illicitly gotten
precursors beginning in 2007.

All the good news was buoyed further by two reports that seemed to confirm meth’s retreat. Every four years, the National
Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) issues a report called the
National Survey on
Drug Use and Health
. NIDA, an arm of the National Institutes of Health within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the de facto
research arm of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), which is headed by the president’s drug czar. As such,
NIDA’S recommendations, which seem implicit in its research, guide legislative drug policy perhaps more than those of any
other U.S. government institute. What NIDA reported just before the Oelwein Christmas pageant of 2006 was that meth use throughout
the United States remained stable or dropped between 2002 and 2006. The nation’s second-most-influential narcotics survey,
Monitoring the Future, funded by the University of Michigan, reported something even more encouraging: meth use among high
school students between 1999 and 2005 had sharply declined. Pointing to these studies as real-time indicators of the effects
of changes in government policy, John Walters told the
Oregonian
in an August 2006 interview that the United States was “winning” the war on meth.

More surprisingly, Walters hinted something heretofore unimaginable: that the meth epidemic was over. “Was meth an epidemic
in some parts of the country?” he said in his interview with Suo. “Yes . . . Is it the worst drug problem? Is it an epidemic
everywhere? The answer is no.”

But the questions that had to be asked that December night at Las Flores was why, if everything seemed so much better, had
the number of meth cases that Nathan Lein was getting not declined? And why hadn’t the number of meth-related complaints of
Clay Hall-berg’s patients dwindled? The answers to those questions require an understanding of what exactly a drug epidemic
is and how a report like the
National Survey on Drug Use and Health
gets made. But the most important aspect to understanding why Oelwein’s meth problem seemed to have become “invisible,” as
Clay put it that night, was a recent shift in the narcotics market. As had been happening for twenty years, since the days
of Gene Haislip, meth had not gone away or been eradicated. It had reassorted its genome.

Ask any drug epidemiologist the question “What is a drug epidemic?” and the answer will likely be, “I don’t know.” It may
seem counterintuitive that a drug epidemiologist can’t define the very concept for which the profession is named, but consider
the difficulties of the related field of viral epidemiology. Say you ask your doctor these elemental questions: What is the
flu? Where exactly does it come from? What exactly does it do? How does it do that? What can I do to confront it? What will
be the outcome of that confrontation? The best your doctor can do is take the little that is known beyond a doubt about the
flu; combine it with common sense, anecdote, and theory; and recommend a solution without any guarantee of success. The epidemiology
of a drug is no different: it is unquantifiable in absolute terms.

Consider again the opinion of Dr. Stanley Koob, the neuropharmacologist at the Scripps Research Institute and a highly regarded
drug addiction specialist. When he says that “meth is way up there with the worst drugs on earth,” only part of that opinion
can be proven. It can be scientifically measured that smoking a drug—as opposed to eating, snorting, injecting, or taking
it anally—is the fastest delivery system to the brain. It is further supposed, though not proven, that the speed of delivery
affects a drug’s addictiveness. So, because meth can be smoked, it (like nicotine, but unlike alcohol) has entrée into the
category of “most addictive.” From there, Koob’s statement veers into the realm of instinct mixed with common sense. The bulk
of Koob’s evidence regarding meth’s “unique dangers” stems from his theory of the drug’s social identity. In Koob’s opinion,
much of meth’s danger lies in the drug’s long history of usefulness to the sociocultural and socioeconomic concepts American
society holds dear, many of which stem from the pursuit of wealth through hard work.

Now take national drug studies. Though the term implies technical exactitude, it is simply impossible to know how many people
become addicted to any drug, methamphetamine included. It’s impossible to know how many people are using a drug—addictively,
regularly, episodically, or singularly. Furthermore, there is no set number or percentage of drug users that signals a drug
“epidemic.” It’s this very lack of a quantifiable foundation that prevents any honest drug epidemiologist from being able
to define a drug epidemic. Saying there is a meth epidemic is just as unverifiable as saying the meth epidemic is over. In
this odd way, the newspaper columnists who, in reaction to Suo’s reporting and the work at
Newsweek
and
Frontline
, had begun asserting in mid-2006 that there had never been a meth epidemic—that it was an invention, a myth—were partly correct.

The point is that we invariably come back to testing as a means of understanding drug use, even though assuming these tests
lead to truth puts one on shaky ground. You simply can’t prove something to be true or false if the means of confirmation
are easily questioned. Consider how the
National Survey on Drug Use and Health
concludes every four years how many meth addicts there are in the United States. First, surveyors ask employers to give their
employees a questionnaire on drug use. The survey asks employees whether they have done amphetamines (not specifically methamphetamines)
in their lifetime, in the last year, and/or in the last six months. First, it seems unlikely that drug addicts will take this
completely optional test; will answer truthfully if they do take it; and will even be at work in the first place—as opposed
to home cooking meth. Further, since methamphetamine is just one of a broad class of stimulants in the amphetamine family,
an answer of yes to a question about using one amphetamine can’t be taken as an answer of yes to using another. And yet, for
the study’s purposes, anyone who says they’ve done any kind of amphetamine in the last six months is considered “addicted
to amphetamines,” and—in a way that is impossible to understand—a certain percentage of these responders is deemed addicted
to crank. It’s in accordance with this system that NIDA proclaimed—and John Walters celebrated—meth’s demise in 2006.

But a drug’s availability, according to Dr. Koob, is the key to its power. And whether or not the Oelwein police were busting
labs, clearly there was still a lot of meth around town, since Nathan hadn’t noticed a drop in his cases. Lab busts removed
the drug’s most obvious elements: the smelly homes, the fires, the sickened children. Removing labs, it turns out, isn’t the
same as removing the drug, or the problems for which that drug serves as some sort of answer. Where meth was coming from now;
how it was getting to Oelwein; and why the Combat Meth Act hadn’t stopped it—these were the new questions that had to be answered.

Sitting in Las Flores that night, I was reminded of a talk I’d had a year before with Phil Price, who had since retired as
the special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. At the time, Price was simultaneously investigating eleven
execution-style murders of Mexican nationals, all committed in empty mansions in quiet Atlanta suburbs, all meth-related.
In discussing the murders, Price had foreseen the Combat Meth Act’s ultimate weakness, long before it was passed.

“Look,” he’d said in his thick North Georgia accent, “I’ll get in trouble for saying this, but the Combat Meth Act will only
take the little bit of the meth business away from the dipshits with the Bunsen burners and the Budweiser chemistry set and
give it to the only people who’ve known all along what to do with it: the Mexican DTOs.

“For a while,” he went on, “people will applaud the government, and things will get remarkably better. But mark my words:
it’ll get worse from there. Because none of this is about a drug. It’s about a system of government and an economy. The Combat
Meth Act will only serve to highlight our immigration policy, and what a holy crock of shit it is. But no one will see that.
All they’ll see is a short-term victory against meth. By the time the crank comes flowing back,” concluded Price, “the government
and the media will be long gone, and we’ll be stuck worse than ever.”

PART 3

2007

CHAPTER 11

ALGONA

D
uring the three and a half years I went back and forth to Oelwein, I told myself that I was searching for the meaning of
meth in small-town America. That is certainly true. But I think I was also looking for the meaning of a small town in my own
life and in my family’s history. And what, if anything, had changed so profoundly that when I would tell my father what I
was seeing in Iowa, he was made to wonder if he would even recognize the place whence he comes.

Rural America remains the cradle of our national creation myth. But it has become something else, too—something more sinister
and difficult to define. Whether meth changed our perception of the American small town or simply brought to light the fact
that things in small-town America are much changed is in some ways irrelevant. In my telling, meth has always been less an
agent of change and more of a symptom of it. The end of a way of life is the story; the drug is what signaled to the rest
of the nation that the end had come.

The truth is that, in the weeks I drove around Illinois, Kentucky, Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri, any town in which I stopped
for a day or two would have satisfied the criteria as a setting for a book about meth—meth was a part of life in all of them.
It’s fair to say I focused on Iowa beginning in 2005 not because of the record number of labs in the state or because I was
quick to develop a relationship with Clay and Nathan, but because Iowa is the place where my father’s branch of the Reding
family had lived since the mid-nineteenth century. As it turns out, my father’s life fits into the conundrum of methamphetamine’s
link with the rural United States, not just because he comes from Algona, but because he worked forty-two years in the industry
that I have come to see as a force behind the difficulties faced by places like Algona and Oelwein: Big Agriculture.

My great-grandfather Nicholas Reding came to Algona from the Franco-Prussian principate of Luxembourg in 1868. With him he
brought his second wife (the first had died) and the fifteen children from his two marriages. After learning that the local
schoolteacher would be educating his children in English, my great-grandfather became a teacher himself, founding his own
school specifically so he could educate his children in German.

Louis Reding was the youngest of Nicholas’s children, born in 1899. Louis spent his whole life in Algona, where he worked
as a tractor partsman at the International Harvester shop. He died in 1979. Alice, my grandmother, was born in Lu Verne (pronounced
“Laverne”), Iowa, twelve miles south of Algona. Alice was one of four children of a woman who must, by the fertility standards
of the Reding clan, have seemed just a hair shy of barren. Alice was five feet tall; she worked as a teller at the Iowa State
Bank for fifty-one years. She died in 1989, at the age of eighty-eight.

My father, Nicholas Reding, named for his grandfather, was born the youngest of four in November 1934; his sister Roz is the
oldest, followed by twins, Jan and Joe. My father was small as a boy, with blond hair and dark brown eyes. During the Depression
and war, it was often up to my father and his brother to kill pheasants, pigeons, or squirrels for supper. In the winter,
they market-hunted jackrabbits, by which it is meant that they went out into the fields at night in the backs of trucks and
killed the animals as they were temporarily paralyzed by the headlights. My father and uncle filled keg-barrels with the rabbits
they shot, for this is how canneries in Sioux City and restaurants in Fort Dodge came about their meat during the rationed
years in World War II. In the summer, they fished for perch and catfish in the East Branch of the Des Moines River—which flows
320 miles away, past the cabin in Ottumwa where Lori Arnold once lived.

My father went to Iowa State in Ames in 1952. He was seventeen. By then, his hair was well on its way to turning black; he
was small, like his mother, and weighed just 110 pounds his freshman year. If it weren’t for his three scholarships, he would
never have been educated beyond high school. A baseball scholarship paid for his room, a chemical engineering scholarship
paid for his board, and a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship paid for his books. There is a photo of him as
a freshman, standing a head shorter than most other members of Iowa State’s varsity baseball squad. That photo has always
had a complicated effect on me. On the one hand, I feel a tremendous amount of pride that my father ever made it out of Algona,
Iowa. On the other hand, I feel a comic sense of disbelief, for my father, standing on the end of a line of tall, strapping
young men, looks impossibly young and small. It’s surprising that he even made it through the brutal winters, never mind that
he was able to swing a thirty-four-inch wooden bat at eighty-five-mile-per-hour fastballs without being blown over. What’s
more incredible still is the remarkable life he would go on to lead.

By his sophomore year, my father had grown to five feet nine and had gained thirty pounds—hardly the stuff of legend, but
enough to be starting in center field for what at the time was a powerhouse of a collegiate baseball team. Iowa State was
the runner-up that year in the College World Series—my father was the MVP. He set a National Collegiate Athletic Association
record for the number of stolen bases in a game—six, including stealing home—that stood for many years. At the end of the
season, at the age of nineteen, he was drafted in the first round by the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals at a
time when the rivalry between them was one of the most enduring and storied rivalries in sports.

My father, though, didn’t believe playing sports was a reliable road out of poverty. Despite being drafted again by the Yankees
following his junior year, he stayed at Iowa State to finish his chemical engineering degree. In 1955, he was offered a job
with Monsanto, in St. Louis, Missouri. He arrived in the city with two shirts, two pairs of shoes, two ties, and one suit,
and he moved into a boarding house. He met my mother at Monsanto, where she was working as a secretary. My maternal grandmother,
Mildred Viola Nicholson, two decades removed from her years in Ebo, Missouri, took an immediate liking to my father. She saw
a kindred spirit in a boy from the country who’d come to a grand and important American city in hopes of making his way. Mildred’s
first husband had left her, my mother, and my aunt, and Mildred had worked all her adult life as a single mother, first as
a maid and then as a cook in a downtown cafeteria called Miss Hulling’s. When my father became ill with influenza in 1956,
my mother and grandmother took the bus every morning and every evening for three weeks to care for him at the boarding house
until he was well again. My parents were married in 1958.

My father spent forty-two years working for Monsanto, retiring as vice chairman in 1998. In the decades he was there, Monsanto
became an agricultural power house, acquiring seed companies, patenting herbicides, and most markedly, pioneering the field
of biogenetic crop engineering. So powerful was Monsanto that in 1996 it formed a joint venture with Cargill. It’s in this
way that the rise of Big Agriculture out of the small towns of the rural United States mirrors the story of my family and
of my father’s life. It’s in this way, too, that the complexity and the overriding humanity of things becomes evident. Monsanto,
in one telling, played a part in destroying the way of life in the small-town United States—the very place from which my father
and my grandmother come. In another telling, Monsanto’s industrialization of farming wasn’t ruinous, but rather it revolutionized
a remarkably difficult vocation through technology and science—in other words, Monsanto, along with Cargill and ADM and ConAgra,
streamlined and modernized the raising of crops.

Initially, during the 1970s, the increased efficiency of American farmers proved a boon for small-town America. OPEC, rich
with a surplus of so-called petrodollars, was funding industry throughout the world—primarily in China, the Soviet Union,
and Latin America—in the way the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank do today. Anxious to modernize their industry
and infrastructure, these nations spent less money on food production, prompting U.S. farmers to—at the now-infamous behest
of the secretary of agriculture—“feed the world” and “plant hedgerow to hedgerow.” U.S. food production was pushed to record
highs. By the close of the decade, though, the gas crisis had abated, OPEC was lending less money, and U.S. farmers who’d
overextended themselves in order to grow grain to sell to Argentina or the Soviet Union had to foreclose on their land. The
farm crisis of the early 1980s was born, and followed by a massive rural out-migration.

Rural sociologist William Heffernan has focused much of his work on the period from 1970 to 2000. Heffernan refers often in
his work to the effect “the formation of the three major food chain clusters” had on American farming—and as a direct result,
on rural America. One of the clusters that Heffernan identifies is Cargill-Monsanto. According to Heffernan, by 1996, two
years before my father retired, Cargill—with the help of Monsanto and its stable of seed companies—controlled massive shares
of almost every food-related market. It was among the top five beef and pork packers, beef-feedlot owners, turkey-farming
operators, and ethanol producers. It was number one in animal-feed plants and grain elevators, and number two in flour milling,
dry corn milling, wet corn milling, and soybean crushing. Cargill was also moving aggressively into the transportation business,
namely river barges, railroad cars, and trucking companies, as well as acquiring grocery store chains. As a result of this
centralization, says Heffernan, “most rural economic development specialists discount agriculture as a contributor to rural
development.” That’s to say that, whether you’re talking about Oelwein, Algona, or Ottumwa, Iowa, between 1980 and 1995, the
lifeblood of those towns ceased to provide the same life that it had offered for over a hundred years—roughly since my great-grandfather
arrived from Luxembourg.

Heffernan’s analysis shows an astonishing sea change in a very short period. Just a quarter century ago, as Heffernan points
out, “when family businesses were the predominant system in rural communities, researchers talked of multiplier effects of
three or four.” Meaning that each dollar generated by James and Donna Lein in Oelwein would exchange hands three or four times
before leaving the community. Today, notes Heffernan, that number is down to one. Historically, farming communities were models
of rural economic health, and mining communities like those in the Appalachians were an indicator of a crippling system of
centralization. Today, farming and mining communities are indistinguishable, says Heffernan. Oelwein and Algona are statistically
related to Elk Garden, West Virginia.

Much of the trip from Oelwein to Algona is on Highway 18. In an era of interstates, Highway 18 is a throwback, and little
more than a well-kept country road running seven hundred miles from Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, across the Iowa and South Dakota
prairie, all the way to Mule Creek Junction, Wyoming. Along its path, Highway 18 passes through twice as many Indian reservations
(two) and national grasslands (also two) than towns of more than ten thousand people. In fact, west of Mason City, Iowa, it’s
generally twenty or thirty miles between gas stations, and an hour or more between towns that have their own high schools.
It is truly one of the more nostalgic stretches of American road—one that seems frozen in time, though of course that’s simply
no longer true.

Ostensibly, I went to Algona to find my father’s house and the makeshift baseball field where he and my uncle Joe used to
play. Because the high school didn’t have a ball field of its own, the Algona Bulldogs during the 1940s and ’50s played all
their games away. My dad said the provisional diamond was somewhere east along the railroad tracks, near where the pheasants
used to sun themselves on cold days while picking at waste grain dropped from the freight cars headed to Chicago via Oelwein
and Waterloo.

Riding around town with my father giving me directions by cell phone, I went to his childhood home, a three-bedroom wooden-shingled
farmhouse built in 1919. He wanted to know every detail: the color of the wood and the roof; if there was still a porch; and
if the mulberry tree was still in the front yard. After I gave him my report, it became apparent that the only thing that
had been changed in nearly sixty years was the color of the small front porch—from green to gray. State Street, Algona’s main
drag, was also much as he remembered it, with the exception that the Iowa State Bank is no longer in existence, though the
redbrick building that housed it still stands. Unchanged as well would appear to be the Reding habit for propagation stretching
back to the first Nicholas Reding. According to the waitress who brought me a french-dip sandwich and cup of coffee at the
town’s café, her sister is married to one Reding and her cousin to another. “By spring thaw,” she said, “you won’t be able
to turn over a single rock in this town without a Reding crawling out from under it.”

After lunch, I called my dad again to help me find the old ball field. It was a fool’s errand, for the prairie in every direction
was under eight inches of snow, beneath which was a hard layer of ice. Still, I wasn’t coming back to Algona any time soon,
and I wanted to be near the place my father had once cherished, where he’d learned to hit and field and steal bases with Uncle
Joe.

As I walked east along the tracks as they bordered Highway 18, it was clear and blue and frigid in the wake of the storms
that had passed over the region in succession for a week. I could see, it seemed, forever, and forever seemed to be a sheet
of white, frozen snow blown into topographical drifts. I have always found mountains to be beautiful. But I’m not moved by
them in any way. The same is true of the ocean, and of beaches and large rivers. The Hudson and the Mississippi valleys are
marvels of natural grandeur; they are magnificent, but not humbling. Prairie is humbling. The isolation—false as it may be,
what with farmhouses every few hundred or few thousand acres—is at once exhilarating and terrifying. The sight of it that
day, of all that open country, was gnawing at my stomach. The very idea that tiny Plains towns from Iowa to Montana are given
names like Harvey and Melvin and Maurice, Dana and Bode and Britt—first names, familiar names—underscores the utter humanity
of an attempt to exist in a place never meant to sustain our ill-fated and ultimately impossible desire for permanence. And
yet here we still are, living and dying in Algona and in Cylinder, hunkered down in Fort Charles and Fort Dodge, having a
french dip and walking down the tracks, looking forward to standing around the wood-stove at night with Nathan Lein and his
girlfriend Jamie Porter. The argument of some sociologists, namely that we should pick up and leave, call a spade a spade,
clear out the towns of the Plains rather than artificially support them on farm subsidies, put the land into a national park
and re introduce the buffalo: this argument makes a certain kind of sense. Nathan Lein’s parents wonder every night how they’ll
make it through another winter. And yet where else would we go? What, really, would we have ourselves do, if not this?