Nick Reding (2 page)

I grew up near St. Louis, Missouri. Fifty-five miles away, near the town of Greenville, Illinois, is a wetland complex that
is one of the more important stopover points in North America for what is annually the world’s most concentrated migration
of waterfowl. I’ve duck-hunted there for much of my life, and consider Greenville to be a part of the place, largely defined,
from which I come. Like St. Louis, Greenville sits in the midst of the bluff prairies and timbered hollows that once stretched
along the Mississippi Valley from east-central Missouri down to Kentucky. Together, this area is a discrete subset of the
southern Midwest, unified by a geography, an accent, an economy, and a cultural sensibility that is an elemental part of who
I am. Hunting ducks each autumn at Carlyle Lake has always served as an annual exploration of my family’s history, for the
birds that hatch on the prairies of northwest Iowa and the Dakotas migrate south, like my father did six decades ago, down
the Missouri River toward the promise of St. Louis. There, they meet with great masses that have moved north along the Mississippi
River, just as thousands of people have done, my grandmother included: she left an Ozark mountain subsistence farm along Ebo
Creek, Missouri, and came looking for a better life on the fertile floodplain that surrounds St. Louis. Not far from where
the two strands of my family came together, there’s Carlyle Lake, and the little town of Greenville, where I have always felt
at home. Somehow, despite having run across meth in small towns all over the Mountain and Middle West, I had persisted in
thinking that the area where I grew up was somehow immune to its presence. That all changed one night in Greenville.

I was in Ethan’s Place, a bar to which I’ve retired for many years after duck hunting. There, I met two men whom I’ll call
Sean and James. Sean was a skinhead. He’d just a few days earlier been released from the Illinois state penitentiary after
serving six years for grand theft auto and manufacture of methamphetamine with the intent to distribute. He was a thin and
wiry six feet one, 170 pounds, with a shaved head and a predictable mixture of Nazi tattoos. He was twenty-six years old.
James was black, twenty-eight years old, and a heavily muscled six feet three. His frame was less sturdy, it seemed, than
his burden, for James moved with a kind of exhausted resignation, like someone who suffers from chronic pain. For the last
six years, James had been serving with the Army Airborne, first in Afghanistan, where he participated in the invasion of that
country; then in Iraq, where he was also a member of the initial offensive; and finally, as a policeman back in Afghanistan,
where he’d found himself in the curious position of protecting people who had been shooting at him a couple of years before.
Like Sean, James had been in a sort of prison, and he was finally home.

Shared history is stronger than the forced affiliations mandated by jail or the military, and pretty soon James and Sean,
the black and the neo-Nazi, talked amiably about all the people they knew in common. They drank the local specialty, the Bucket
of Fuckit, a mixture of draft beer, ice, and what ever liquor the bartender sees fit to mix together in a plastic bucket.
As they played pool, James stalked around the table, shooting first and assessing the situation later, each time hitting the
balls more aggressively. The contours of his face formed themselves into a look of desperate perplexity beneath the shadow
of his St. Louis Cardinals cap. Why, he seemed to be thinking, will the balls not go in?

Sean, too, moved around the table with a kind of pent-up aggression. Whereas James’s muscular shoulders sagged in defeat beneath
his knee-length Sean John rugby shirt, Sean’s movements were fluid and decisive inside his Carhartts. His confidence was palpable.
The enormous pupils of his blue eyes brimming with lucid possibility, Sean easily crushed James in the game of pool. Sean
was riding the long, smooth shoulder of a crank binge.

As I shot pool and talked with James and Sean over several nights, it hit me with great force that meth was not, in fact,
following me around. Nor was it just a coincidental aspect of life in the places I’d happened to be in the last half decade,
in Gooding or Los Angeles or Helena. Meth was indeed everywhere, including in the most important place: the area from which
I come. There, it stood to derail the lives of two people with whom, under only slightly different circumstances, I could
easily have grown up.

Meeting Sean and James took away the abstraction that I’d felt regarding meth since 1999. In the wake of what I’d seen in
Greenville, writing a book about the meth epidemic suddenly took on the weight of a moral obligation. Around that same time,
after a decade in New York City, I’d begun yearning to return to the Midwest. My desire to understand the puzzle of meth had
now conspired with an instinct to view the fullness of the place I’d left when I was eighteen. So, too, was the need to consider
both parts of the puzzle growing more urgent. By mid-2005, meth was widely considered, as
Newsweek
magazine put it in its August 8 cover story, “America’s Most Dangerous Drug.”

In the end, meth would have a prolonged moment in the spotlight during 2005 and 2006, which can in some ways be traced to
a late-2004 series called “Unnecessary Epidemic,” written by Steve Suo for the
Oregonian
, an influential newspaper in Portland. In all, the
Oregonian
ran over two hundred and fifty articles in an unprecedented exploration of the drug’s ravages. Following the cover story in
Newsweek
, a
Frontline
special on PBS, and several cable television documentaries, the United Nations drug control agency in late 2005 declared methamphetamine
“the most abused hard drug on earth,” according to PBS, with twenty-six million addicts worldwide. Even as global awareness
of the drug grew, meth’s association with small-town America remained strongest. The idea that a drug could take root in Oelwein,
however, was treated as counterintuitive, challenging notions central to the American sense of identity. This single fact
would continue to define meth’s seeming distinctiveness among drug epidemics.

In 2005, after six years of trying, I got a contract to write this book under the assumption that meth was a large-scale true-crime
story. In that version of the meth story, the most stupefying aspect is the fact that people like Sean could make the drug
in their homes. Or that Coco, the Mexican teenager I’d met in 1999, would risk deportation for a fourth time in order to come
to Gooding, Idaho, to sell the drug. 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. For this reason, and because Sean and James had made it clear that they did not want to be written about,
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 afternoon
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 socio cultural cancer.” Later that day, I spoke at length to the doctor’s twin brother, who was
the former county public defender, and then to the assistant county prosecutor. The doctor lived in Oelwein. I made the calls
on a Saturday. The following Wednesday, I was driving north on Highway 150, following flights from New York to Chicago to
Cedar Rapids.

The doctor’s name is Clay Hallberg. Doctor Clay, as he’s known around town, is Oelwein’s general practitioner and onetime
prodigal son. As his father had done before him for forty-five years, Clay has for two decades delivered babies, overseen
cancer treatments, performed surgeries, and served as proxy psychologist, psychiatrist, and confidante to Oelwein’s wealthy
farmers and poor meatpackers, to its Mexicans and Italians and Germans, its Catholics and Lutherans and evangelicals. Oelwein,
replete with its humdrum realities and unseen eccentricities, passes daily through Clay’s tiny, messy office across the street
from Mercy Hospital, one block north of the senior high school. Clay grew up in town and had come back following medical school
and a residency in southern Illinois. He raised three children there with his wife, Tammy, all the while living down the street
from his parents and his two brothers. Really, I went to Oelwein for the reason that Clay and his hometown seemed inseparable
to me, in the same way that hometown America was becoming inseparable with meth. I thought Clay could explain to me how that
had happened.

By May 2005, Oelwein was on the brink of disaster. As I stood on First Street in front of the post office, the signs of entropy
were everywhere, and hardly less subtle than those in East New York, Brooklyn, or in Compton or Watts, in Los Angeles. The
sidewalks were cracked, half the buildings on Main Street stood vacant, and foot traffic was practically nonexistent. Seven
in ten children in Oelwein under the age of twelve lived below the poverty line. Up at the four-hundred-student high school,
on Eighth Avenue SE, 80 percent of the students were eligible for the federal school lunch program. The principal, meantime,
was quietly arranging with the local police to patrol the halls with a drug-sniffing dog—essentially, to treat the high school
as a perpetual crime scene. The burned-out homes of former meth labs dotted the residential streets and avenues like open
sores. At the same time, the Iowa Department of Human Services, whose in-home therapists serve as one of the only realistic
options for dealing with a mélange of psychiatric ailments, drug addiction, and all manner of abuse in Oelwein, was cutting
90 percent of its funding to the town. The meatpacking plant was on the verge of closing its doors. The industrial park sat
unoccupied. Unemployment was pegged at twice the national level. For Larry Murphy, Oelwein’s embattled second-term mayor,
the question was this: How would he keep his town from literally vanishing into the prairie?

The afternoon that I arrived in Oelwein, Clay Hallberg’s friend Nathan Lein met me at the Super 8 motel. For forty years,
Nathan’s parents have farmed and raised livestock on 480 acres north of town. Following law school in Indiana, Nathan returned
home to take the job of assistant Fayette County prosecutor. On our way to the police station, Nathan drove by what he described
as several working meth labs on the pretty, oak-lined streets that fill out Oelwein’s residential neighborhoods, where the
hand-laid stone houses date back in some cases 120 years. We passed Amishmen coming to town in their buggies, the Rent-a-Reel
movie rental store, and the farm co-op. Two blocks farther on, Nathan pointed out his favorite restaurant, a drive-in burger
joint called EI-EI-O’s, which had recently closed. On the boarded-up windows, the owner had scrawled in red spray paint, “Make
Offer—Please!”

The Oelwein Cop Shop, as the police station is known, is a nondescript 1960s-era brick building by the railroad tracks, one
block north of the Chicago Great Western round house. Inside, past the blue-lit dispatch station, Nathan introduced me to
the new chief of police, Jeremy Logan. Logan had recently been promoted from sergeant by Mayor Murphy with mandates to clean
up a force with a reputation for impropriety and to spearhead a desperate effort to get Oelwein’s small-time meth manufacture
under control. Sitting in his windowless office wearing a bulletproof vest, Logan scrolled through mug shots of Oelwein’s
best-known crank dealers and most notorious addicts, one of whom had recently been taken from his home along with fifteen
assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition—all while his fifteen-year-old daughter watched. Many of Oelwein’s addicts
and dealers, said Logan, hung out at the Do Drop Inn. The idea was that I would go there and, with the blessing of Logan and
Nathan Lein, have free range to meet whomever I could. The further hope was that I would get the stories of several addicts
and dealers and, with luck, be allowed to follow their lives for the next two years.

It didn’t take long. Two days later, I was in the dank living room of Roland Jarvis’s small house, watching TV with the shades
drawn against the bright May sunlight. Jarvis, a thirty-seven-year-old former meatpacking worker, had just smoked some crystalline
shards of crank heated on a small piece of tinfoil, the vapor of which he sucked through a glass pipe. As we settled in for
the denouement of the mobster movie
Goodfellas
, Jarvis told his story, principally about the night he blew his mother’s house up while cooking a batch of meth. That night
had earned him three months in the burn unit at the University of Iowa Hospital in Iowa City, and had melted most of his hands
and face off.

Clay Hallberg is Roland Jarvis’s doctor. Nathan Lein put Jarvis in jail. On the frigid winter night in 2001 when Jarvis blew
up the house, he ran screaming onto the street, begging then-sergeant Jeremy Logan—with whom Jarvis had gone to Oelwein High
School in the 1980s—to shoot him. Such was the pain of burning alive. And so, too, is this just a small part of the difficulty
caused a tiny rural community by the specter of a drug epidemic, which directs life there in a thousand unseen ways. Nathan
Lein and his girlfriend, a caseworker with the Department of Human Services, hardly ever went out to dinner anymore, for fear
of seeing people that Nathan had put in jail, or whose children his girlfriend had recommended be taken away by the state.
Of Roland Jarvis’s four children, one, at thirteen, already needed a kidney transplant, a defect that Jarvis blames on his
and his wife’s intravenous meth use while the child was in utero. Summing up the damage done to Oelwein one morning at the
Perk, Tim Gilson, the former principal of the nearly bankrupt high school, was almost driven to tears remembering the harsh
metrics of the job from which he’d recently resigned in order to finish his Ph.D. in education. “We just didn’t have the money
and the staff to help the kids that needed the most of it,” Gilson said, describing the events leading up to asking the police
to patrol the halls. “On the one hand, I had an obligation to my teachers, who were frightened of their students. On the other
hand, is there anything worse than calling the cops on your own children?” He went on, “We’re in Iowa, for God’s sake. We
don’t
do
that.”