Nick Reding (4 page)

That’s when Larry Murphy called. Murph, as he’s known around town, is a onetime meatpacking worker from a well-known Catholic
Democratic family in Dubuque, Iowa. Of Larry’s eight surviving siblings—there were initially ten—four are, or have been, involved
in state politics. During his senior year in high school, Nathan had worked for Murph as a page during one of Murph’s three
terms as a state senator. In January 2002, one year after Nathan moved back to Iowa, Murph took office as the mayor of Oelwein,
which was in dire straits financially. In addition to problems with the farms, Chicago Great Western had closed the round
house, and wages at the Tyson meatpacking plant in town were barely a third of what they’d been as recently as 1992. With
a shrinking student body and falling tax support, Oelwein High School was in danger of being closed, which would have had
the disastrous effect of leaving some four hundred students to be bussed, at great expense, to schools as many as fifty miles
away.

Into this vacuum had moved the production and distribution of methamphetamine. Not only in Oelwein, but all across Iowa, meth
had become one of the leading growth sectors of the economy. No legal industry could, like meth, claim 1,000 percent increases
in production and sales in the four years between 1998 and 2002, a period in which corn prices remained flat and beef prices
actually fell. Farmers, desperate to avoid foreclosure on their land, sold anhydrous ammonia (a common fertilizer) to meth
cooks to make the drug. Others simply quit farming and went into the small-scale meth-manufacturing business. Meatpacking
workers hoping to stay awake long enough to take on double shifts bought the drug in increasing quantities. As all manner
of small legitimate businesses went bankrupt, meth labs opened in their stead. According to Nathan, farming and agriculture
began vying with a drug to be Oelwein’s lifeblood.

“Talk about a nightmare,” said Nathan, reflecting back. “We’d lost all the bases of civilized culture around here. It was
third-world. People began referring to Oelwein as ‘Methlehem.’ ”

In March 2002, early in his first term as mayor, Larry Murphy called Nathan and offered him the job of assistant county attorney,
along with a mandate to clean up meth in Oelwein. The new mayor appealed to Nathan’s idealistic side and enlisted him to help
make an example of how a tough town could succeed in difficult times. He also played on Nathan’s innate desire to be closer
to home. As he and his parents became more estranged, the problems between Nathan and his girlfriend increased; for the first
time since returning to Iowa, he wanted to leave Waterloo and come back to Oelwein. Murph told him that a state job would
give him plenty of time at night and on weekends to work at his parents’ farm and to heal what ever wounds were festering
between them. Nathan could be part of two solutions, Murph said—one personal, one civic. Nathan jumped at the chance.

“He’s a very persuasive guy,” said Nathan in 2005. “I went from totally apathetic to totally gung-ho in about a week. We were
going to fix this place. I really believed that. In some ways, I almost still do.”

Crank in Oelwein back in 2005 was largely considered a small-lab problem, as it was in most of the country. The year before
(2004 statistics had just been released when I went to Oelwein), there were 1,370 methamphetamine labs seized in Iowa. In
Illinois, the number was 1,098. Tennessee had 889, Nebraska had 65, and Georgia law enforcement officers seized 175. In Arizona,
the number was 71, and in Oregon it was 322. Missouri beat them all with 2,087. Between 1998—Nathan’s senior year in high
school, when there were only 321 labs busted in Iowa—and 2004, there had been an increase of nearly 500 percent. And that’s
really only the tip of the iceberg. Oelwein chief of police Jeremy Logan, reflecting a reality nationwide, readily admits
that law enforcement dismantles, at most, one in ten of the total number of labs in existence. Extrapolate that onto the number
of children taken out of Iowa meth labs alone in 2003 and 2004 (700) and that means that at least 7,000 kids were living every
day in homes that produce five pounds of toxic waste, which is often just thrown in the kitchen trash, for each pound of usable
methamphetamine.

By the time I met Nathan, he estimated that 95 percent of all his cases were related to the drug in one manner or another:
manufacture and distribution, possession, possession with intent to distribute, illegal sale of narcotics to a minor, driving
under the influence of an illegal substance, etc. Of those, he had to offer a plea in about ninety-eight out of a hundred,
he said. What bothered him most were the crimes, and these were numerous, in which children had been involved. Many of those
included child rape. Others involved neglect to an order of magnitude—three-year-olds left alone for a week to take care of
their younger sibling; children drinking their own urine to avoid dehydration—that had once been unheard of in Oelwein.

The population of Oelwein fell steadily through the 1980s and 1990s and continues to fall today, albeit at a slower pace.
The result has been a long-term steady loss of tax revenue. In this environment, certain basic civic functions become indulgences.
Keeping the streetlights on at night is no longer a given. Trials, which are expensive, are no longer economically feasible.
Nor are lengthy incarcerations. As these problems extended throughout the county and state, there was simply no place to put
meth addicts. The Fayette County jail was full. The local jail was full. The Iowa state penitentiary in Fort Madison was full.
There were no rehab facilities to speak of in Fayette. The Department of Human Services (DHS) was laying off workers each
week; by October of 2005, Nathan’s girlfriend, Jamie, would be out of a job.

Sitting with Murph one day that May watching the Oelwein Husky varsity baseball team lose a double-header to the Decorah Vikings,
I asked Murph, who was now halfway through his second term as mayor, when he’d first noticed meth as a real factor in the
life of Oelwein. Like Nathan, he said in 2003, and compared the number of labs to a plague. I asked him what he planned to
do about meth, since it had been a problem for a couple of years. Murph, a warm and vibrant man of fifty who appeared, behind
pilot’s sunglasses and beneath a navy-issue baseball cap, to be in spectacularly good health, was uncharacteristically silent.
“I honestly don’t know,” he said finally. “My fear is that there is no solution. That’s how unclear the path has become at
this point.”

Murph understood, perhaps more than anyone, the manner in which Oelwein’s financial difficulties of the last two decades reinforced
its meth problem. His job was increasingly directed by the belief that in solving the town’s economic dilemma, the drug problem,
too, would abate. That was the hope, anyway. On another level, meth seemed to operate completely outside the bounds of any
rational, calculated variables. If crank was supposed to appeal only to people with nothing to lose, why then, said Murph,
did the “good families” suffer its consequences, too? Recently, the husband of the woman who owned a local beauty salon had
been hallucinating so badly one night that he accused his wife of having sex with a stranger in the bed next to him (she was
hiding with her daughter in an adjoining room at the time), and then he tried to kill her. It was as though, said Murph, a
sense of nihilism had become endemic to Oelwein.

One example of the connection between financial loss and the increase in meth use was a feeling among the small-time cooks
that they, like the moonshiners of the early twentieth century, were the last of a breed, not just of rebellious criminals,
but of small-business people. In the wake of so many closed storefronts, it was the Beavis and Butt-Head cooks, as the police
called them, who touted their place as entrepeneurs in the increasingly weak economy of Oelwein. It was an added benefit of
the vitality of their businesses that people, when they snorted or smoked local crank, felt good for days. Viewing themselves
as modern-day Pied Pipers, the cooks by their very presence in town posed a question to which the answer was not obvious:
What else was there to feel good about? It was a logic that had become pervasive. Across the street from Nathan Lein’s house,
ninety feet from his front door, a married couple who were batchers worked day and night until Nathan tried and convicted
them in 2003.

Small-time cooks in Oelwein make a kind of methamphetamine called “Nazi cold,” which relies on anhydrous ammonia, a chemical
fertilizer rich in nitrate that farmers spray on their fields, and pseudoephedrine rendered from Sudafed and Contac. The name
Nazi cold refers in part to the dependence on cold medicine and in part to the methamphetamine synthesis process used by the
Germans in World War II, which depended on nitrate. Of the latter ingredient, the Germans had enormous supplies, for nitrate
is also a key component in gunpowder. (With enough gunpowder and enough meth, one might conclude, anything seems possible.)
German meth-amphetamine during the war, manufactured by the pharmaceutical companies Temmler and Knoll and sold under the
name Pervitin, was in fact made in laboratories, and in huge quantities: millions of pills each month.

Nazi cold meth, on the other hand, can be manufactured wherever, and in quantities that rarely exceed a pound per cook, but
which are more likely to produce only a few grams of what is locally called swag, shit, batch, and crank. Lab locations in
Iowa in the past decade have included bait and tackle shops, river barges, networks of tunnels dug with backhoes, the cab
of a combine, thousands of kitchen sinks, bathtubs, and motel rooms, a high school locker room, and a retirement home, in
which the elderly residents were given excessive doses of opiates so that they would not wake up while the batchers worked.
In one Iowa county, the school district banned bake sales after several children unwittingly brought to school meth-tainted
chocolate chip cookies and Rice Krispies treats that sickened classmates.

Like dioxin, meth residue possesses a unique ability to bind to food, countertops, microwave walls, sink basins, and human
lung tissue for days after being synthesized. Making the drug is a dangerous undertaking. The extreme “heat” of anhydrous
ammonia, which is stored at negative two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, is such that it can burn through human tissue to the
bone. By 2005, meth-making in Oelwein was a process more often completed in a twenty-ounce soda bottle than in an actual laboratory.
At least one step in the process—adding lithium to anhydrous—can result in explosive boiling if not properly done. In another
method of production, adding blue iodine to red phosphorus often produces phosphine gas, which is toxic enough to cauterize
lung and throat tissue. The side effects of meth—bleeding skin-sores as your pores struggle to open and expel the drug, which
often become infected; internal organs shrunken from dehydration; vast areas of the brain that according to CAT scans are
completely depleted of neurotransmitters: a sense that a person is literally falling apart from the inside out—seem almost
unnatural, something visited upon our waking lives from the unconscious. The cruel irony is that it is a horror completely
of our own making.

“Lab,” then, is largely a misnomer. All that is truly necessary to make Nazi dope, in addition to the anhydrous ammonia and
the cold pills, is a lithium strip from inside a battery (accessible by unrolling the layers of zinc and aluminum that lie
beneath the protective sheath), some Coleman lantern fluid, and a ninth-grade knowledge of chemistry. Using a soda bottle
instead of a pair of buckets rigged with surgical tubing is called the single-batch system, and it became popular in Oelwein
once the police had begun raiding so many homes in search of meth labs. Single-batching was devised as a way to cook while
riding mountain bikes. If they strapped a soda bottle onto a rack over the rear wheel, single-batchers believed that the constant
movement—unlike in a home lab—would diffuse the smell of the process. They further believed that the police wouldn’t suspect
people on bikes of cooking meth. (It didn’t take long to catch on. In one story, a Fayette County sheriff’s deputy pulls up
to a kid sitting by the side of the road amid a wilderness of midsummer corn. His bike in pieces all around him, he has a
soda bottle at his side, inside of which there is a small inferno of activity: he has decided, while he waits for his meth
to cook, to take his bike completely apart and put it back together again. The boy asks the deputy why he stopped. “I got
a call,” says the deputy, in the bone-dry wit endemic to the Midwest, “that you needed to borrow a screwdriver.”)

The first order of business for any Nazi cold cook is to amass quantities of cold pills. To do this, cooks generally hire
people who will work in exchange for a portion of the product. These people stereotypically ride together in vans from one
town to the next, piling into gas stations, Wal-Marts, grocery stores, and pharmacies in order to steal or buy as much cold
medicine as they can. They might do one county today, and another tomorrow. If they’ve been particularly active lately around
Oelwein, they might run up to Caledonia, Minnesota, hit Decorah and Kendallville, Iowa, on the way, then rob their way home
via Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Cops across the country, playing on the van element and the fact that the people riding in
them are apt to be acting funny, call the process of amassing pills Smurfing.

Depending on how successful the cook is, he might have his own supply of anhydrous ammonia, which is generally to say that
he gets it from a farmer who takes a cut of the profit. For small-timers, though, stealing is the order of the day. It’s dangerous
work, and a common source of injury. For use as a fertilizer, anhydrous is highly diluted; for use in making crank, it must
be gotten in its concentrated form, which is largely done at night and surreptitiously. One common and incredibly hazardous
way of getting anhydrous from the heavy, thick-walled steel tanks in which it is stored is to prop the tank legs on bricks
and then to drill holes just above the settling line of the anhydrous, easily identified, like studs in drywall, by rapping
one’s knuckles along the tank and listening to the pitch. Then, the thieves remove bricks one at a time from two of the legs
of the tank, tilting the tank more and more. When the anhydrous pours out of the drilled holes, they attempt to catch it in
buckets or small, reinforced kerosene containers. Dr. Clay Hallberg, the chief of staff at Mercy Hospital, tells one story
among many of a boy who waited nearly two days to come to the emergency room following an accident while stealing anhydrous
in which a small amount of the liquid had spilled on his jeans. He’d have come sooner, but he was still high, and he didn’t
want to go to jail. By the time he got to the ER, says Clay, one of the boy’s testicles had melted off.