Nick Reding (6 page)

Part of meth’s draw in U.S. small towns beginning in the 1980s is that it’s both cheap and easy to make from items available,
in bulk, at the farmers’ co-op and the drugstore. The real basis of meth’s attractiveness, though, is much simpler: meth makes
people feel good. Even as it helps people work hard, whether that means driving a truck or vacuuming the floor, meth contributes
to a feeling that all will be okay, if not exuberantly so. By the 1980s, thanks to increasingly cheap and powerful meth, no
longer was the theory behind the American work ethic strictly theoretical: there was a basis in one’s very biochemistry, a
promise realized. And according to the magazine and newspaper ads, all of it came without any of the side effects which hardworking
Americans loathe: sloth, fatigue, laziness.

In biochemical terms, methamphetamine is what is called an indirect catecholamine agonist, meaning that it blocks the reuptake
of neurotransmitters. When you feel good, it’s because dopamine or epinephrine has been released into the synaptic gaps between
the neurons in your brain. Metaphorically, this microscopic emission is a simulacrum at the tiniest, most ethereal level for
the release and subsequent satiation one feels for having performed some kind of biologically essential task, such as having
sex. Later, the neurotransmitter is soaked up out of the synapses, like water into a sponge, by the inverse neuronal process,
one designed to be as efficient as it is perpetual. Indeed, running out of neurotransmitters, the feel-good chemicals that
reward you for remaining biologically viable, would be tantamount to the nihilistic meaninglessness that Oelwein mayor Larry
Murphy feared had engulfed his town by 2005.

Methamphetamine, like crack (and therefore, like cocaine, of which crack is merely a smokable form), encourages the first
part of this biochemical transaction and blocks the second. That’s to say that because the reuptake of the neurotransmitter
back into the “sponge” takes longer, you feel good for longer. Meth, though, appears to be unique among psychostimulants in
one way, says Tom Freese, a doctor of clinical psychology at UCLA and a member of what is widely regarded as the foremost
research team in the world studying the drug’s human effects. Freese says that both meth and crack “lurk” in the space between
the brain’s neurons, where they stop the reuptake of dopamine, thereby “flooding” you with good feelings. But meth alone,
says Freese, “goes inside the presynaptic cells to push dopamine out.” That, he says, “makes for more of a flood, if you will.”
This ultimately might begin to account for why some neurological researchers see total depletion of neurotransmitters in sectors
of the brains of chronic meth users. It’s perhaps no wonder, then, that the 1950s-era Methedrine and Benzedrine addicts depicted
in the David Lynch movie
Blue Velvet
are associated with anarchy. Moving through the world, and the movie, unable to feel anything but rage, they are the embodienent
of late-stage meth addiction, the political expression of the existential scourge and the bane of the work-based American
dream.

Meth works on the limbic system of the brain, which is the brain’s reward center, as well as on the prefrontal cortex, where
decision making takes place. A meth user’s feelings are reflected in what are called his executive actions, or what Freese
calls “his ability to choose between what we all know to be good and bad.” Freese says that what feels good is tied directly
to survival. The ability to make decisions, therefore, is in some ways controlled not by what people want, but by what they
need. Meth, says Freese, “hijacks the relationship” between what is necessary and what is desired. “The result is that when
you take away meth, nothing natural—sex, a glass of water, a good meal, anything for which we are
supposed
to be rewarded—feels good. The only thing that does feel good is more meth.” Moreover, he continues, “there’s a basic and
lasting change in the brain’s chemistry, which is a direct result of the drug’s introduction.” The ultimate effects are psychopathology
such as intolerable depression, profound sleep and memory loss, debilitating anxiety, severe hallucinations, and acute, schizophrenic
bouts of paranoia: the very things that meth, just eighty years ago, was supposed to cure.

Sleep loss alone, Freese posits, can cause enough emotional and biochemical stress to result in long-term functional deficits.
Once the effects of days of sleeplessness are compounded by the panic of memory loss and one of the more common hallucinations
from which meth addicts suffer (for instance, that insects are crawling out of their skin), it’s no wonder that addicts do
things non-addicts wouldn’t dream of. As Dr. Clay Hallberg, the Oelwein general practitioner, says, “I’d much rather be in
the emergency room with a paranoid schizophrenic—and I’ve been in the ER with plenty—than a meth-head. They’re literally out
of their minds.”

Roland Jarvis used to have a good job at Iowa Ham in Oelwein. It was a hard job, “throwing” hundred-pound pans full of hog
hocks into a scalding roaster and pulling them out again, a process he likens to playing hot potato with bags of sand. But
he made eighteen dollars an hour, with full union membership and benefits. That would be a lot of money today in Fayette County.
In 1990, it was the kind of money about which a high school dropout like Jarvis could only dream. Jarvis had a girlfriend
he wanted to marry, so he took double eight-hour shifts at Iowa Ham, trying to put away as much money as possible. On days
that he worked back-to-back shifts, Jarvis had a trick up his sleeve: high on crank, with his central nervous system on overdrive
and major systems like his digestive tract all but shut down, Jarvis could easily go for sixteen hours without having to eat,
drink, use the bathroom, or sleep.

According to Jarvis and Clay Hallberg, it was common in the 1970s and 1980s to get meth from Doc Maynard, a general practitioner
in nearby Winthrop, Iowa. Into his seventies, Jarvis and Clay say, Maynard wrote thousands of illegal prescriptions for Methedrine,
mostly for young girls who wanted to lose weight, but also for farmworkers and industrial laborers. A more powerful kind of
dope occasionally came to northern Iowa from California in those days, too. A local from Oelwein, Jeffrey William Hayes, who
insists on being called by his full name, had gone to Long Beach to look for work among the small community of northeast Iowans
living there. Hayes had come back to Oelwein with the dope, which was called P2P, for the ingredient phenyl-2-propanone. Every
now and again, Jeffrey William Hayes would load his wife and his young daughter, Hanna, into an eighteen-wheeler cab, drive
to Long Beach, pack the wheel wells with P2P crank, and drive home to sell it.

For the most part, though, the methamphetamine market in Oelwein was hit and miss. When there was a lot, there was a lot,
and when there was none, it was bone-dry. And though Jarvis was heterosexual, and gossip spreads fast in Oelwein, he says
he didn’t mind trading sex with men for meth. In fact, by the time he was working doubles at Iowa Ham, he’d do what ever he
could to get the drug. Jarvis considered meth to be his job security. It made Jarvis into the ideal employee. He was like
a gorilla throwing the ham trays around. Then he’d come home and he could have sex with his girlfriend for hours on end, drink
without getting drunk, and be awake for work the next day without ever having slept.

By the early 1990s, more and more P2P dope was entering Oelwein via California, thanks in part to the connections that had
been forged by Jeffrey William Hayes and his business partner, Steve Jelinek, whose parents owned Oelwein’s flower shop. In
1992, Iowa Ham, a small, old canning and packaging company, was bought by Gillette. Overnight, the union was dismantled, and
the wages, according to Jarvis and Clay Hallberg, fell from $18 an hour to $6.20. For Jarvis, who now had the first of his
four children, it became more important than ever to work harder and longer in order to make ends meet. His meth habit increased
along with the purity of the dope. And then one day he did the math. On the one hand, he was making $50 every eight hours
to do a job in which there was a 36 percent rate of injury, thereby making meatpacking the most dangerous vocation in the
country. For this, Jarvis, now that he worked for Gillette, got no medical coverage for himself or his children, no promise
of workers’ compensation should he be hurt, and no hope of advancement. (With Iowa Ham, every employee had not only gotten
benefits; they’d owned stock in the company.) On the other hand, Jarvis was paying a hundred dollars at a time in order to
buy enough meth to be able to work double shifts for five days straight. For Jarvis, the solution was clear: He would go into
business for himself.

The high Jarvis has built his life (and at one point his livelihood) around has five parts: the rush, the high, the shoulder,
the tweak, and the withdrawal. Snorting just a couple of lines of reasonably pure meth kept him involved in this continuum
for at least twelve hours. Twelve hours is roughly the length of meth’s half-life, and a measure of how long it takes one’s
body to completely metabolize the drug, as well as an indicator of how powerful the drug is. (The half-life of crack is only
twenty minutes, or about thirty-six times less than meth.) The rush is just what the term suggests: an initial feeling of
tremendous euphoria. Dr. Clay Hallberg describes it as “taking all of your neurotransmitters, putting them in a shot glass,
and slamming them.” The high is the hours-long period of an exceptionally vivid confidence and sense of well-being that Jarvis
experiences while dopamine and epinephrine literally pool around his brain’s neuronal synapses: a biochemical bacchanal. The
physical effects include a litany of the body’s most ecstatic and powerful reactions. Core temperature spikes and blood flow
to the heart increases dramatically. For men, so, too, does blood flow increase enormously to the penis, and for men and women
both, there is an increased need and desire to have sex, a fact that helps explain why meth abuse in gay communities is linked
to huge increases in AIDS and hepatitis C. And none of it—not the “full body orgasm” so commonly referred to, or the ability
to drink without getting drunk, or the ability to have sex for hours at a time without losing an erection—comes at an obvious,
outward cost: no slurring, no falling down, no passing out.

The rest of the meth high, though, is not high at all. The shoulder period is when Jarvis’s euphoria first plateaus and then
decreases dramatically, on its way to falling completely to the floor. The fall itself is what’s called the tweak, so named
for the physical manifestations of what amounts to the brain’s running on empty. The stores of neurotransmitters now depleted,
and their synaptic effect no longer consistent with a sense of well-being, Jarvis becomes increasingly agitated. Tests on
mice at the Scripps Research Institute by Dr. Kim Janda suggest an attribute unique to meth that would prove cause for increased
agitation, to be sure: The body actually forms antibodies, effectively vaccinating itself against the drug and thereby making
the “high” increasingly difficult to achieve. This, Dr. Janda’s research indicates, results in a kind of self-perpetuating
biochemical loop: the more meth Jarvis does, the more difficult it is to get high, leaving him no choice but to do more meth.

Unaware of how hard his body has been working, and the deficit at which he is operating, Jarvis begins to show physical depletion.
Shaking hands, severe sweats, muscle cramps, and shortness of breath are all symptoms of the impending withdrawal. So, too,
does the paranoid conviction set in that he’s being followed—like the belief that a black helicopter was hovering above his
house. (This hallucination is common; I heard the exact same story from dozens of addicts in Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky,
Georgia, and California.) The desperation to make more meth, at what ever cost, and the hallucinations have been the defining
features of Jarvis’s life for nearly a decade. Every time he came home from jail, he was cash-stricken and eager to feel good,
and he redoubled his lab’s output.

Dr. Clay Hallberg was the company doctor at Iowa Ham when it was bought by Gillette in 1992. Within a year, he’d called the
plant manager, an old friend who’d worked with Clay’s cousin years before at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Rapids. Clay
told the manager that he’d noticed an unsettling decline in the morale of the workers coming to see him since they’d lost
their benefits. Clay was worried about the increase in drug use as well; more and more workers, suffering from depression
now that they’d lost two thirds of their income overnight, were turning to meth. The plant manager said he’d look into it.
A week later, Clay was fired.

That the surge in meth use in Oelwein was a direct result of wage cuts at the Gillette plant would be hard to argue convincingly.
After all, Roland Jarvis had already been using the drug for several years at that point. But it would be naive not to see
those wage cuts as yet another difficult turn in the financial fortunes of Oelwein, just as it would be foolish not to notice
the 400 percent increase in local meth production that happened at the same time, as reflected in the number of labs busted
in Oelwein. Or, moreover, not to see the link between a steady long-term rise in the abuse of a drug associated with hard
work and a steady long-term decline in the amount of work available in rural America’s defining industries. Not long after
buying Iowa Ham, Gillette sold the plant to Iowa Beef Products (IBP); in 2001, Tyson bought the plant. With each sale, the
number of workers was further cut and wages remained stationary despite rising inflation. In January 2006, Tyson closed the
plant for good. By then, the initial workforce had been reduced from over eight hundred people to ninety-nine, a remarkable,
devastating loss of revenue in a town of only six thousand.

The association between meth and work is part of why Dr. Stanley Koob, a neuropharmacologist at the Scripps Research Institute,
and widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on drug addiction, considers methamphetamine to be “way up there with
the worst drugs on the planet.” Hard work and meth conspire, says Koob, in formulating the drug’s “social identity,” which
is essentially an attempt to analyze how acceptable a drug is. For eight decades, from the time Nagayoshi Nagai first synthesized
meth in 1898 until the early 1980s, meth was a highly acceptable drug in America, one of the reasons being that it helped
what Nathan Lein calls “the salt of the earth”—soldiers, truck drivers, slaughterhouse employees, farmers, auto and construction
workers, and day laborers—work harder, longer, and more efficiently. It’s one thing for a drug to be associated with sloth,
like heroin. But it’s wholly another when a formerly legal and accepted narcotic exists in a one-to-one ratio with the defining
ideal of American culture. Meth’s most disastrous physical and psychological effects develop more slowly than its rate of
addiction; one’s lucidity and ability to concentrate actually increases short-term. Add this to the fact that ours is a culture
in which the vagaries of hard work are celebrated as indicators of social worth, and the reasons to do crank are in fact quite
often—initially, at least—more numerous and compelling than the reasons not to do it. So much so that Patricia Case calls
meth “the most American drug.” In the metric that took hold of Oelwein at the beginning of the 1980s with the farm crisis—and
extended through the next decade with the complicated demise of Iowa Ham—the ability to make something in your basement that
promised work, success, wealth, thinness, and happiness was not necessarily too good to be true.