Methland The Death And Life Of An American Small Town last post

Methland in my opinion was a great book which i recommended to any one looking for a good book.  Once i started reading the book i couldnt put it down it was really hard to.  Ultimately, reading Methland feels like a meth trip; It's fast paced, keeps you up at night, and leaves you wanting more. I thought some of the stories in the book were not true just because how crazy they were.  I really enjoyed reading this book because i had never read anything like this before. 

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Reding in the book goes back to Oelwin, Iowa many times in the book visiting the characters he meet the first time he went there.  It was very interesting to see how each of the characters changed and the experiences they went through each time.  The great part about the book is it focuses on other small towns around Oelwin Iowa.  He keeps the audience interested by using the towns around Oelwin to show the truth of what was really happening.  He was trying to show how meth was the worlds most dangerous drug and if done the consequences that can occur.  One story that really stood out was when he went to back to visit these guys major and buck.  Major was a heavy meth user and Buck his kid was exposed to the drug already having serious consequences.  Major was taking to Reding telling him that he couldn't live with buck alone fearing that he would abuse him or worse kill him.  One time Buck was almost killed when Major mistook baby food for a nickel and made Buck eat it causing serious problems and surgery having to be performed to remove the nickel.  This was the reason Major could not take of Buck so he lives with Majors parents until Major is able to take care of him. Major still lives with Buck but ,cant ever be alone with him so one of Majors parents have to be home at all times.  There are many more stories just like this were Reding would go back and interview the people he spoke with in 2005 when he was first just getting started.  Every time he seems to go back things are improving. When he went back in 2008 buck was allowed to be alone in the house with Major and the town of Oelwin was know slowly rebuilding moving away from the stages of methland.  It was amazing to see  the improvements of the town after what looked like a town that would never recover. 

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A central myth of our national culture is small-town residents, the story goes, are honest, hard-working, religiously observant and somehow just more American than the rest of America . . . Reding reveals the fallacies of this myth by showing how, over the past three decades, small-town America has been blighted by methamphetamine, which has taken root in--and taken hold of--its soul. Oelwein serves as a case study of the problems many small towns face today. Once a vibrant farming community where union work and small businesses were plentiful, Oelwein is now struggling through a transition to agribusiness and low-wage employment or, alternatively, unemployment. These conditions, Reding shows, have made the town susceptible to methamphetamine. He tracks the decline and, ultimately, the limited resurgence of Oelwein, while also examining the larger forces that have contributed to its problems. He links meth to the gathering power of unregulated capitalism beginning in the 1980's. It was then, he argues, that one-time union employees earning good wages and protected by solid benefits and begans to see their earnings cut and their benefits disappear. Undocumented migrants began taking jobs at extraordinarily low wages, thereby depressing the cost of labor. Meth, with its opportunity for quick profit and its power to make the most abject and despondent person feel suddenly alive and vibrant, found fertile ground. Meanwhile, in Washington, pharmaceutical lobbyists were working hard to keep DEA agents from attempting to limit access to the raw ingredients; ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, meth's core precursors, were simply too vital to the lucrative allergy-remedy market.  Reding positions the meth epidemic as the triumph of profits over the safety and prosperity of America's small-town inhabitants. But meth hasn't always been seen as a menace. In fact, Reding explains, 'methamphetamine was once heralded as the drug that would end the need for all others. He believed that this drug could replace all other drugs which meant a dangerous society. 

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Through four years of reporting, Reding brings us into the heart of rural America through a cast of intimately drawn characters. "Methland "is a portrait not just of a town, but of small-town America on the brink. Centered on one community battling for a brighter future, it reveals the connections between the real-life people touched by the drug epidemic and the global forces behind it. "Methland" provides a vital perspective on a contemporary tragedy, ultimately offering the very thing that meth once took from Oelwein: hope. "This is a strong book, and it tells a complicated story in comprehensible, human dimensions. "Think globally, suffer locally. This could be the moral of "Methland," Nick Reding's unnerving investigative account of . . . Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself.  Details, with blunt statistics and apt anecdotes, the vanishing of educated young males from rural Iowa, as well as the butchering of middle-class jobs at the local packing plant. 'Vicious cycle' is not an adequate term. As Reding painstakingly presents it, the production, distribution and consumption of methamphetamine is a self-catalyzing catastrophe of Chernobylish dimensions. The rich, with their far-off, insulated lives, get richer and more detached, while the poor get high and, finally, waste.

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The Next part of the book we come across a very interesting character Ronald Jarvis.  Roland Jarvis, a former meatpacking worker who burned his house down in 2001. Jarvis, who had a methamphetamine lab inside, was hallucinating that he saw black helicopters hovering overhead and, in a panic, dumped chemicals down the drain. The home went up in flames, and Jarvis was burned so badly that he begged the police to shoot him. Jarvis had third-degree burns over 78 percent of his body and spent three months in the burn unit in Iowa City, Iowa.  Even though he burned his hands off he still found a way to smoke meth which is amazing.  He taught himself how to light a lighter with what was left of his hands and hold a pipe in his mouth.  When i read that i stopped and said holy shit this is the most addictive drug.  The guy fuckin almost killed himself and still couldn't stop smoking meth.  Jarvis' addiction encapsulates what has happened to many small towns in America. Meth is a drug of the American working class, because it gives people "inordinate amounts of energy."  The story's in this book were just incredible like this next one about Lori Arnold.  She is the sister of actor Tom Arnold.  Laurie Arnold, a woman in Oelwein who turned meth dealing into a highly profitable enterprise, capitalizing on what Reding referred to as a culture of "vocational" meth use. As Reding chronicled, Arnold dropped out of high school her freshman year and experienced her first divorce by the age of 16. She went back to high school after her divorce, but quickly dropped out and re-married by age 18. Her second husband was an alcoholic and cocaine user who beat her whenever he drank. Furthermore, Arnold's husband was unable to take care of their kids because of his alcohol and drug problem, leaving the responsibility solely with Arnold.With her marital troubles, Arnold turned to meth use, and later to selling meth. Originally, she began dealing meth in small quantities. Over time, she made much larger sums of money, eventually reaching thousands of dollars for her routine sales. Arnold hired a dozen "runners" who frequently traveled to Long Beach, Calif., to transport the drugs and then ended up buying a car dealership so she had access to a variety of cars and dealership tags, making it harder for the authorities to keep tabs on her operation. While Arnold's meth enterprise was going on, the Drug Enforcement Agency was primarily concerned with cocaine use, and was not rapidly investigating meth operations. This allowed Arnold to hide her meth operation for many years without people ever becoming aware of the situation.She was eventually arrested and sent to jail were she later got out and got back into the business.

Methland The Death And Life Of An American Small Town

For my project i chose the book Methland The Death And Life OF An American Small Town by Nick Reding. The book takes place in a small town in Iowa.  The name of this town is Oelwein, Iowa.  A town with only 6,159 people Oelwin Iowa is like thousands of other small towns across the country, has been left in the dust by the consolidation of the agricultural industry, a depressed local economy, and an out-migration of people. As if this weren't enough to deal with, an incredibly cheap, long lasting, and highly addictive drug has rolled into town.In the first part of the book we meet some characters one being Nathan Lein, the town prosecutor, whose caseload is filled almost exclusively with meth-related crime.  Most of the people in the city live in poverty due to the fact of very little jobs.  Many of the plants were closed down in the town causing people to turn to what some call the most dangerous drug in the world.  " Talk about a nightmare," said Nathan reflecting back. " We'd lost all the bases of civilized culture around here.  It was a third- world.  people began to referring to Olwein as Methlehem." Another Character we learn about is Larry Murphy who arguably has the tough fist job the mayor of the city.   Murphy is the one who hired Nathan to clean up the town. Its amazing to think how a town can go from a normal small town to a town were chaos is taking place.