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Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

We tend to think of small-town living as idyllic and serene, certainly better than big-city living, with all its pollution and poverty. Think again. Since the late 20th century, rural, small-town America has been changing, in part due to the loss of family farms to agribusiness, and changing not for the better. Poverty is rampant, with families moving from farms to town life and with local manufacturing declining. Into this void has stepped a trade consistently profitable – the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine.

Author Nick Reding grew up in the Midwest, and for him, the decline in quality of life has been heartbreaking and alarming. He has seen good-paying jobs in small towns systematically evaporate, as corporate giants have gobbled up companies and either closed them or lowered wages for employees by two-thirds. He has seen how the local folks have coped with the changes, as more people have become users of this cheap and highly-addictive drug. From using to manufacturing and distributing has been one small step out of poverty but deeper into despair.

Reding follows the decline of one town, Oelwein in Iowa, once a reasonably prosperous place, where farms and a meat-packing plant supported nearly everyone. But agribusiness put an end to all that, and the result has been a disaster. Reding follows meth users in their trajectory from prosperity to poverty, looking at causes and effects. He also allows readers to see the complicated network of makers and distributors of meth, from Mexico to the house next door.

Meth is easy to make, with ingredients in plentiful supply and easy to access. A small-town resident is especially able to get the necessary ingredients and make the drug, not in a big, fancy lab, but in a garage, a basement, or a backyard tool shed. While drug enforcement agencies have proposed changes to laws to create more effective barriers to drug manufacturing, pharmaceutical companies and chain pharmacies have done their best to block those reforms and regulations. Reding traces the on-going battle with Wal-Mart and Warner-Lambert. He reveals which members of Congress have been the most obstructive in reform, and readers will be surprised perhaps, when those members are often the very ones in favor of tougher sentences for drug-users.

More than anything, Reding reveals the devastation meth has had on the average small-town resident, whether a user or a person who witnesses the closing of nearly every shop in town as misery and poverty spread. He also shows what it takes to rebuild a town, and sometimes that depends on just one person, a tenacious visionary.

All in all, Oelwein survives, thanks to the persistence of a handful of people, both residents of the town and drug agents who continue to fight for reform of drug laws and pharmaceutical manufacturing. Ultimately, Oelwein may once again revive and prosper to become that which we envision when we think of the glories of small-town life.

D. L. S.

Labels: drug abuse, meth, methamphetamine, Methland, Nick Reding, rural life