Photograph Courtesy of Taka Yanagimoto
Author Nick Reding set Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town in Oelwein, Iowa. But he could have set it even closer to his St. Louis hometown—say, in Jefferson County, Mo.— and found the same forces in play: vanishing or dead-end jobs, Mexican drug trade, immigration tensions, rural isolation, and the appeal of a drug that’s quintessentially American, because it lets you work hard and play hard for days on end.
You talked to users, cops, doctors, lawyers, and dealers. How tough was it to do the actual reporting and win people’s trust?
Any tension I felt was just feeling like an outsider. It doesn’t matter who you are, when you walk into the bar in town, everybody knows you are not from there. It didn’t matter that our family’d had a farm. Or that my basic uniform was Carhartts and a T-shirt. In fact, people would be really snippy about that: “Oh, are you trying to fit in?”
What finally helped?
What helped was when I’d say, “I don’t want to be one of you!” And just hanging around. It just takes months for them to trust you.
You happened onto Oelwein as a typical town, but in those years, it was Jefferson County, Mo., that led the country for meth-lab busts. Any idea why?
My feeling on that is that the more money and manpower you put into finding meth labs, the more you are going to find. Jefferson County had made that their number-one priority. On the other hand, I continually ran into particular counties or particular townships where you would say, “Why is it that this place is so much worse?” So maybe I’m going to contradict myself here.
Down in Benton, a little town in Southern Illinois, people would come routinely from four states to steal ephedrine and cook dope. I’m not sure that really means Benton is any worse than anywhere else. I just think that is how the meth business works. People go to a place, and other people follow. There are clusters.
So it’s either because they’re looking harder or because that’s where the clusters are.
Ever since I read Methland, I’ve been looking around the little town where I live, sniffing the air, wondering…
Yeah. There’s this idea that in a small town, everybody knows what everybody’s doing. And they have no idea! When I went back to Oelwein for a town-hall meeting, to let everybody say what they wanted about the book, there were probably 25 tweakers in the audience. And here’s this woman telling me, “I don’t think we have this problem in our town, and I just wanted to say that to your face.”
What puzzled you as you did the research?
I wrote this book three or four times before I got it right. I knew the whole time that there was something I was missing. There was something bigger, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. It turned out to be the role of big agriculture.
You mean in causing small farms to foreclose and undermining local economies?
Yeah. I knew that meth was just a metaphor for something else, just a lens onto a larger story, and I knew the story was that there was no money left. Meth is the thing you do to try to make more money—or to feel better about yourself because you can’t make more money.
You acknowledged in the book that whether something’s an “epidemic” or not is kind of a semantic question. Do you think meth was—is—an epidemic?
Absolutely. I don’t think things have to be plottable on a graph in order to exist. Yes, there is a meth epidemic. It’s not a joke, it’s not made up, and it’s getting worse.
You wrote with grudging admiration about Lori Arnold, actor Tom Arnold’s sister, who pretty much pioneered Oelwein’s meth industry. What was her tragic flaw?
I think she’s too smart for her own good. If she had started a legitimate business, God knows where she would be. I talk to her every month or so. She says that she’d do it all over again, that she had a great time. She has no sense of regret or remorse. Maybe that’s her tragic flaw.
What was the most interesting reaction to the book?
So many people had a really allergic reaction to the notion that someone would write about small-town U.S. and say there was something bad going on there. Early on, I actually got death threats about this book.
Were the people who objected living in small towns themselves?
No, they weren’t! But there’s this weird sense of propriety about what small-town U.S. means to U.S. culture. It’s protectionist. Like it’s heretical to say anything negative.
You’re a St. Louis boy—your grandmother worked for Miss Hullings downtown—and you recently moved home again. Why?
I left when I was 18 and came back 18 years later. I’d been living in New York for 14 years. As soon as we decided to get married, it made total sense to come home.
You wrote about meth users with a lot of empathy. Do you think you could ever get hooked?
Yes and no. I was a longtime smoker, so clearly I am not above being addicted to something. But my drugs of choice are nicotine and bourbon, not meth. It just doesn’t have attraction for me at all. I want to slow down in the evening, not ramp up.
What difference did it make, following people’s lives so intimately rather than just gathering dry facts?
I’d been staring at newspaper clippings and talking to professors and law-enforcement people for a long time. But the more detailed the level I went to, the bigger the picture got. Without Oelwein and the people there, I would never have made the bigger connections.
Did you think Oelwein would turn around?
I had some serious doubts. The kind of money they came up with is astonishing. I was kind of hopefully dubious. And even now, just because Main Street looks better doesn’t mean the businesses are going to stay in business.
You mentioned the way people sang meth’s praises decades ago; why didn’t the stuff cause more problems sooner?
If you actually go look at newspaper archives, there was a full-blown meth epidemic here post–World War II, with a lot of public outrage and police activity, and the same thing happened in post–World War II Japan. But people forget.
You also wrote powerfully about how using meth destroys your ability to feel pleasure in normal ways. Why don’t all the anti-drug campaigns emphasize that?
It’s a touchy subject, because if you tell meth addicts that they are never going to feel good again, then why would they stop doing meth? I think it’s one of those pieces of information that is true and that everybody just tries not to talk about, because it’s really depressing.
If you were going to write a formula for a meth-free town, what would it be?
There are always going to be people who do meth, just as there will always be alcoholics. The question is what proportion of the people are doing this and how many of them are doing it because they can make more money that way than at a regular job. A lot of it is economics. A lot is education—it’s stunning, if you go to some of these places, how little people there now about the drug, what it does, and where it comes from. And then there’s law enforcement. Somewhere in there, there’s a perfect formula.
I read somewhere that your next book might be about immigration?
I don’t know. I tried to sell a book based on that to my editor, and he thoroughly rejected it.
Yeah, but this book got rejected initially, too.
Yeah, this one didn’t even make it past my first agent. She was in New York, and she said, “Nobody knows what meth is, and nobody gives a shit about middle America.”
