Better living through Chemistry: what the rural Midwest's meth epidemic does, and doesn't, say about the global economy.

• Author: Homans, Charles
• Position: Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town - Book review

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

by Nick Reding

Bloomsbury, 272 pp.

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In an early scene in Nick Reding's Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, a former meatpacker turned small-time methamphetamine cook in Oelwein, Iowa, named Roland Jarvis, inspired by a paranoid hallucination involving black helicopters, pours the hazardous chemicals comprising his home meth lab down the drain and then lights a cigarette, inadvertently blowing up his house and melting off most of his face. When the local police sergeant--a high school classmate of Jarvis's--arrives on the scene, Jarvis begs him to shoot him. No one--the cops, the paramedics, Jarvis himself--quite knows what to do. None of them has really been here before.

This, in a nutshell, is what scared Americans about methamphetamine when it began to seep into the periphery of the national consciousness, building into a full-blown panic by the mid-2000s. The drug itself, a powerful stimulant, is unpleasant enough, but as Reding observes, "[i]n truth, all drug epidemics are only in part about the drugs." What allowed meth to capture the public imagination so fully was the way in which it attacked the stories that Americans told themselves about the primordial decency of the heartland. Aside from its ease of manufacture-you can make meth out of readily available industrial and pharmaceutical products, enabling a twenty-first-century variant on the moonshiners of earlier generations such as Jarvis--the drug's most novel aspect was its clientele: the same predominantly white small-town residents who had watched the urban depredations of crack cocaine from afar and told themselves that they weren't that kind of people. "We're in Iowa, for God's sake," a former Oelwein high school principal, explaining his decision to request police patrols of his school, tells Reding. "We don't do that." In mainstream America's Rockwellian imagination, police officers in towns like Oelwein were supposed to be stopping high school kids from making out in cars on prom night. In the meth age they suddenly needed bulletproof vests and hazmat training.

An August 2005 Newsweek cover story proclaimed meth to be "America's Most Dangerous Drug," which is highly debatable--there are gaping holes in the statistics cited by both the alarmists and the skeptics. As Methland's title suggests, Reding, a magazine writer, tends toward the former. His account of meth's rise in the...