Nick Reding

by Methland: The Death;Life of an American Small Town

  “He’s a very persuasive guy,” said Nathan in 2005. “I went from totally apathetic to totally gung-ho in about a week. We were going to fix this place. I really believed that. In some ways, I almost still do.”

  Crank in Oelwein back in 2005 was largely considered a small-lab problem, as it was in most of the country. The year before (2004 statistics had just been released when I went to Oelwein), there were 1,370 methamphetamine labs seized in Iowa. In Illinois, the number was 1,098. Tennessee had 889, Nebraska had 65, and Georgia law enforcement officers seized 175. In Arizona, the number was 71, and in Oregon it was 322. Missouri beat them all with 2,087. Between 1998—Nathan’s senior year in high school, when there were only 321 labs busted in Iowa—and 2004, there had been an increase of nearly 500 percent. And that’s really only the tip of the iceberg. Oelwein chief of police Jeremy Logan, reflecting a reality nationwide, readily admits that law enforcement dismantles, at most, one in ten of the total number of labs in existence. Extrapolate that onto the number of children taken out of Iowa meth labs alone in 2003 and 2004 (700) and that means that at least 7,000 kids were living every day in homes that produce five pounds of toxic waste, which is often just thrown in the kitchen trash, for each pound of usable methamphetamine.

  By the time I met Nathan, he estimated that 95 percent of all his cases were related to the drug in one manner or another: manufacture and distribution, possession, possession with intent to distribute, illegal sale of narcotics to a minor, driving under the influence of an illegal substance, etc. Of those, he had to offer a plea in about ninety-eight out of a hundred, he said. What bothered him most were the crimes, and these were numerous, in which children had been involved. Many of those included child rape. Others involved neglect to an order of magnitude—three-year-olds left alone for a week to take care of their younger sibling; children drinking their own urine to avoid dehydration—that had once been unheard of in Oelwein.

  The population of Oelwein fell steadily through the 1980s and 1990s and continues to fall today, albeit at a slower pace. The result has been a long-term steady loss of tax revenue. In this environment, certain basic civic functions become indulgences. Keeping the streetlights on at night is no longer a given. Trials, which are expensive, are no longer economically feasible. Nor are lengthy incarcerations. As these problems extended throughout the county and state, there was simply no place to put meth addicts. The Fayette County jail was full. The local jail was full. The Iowa state penitentiary in Fort Madison was full. There were no rehab facilities to speak of in Fayette. The Department of Human Services (DHS) was laying off workers each week; by October of 2005, Nathan’s girlfriend, Jamie, would be out of a job.

  Sitting with Murph one day that May watching the Oelwein Husky varsity baseball team lose a double-header to the Decorah Vikings, I asked Murph, who was now halfway through his second term as mayor, when he’d first noticed meth as a real factor in the life of Oelwein. Like Nathan, he said in 2003, and compared the number of labs to a plague. I asked him what he planned to do about meth, since it had been a problem for a couple of years. Murph, a warm and vibrant man of fifty who appeared, behind pilot’s sunglasses and beneath a navy-issue baseball cap, to be in spectacularly good health, was uncharacteristically silent. “I honestly don’t know,” he said finally. “My fear is that there is no solution. That’s how unclear the path has become at this point.”

  Murph understood, perhaps more than anyone, the manner in which Oelwein’s financial difficulties of the last two decades reinforced its meth problem. His job was increasingly directed by the belief that in solving the town’s economic dilemma, the drug problem, too, would abate. That was the hope, anyway. On another level, meth seemed to operate completely outside the bounds of any rational, calculated variables. If crank was supposed to appeal only to people with nothing to lose, why then, said Murph, did the “good families” suffer its consequences, too? Recently, the husband of the woman who owned a local beauty salon had been hallucinating so badly one night that he accused his wife of having sex with a stranger in the bed next to him (she was hiding with her daughter in an adjoining room at the time), and then he tried to kill her. It was as though, said Murph, a sense of nihilism had become endemic to Oelwein.

  One example of the connection between financial loss and the increase in meth use was a feeling among the small-time cooks that they, like the moonshiners of the early twentieth century, were the last of a breed, not just of rebellious criminals, but of small-business people. In the wake of so many closed storefronts, it was the Beavis and Butt-Head cooks, as the police called them, who touted their place as entrepeneurs in the increasingly weak economy of Oelwein. It was an added benefit of the vitality of their businesses that people, when they snorted or smoked local crank, felt good for days. Viewing themselves as modern-day Pied Pipers, the cooks by their very presence in town posed a question to which the answer was not obvious: What else was there to feel good about? It was a logic that had become pervasive. Across the street from Nathan Lein’s house, ninety feet from his front door, a married couple who were batchers worked day and night until Nathan tried and convicted them in 2003.

  Small-time cooks in Oelwein make a kind of methamphetamine called “Nazi cold,” which relies on anhydrous ammonia, a chemical fertilizer rich in nitrate that farmers spray on their fields, and pseudoephedrine rendered from Sudafed and Contac. The name Nazi cold refers in part to the dependence on cold medicine and in part to the methamphetamine synthesis process used by the Germans in World War II, which depended on nitrate. Of the latter ingredient, the Germans had enormous supplies, for nitrate is also a key component in gunpowder. (With enough gunpowder and enough meth, one might conclude, anything seems possible.) German meth-amphetamine during the war, manufactured by the pharmaceutical companies Temmler and Knoll and sold under the name Pervitin, was in fact made in laboratories, and in huge quantities: millions of pills each month.

  Nazi cold meth, on the other hand, can be manufactured wherever, and in quantities that rarely exceed a pound per cook, but which are more likely to produce only a few grams of what is locally called swag, shit, batch, and crank. Lab locations in Iowa in the past decade have included bait and tackle shops, river barges, networks of tunnels dug with backhoes, the cab of a combine, thousands of kitchen sinks, bathtubs, and motel rooms, a high school locker room, and a retirement home, in which the elderly residents were given excessive doses of opiates so that they would not wake up while the batchers worked. In one Iowa county, the school district banned bake sales after several children unwittingly brought to school meth-tainted chocolate chip cookies and Rice Krispies treats that sickened classmates.

  Like dioxin, meth residue possesses a unique ability to bind to food, countertops, microwave walls, sink basins, and human lung tissue for days after being synthesized. Making the drug is a dangerous undertaking. The extreme “heat” of anhydrous ammonia, which is stored at negative two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, is such that it can burn through human tissue to the bone. By 2005, meth-making in Oelwein was a process more often completed in a twenty-ounce soda bottle than in an actual laboratory. At least one step in the process—adding lithium to anhydrous—can result in explosive boiling if not properly done. In another method of production, adding blue iodine to red phosphorus often produces phosphine gas, which is toxic enough to cauterize lung and throat tissue. The side effects of meth—bleeding skin-sores as your pores struggle to open and expel the drug, which often become infected; internal organs shrunken from dehydration; vast areas of the brain that according to CAT scans are completely depleted of neurotransmitters: a sense that a person is literally falling apart from the inside out—seem almost unnatural, something visited upon our waking lives from the unconscious. The cruel irony is that it is a horror completely of our own making.

  “Lab,” then, is largely a misnomer. All that is truly necessary to make Nazi dope, in addition to the anhydrous ammonia and the cold pills, is a lithium strip from inside a
battery (accessible by unrolling the layers of zinc and aluminum that lie beneath the protective sheath), some Coleman lantern fluid, and a ninth-grade knowledge of chemistry. Using a soda bottle instead of a pair of buckets rigged with surgical tubing is called the single-batch system, and it became popular in Oelwein once the police had begun raiding so many homes in search of meth labs. Single-batching was devised as a way to cook while riding mountain bikes. If they strapped a soda bottle onto a rack over the rear wheel, single-batchers believed that the constant movement—unlike in a home lab—would diffuse the smell of the process. They further believed that the police wouldn’t suspect people on bikes of cooking meth. (It didn’t take long to catch on. In one story, a Fayette County sheriff’s deputy pulls up to a kid sitting by the side of the road amid a wilderness of midsummer corn. His bike in pieces all around him, he has a soda bottle at his side, inside of which there is a small inferno of activity: he has decided, while he waits for his meth to cook, to take his bike completely apart and put it back together again. The boy asks the deputy why he stopped. “I got a call,” says the deputy, in the bone-dry wit endemic to the Midwest, “that you needed to borrow a screwdriver.”)

  The first order of business for any Nazi cold cook is to amass quantities of cold pills. To do this, cooks generally hire people who will work in exchange for a portion of the product. These people stereotypically ride together in vans from one town to the next, piling into gas stations, Wal-Marts, grocery stores, and pharmacies in order to steal or buy as much cold medicine as they can. They might do one county today, and another tomorrow. If they’ve been particularly active lately around Oelwein, they might run up to Caledonia, Minnesota, hit Decorah and Kendallville, Iowa, on the way, then rob their way home via Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Cops across the country, playing on the van element and the fact that the people riding in them are apt to be acting funny, call the process of amassing pills Smurfing.

  Depending on how successful the cook is, he might have his own supply of anhydrous ammonia, which is generally to say that he gets it from a farmer who takes a cut of the profit. For small-timers, though, stealing is the order of the day. It’s dangerous work, and a common source of injury. For use as a fertilizer, anhydrous is highly diluted; for use in making crank, it must be gotten in its concentrated form, which is largely done at night and surreptitiously. One common and incredibly hazardous way of getting anhydrous from the heavy, thick-walled steel tanks in which it is stored is to prop the tank legs on bricks and then to drill holes just above the settling line of the anhydrous, easily identified, like studs in drywall, by rapping one’s knuckles along the tank and listening to the pitch. Then, the thieves remove bricks one at a time from two of the legs of the tank, tilting the tank more and more. When the anhydrous pours out of the drilled holes, they attempt to catch it in buckets or small, reinforced kerosene containers. Dr. Clay Hallberg, the chief of staff at Mercy Hospital, tells one story among many of a boy who waited nearly two days to come to the emergency room following an accident while stealing anhydrous in which a small amount of the liquid had spilled on his jeans. He’d have come sooner, but he was still high, and he didn’t want to go to jail. By the time he got to the ER, says Clay, one of the boy’s testicles had melted off.

  It’s stories like this, told and retold every day among the farmers at Hub City Bakery or while shopping at VG’s, that had begun to fray the sense of civility in Oelwein by summer 2005. Two years after a consolidated effort to rid the town of meth was begun, patience was waning. The police chief mandated—with Nathan’s and Murph’s full support—that his men pull over cars for almost any reason in hopes of finding meth. He had recently lobbied the city council to pass an ordinance outlawing bikes in town. The hope was that the cooks who brazenly cycled around making meth in their soda bottles would at least do so somewhere out in the country instead of right on Main Street. In reaction, there was talk in Oelwein that Murph and Nathan and the chief were infringing on people’s civil liberties when they ought to be doing something about the meth labs, which regularly caught fire in residential neighborhoods, sending toxic plumes of smoke in whatever direction the wind happened to be blowing. Meantime, an Oelwein officer named David Bloem was being investigated for assaulting a meth addict named Jason Annis. According to the West Branch (IA) Times, the accident began when Bloem arrested Annis with a meth-filled syringe “sticking out of his arm.” Later, a video camera in the police station appeared to show Bloem shoving Annis to the floor, where he suffered a broken orbital bone at one eye and a compound fracture at his left cheek.

  The effect was partly desperation, even panic, and partly a reversion to the overly simplistic version of events, which is that meth, and meth alone, was responsible for all that was bad in Oelwein. The addendum to the postulate is that whoever becomes hooked is weak. There’s something wrong with them, and because of them, there’s now something wrong with us. Even Nathan, whose own contradictions made him adept at looking at things evenhandedly, was quick to talk about the “shitbags” and the “scum”: those whose addiction made everyone else pay the price. After three years as assistant county attorney, during which things had gone from bad to worse (in Oelwein), he found it harder and harder to see the nuances of life after meth.

  Nathan’s office is in a squat three-story brick building at the corner of Highway 150 and Route 3, across the street from the Oelwein Public Library. On the first floor of the building there is a small bank. The second and third floors, like so many commercial spaces in Oelwein, are empty. The basement is occupied by a two-man law firm, Sauer and Sauer LLC. The younger Sauer, Wayne, is, in addition to being a partner in the firm with his father, the county attorney. Nathan, every day that he’s not in court, goes to his office there, which is ample, if not extravagant. There is a large desk and three chairs, two of them stacked with boxes of depositions and police reports. On the wall hangs the beard of a turkey that Nathan killed last spring, ten inches long and black and coarse, like the tail of a tiny horse. Next to that is a framed certificate of thanks to Nathan for one of the many cleanups he has organized on the nearby Volga River.

  It’s lunchtime, during which Nathan, who is proud of his frugality, would normally go home and eat last night’s leftovers while watching TV. A second reason Nathan hardly goes out to eat is that he is constantly running into people he’s prosecuted. Today, though, is Friday, the end of the workweek, and the May sun is finally out following five solid days of rain. Leo’s Italian Restaurant, just three blocks away, has a special every Friday on the fried pork tenderloin sandwich with mayo and tomato and a side of broasted potatoes. It’s still an expensive sandwich, if you ask Nathan: $5.95. But today it sounds too good to pass up. So Nathan reaches for his suit jacket, walks up the stairs, and heads out the glass door of the building into the warm sun.

  Leo’s is packed. Fronted by large windows that look onto Main Street and across at the movie house, Leo’s feels as old as the building, built in 1907, that it has occupied for forty years. The tin ceiling is original, as are the wood walls. Business is good every lunch and dinner, twelve months of the year. At the tables sit farmers in their clean jeans, and technicians from the Tyson plant, along with some men in town to discuss the opening of an ethanol plant down the road.

  Taking his place in a red Naugahyde booth against the wall, Nathan is feeling a little philosophical, perhaps because the waitress, Brigitte Hendershot, represents for him the difficulties faced by his town. Brigitte works five days a week. She is fifty-four, and what Nathan calls the salt of the earth. Her son-in-law is a sheriff’s deputy; her daughter works for the state’s Department of Human Services. It is people like Brigitte, says Nathan, whom the meth epidemic hurts the most. They work hard all their lives only to see their towns go to hell and to worry that their grandchildren will fall prey to a drug. In a sinking economy, he says, it’s as though the harder they work, the farther behind they fall. It makes Nathan crazy.

  “I think about the credos
that I admire: Kant’s call to action for the betterment of man; Aquinas’s belief that every man’s job is to help every other man achieve his ends. When I grew up,” says Nathan, “everything in my parents’ house had to be black and white. No interracial marriage, no booze, no sex, no voting for Democrats. I went to law school, and I thought: How does this narrow-minded horseshit aid in the callings of Kant and Aquinas? It can’t, because it’s too marginalizing.

  “But now look where I am,” he continues. “I’ve come full circle, because I see the people that I prosecute as case files, black ink on a white page. There’s so fucking many meth-heads, I can’t differentiate. I don’t get a chance to see them in their homes. I don’t really have time to see them even as people, because that’s not how I’m trained. So how have I evolved?” he asks, rubbing quickly at his nose before answering his own question. “I haven’t. I devolved.”

  Brigitte comes over to take Nathan’s order. Her hair is dyed black to hide the gray, and she wears dark glasses that turn darker in the sun when she goes outside. When she leaves, Nathan leans forward onto the table and clasps his hands.

  “Let’s try to look at meth scientifically and economically,” he begins. “First, there’s the part of your brain that’s evolved over thousands of years to reward you for doing the things that will regenerate the species. Have sex, feel good, in a nutshell. Then there’s meth, which is twenty times better than sex. So, basically, meth becomes more powerful than biology.