Nick Reding

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

  The first time I’d met Major we’d gone on a glorious July day to an isolated park a few miles outside town, at Major’s request, to play Frisbee golf. The course was laid out in the woods, and each “hole” was a large metal basket set at certain distances, from a hundred yards to several hundred, from each “tee,” which was nothing more than a mowed patch of grass amid the trees. After playing, Major instructed me to take a shortcut on the way home. As one gravel section road led to the next, with green, chest-high corn obscuring the horizon in every direction, it was obvious we weren’t headed back to town but, rather, farther into the country. Major asked me several times if I knew where I was, knowing well that I did not. He clearly enjoyed the control. Eventually, he told me to pull in the driveway of an isolated farmhouse, which turned out to be the current residence of the Family. There, the Sons of Silence leader, Bob, was living with his daughter—Buck’s mother—and presumably batching meth in the barn, just as he’d been doing when Major was sent to jail.

  Only a few days before, Bob had called Bonnie and Joseph in the middle of the night to say that he was coming to kill them and Major, to burn their house down, and to kidnap Buck. And yet, at the first chance Major had, he’d concocted an elaborate plan to play a game of Frisbee golf in an isolated park in order to be driven back to the life he both loathed and longed once again to live. When I pulled out of the driveway, Major pleaded for me to take him back, then refused to tell me how to get back to town. He berated me, threatened to have me killed, and pounded the dashboard as I drove. Major pulled out a cell phone, called a girl he used to know, and promised me that if I’d take him back to the Family, he’d get the girl high and she’d do anything I wanted. It took an hour of driving around aimlessly before I finally got him back home.

  By that stretch, Major had come a long, long way. He still prayed for Buck’s mother to come back to him, but only if she were clean. He still dreamed of the Family when he slept at night, and had to fight the occasional urge to rejoin them, but it was no longer a daily battle he waged with himself. In order to see more clearly still how far he’d come, one has only to think of Roland Jarvis, for example, or even Lori Arnold, who was due out of federal prison for the second time in June 2008.

  The last time I’d visited Jarvis, oddly, was the only time I’d ever seen him outside his mother’s house. He was sitting in his mother’s front yard in a lawn chair, wearing his customary flannel shirt and heavy warm-up pants despite the heat, idly chatting with neighbors walking by on the sidewalk. That, though, seems to have been a high point. I’d tried to contact Jarvis, but to no avail, which I took to be a bad sign, given how welcoming he’d been during two years’ worth of my trips to Oelwein. No one seemed to know where he was or what had happened to him. Clay Hallberg, his doctor, hadn’t seen him in months. It was as though Roland Jarvis had been suddenly swallowed up by the musty living room floor of his mother’s house.

  Yet here was Major, twenty-seven years old (Jarvis would turn forty in December 2007), staying clean, holding a job, seeming to enjoy the sight of his son, who, so far, needed no transplants and no special education. Gone were the days when Major was so high that he mistook a nickel for baby food. (Buck nearly choked to death on the nickel, while Major, fearful he’d be put in jail if he took the child to the hospital, drove Buck to his parents’ house and had them take Buck to the ER. Once there, Buck had emergency surgery to remove the nickel from his trachea.) No longer did Major seem to have the energy for the monologues describing how enemies of the Family were duct-taped to chairs and given lethal amounts of intravenous methamphetamine, their bodies thrown to the hogs. By December 2007, Major had lost his enthusiasm for the Sons’ white supremacist espousals, which, ironically, he’d always spewed to an inaudible beat—as though, even as he raged against blacks, one of his beloved Wu-Tang Clan riffs played in his mind. Compared with Roland Jarvis, Major had triumphantly entered an entirely new realm.

  Major’s hope was nonetheless tentative. For one thing, he was attempting to stay clean of meth while refusing to stop drinking. (When I asked him about this, he asked if drinking was illegal. I shook my head. To which Major added angrily, “Then I rest my case.”) Just how close Major was to losing the ground he’d gained was made clear in a story he told me while Buck, drowsy with his belly full of pizza, climbed inside his newly rebuilt fort, ostensibly to watch more Looney Tunes, and fell quietly asleep.

  The previous night, Major said, he had put Buck to bed and walked in the agonizing cold to a favorite bar eight blocks away. Between the time he’d spent with the Family, the time he’d spent in jail, and the time he’d spent essentially hiding in his parents’ home, afraid that any social contact would lead to a relapse, most of Major’s friends had moved on in one form or another. Many had left town looking for work, or had married and taken jobs that kept them out of the bars at night. The rest, not unreasonably, were afraid to get involved with a former neo-Nazi meth dealer. But that night, Major had run into a girl with whom he’d gone to high school, and on whom he’d had a long-buried crush. As they talked and drank, Major became aware that not only were his adolescent feelings still fresh, but that she, too, had long had feelings for him.

  The sudden awareness that his mind was at ease was almost dizzying, since he’d been constantly preoccupied for so long. Life, Buck, his parents, his past—for a sweet, short time, thoughts of all these things dissolved away with the pitchers of beer and the warm, dark room. He was drunk and happy, reconnecting with a part of his life that was free of the burden of his recent entanglements. He and the girl laughed about how, back in high school, Major, who’d never done drugs of any kind until after he’d graduated, had actually given a speech to the student body on the evils of methamphetamine.

  Then, ecstatically, Major and the girl took advantage of the low light in the corner booth to engage in the kiss that had been nearly a decade in coming. As he kissed her, though, Major snuck glances at the big windows at the front of the bar. He knew he had to leave, even though the warmth of her body held him fast. It was going on midnight on a Friday, and the police would be out cruising. They all knew exactly who Major was. None of them, he felt sure, truly believed a man like him could ever get clean, and they would be gunning for him. He had eight blocks to walk—a loner on quiet, frigid streets, standing out like a criminal. Which, legally, he would be: being drunk in public (and Major was most certainly drunk by now) would constitute a violation of his probation. Should he be caught, he would get three years in jail, no questions asked. He’d completely run out of strikes.

  Finally, Major told the girl he had to go, pushing his way out of the booth. He’d thought about getting the girl to drive him home, but he knew that would be foolish. She was drunk, too, and if the police pulled her over—which was likely—he would go to jail just the same. He thought briefly about driving her car himself. Eight blocks wasn’t that far, after all, and Major was nothing if not an expert at driving drunk. But he decided against this, too, knowing that public drunkenness would get him jail time but that another driving violation would mean he’d lose his license for good. So Major kissed the girl good-bye, went out the door alone, and started walking.

  At first he kept to the edge of the sidewalk. Then, he said, he pulled his parka hood over his head, shielding his face. He thought about Buck and his penchant for building forts, and how a small boy convinces himself that to be unseeing is magically equivalent to being unseen. For a block, Major walked with his hood pulled tight and his head down. Then he threw the hood back. He was getting panicky now, and he started moving along the snow-covered lawns, nearer to the houses, drawn by the shadows of the awnings and the frozen, screened-in porches.

  Soon Major was panting beneath a tree, in the throes of what felt to him like a paralyzing, vomitous meth withdrawal—a full three maddening years since he’d smoked his last foil. All the paranoia came crashing back on him, knocking the breath from his lungs with a force like a wall of water. His vision tun
neled, and he began sweating. His heart raced as he puked on the frozen snow. When he was done, he started running—jumping fences and looking behind himself in utter terror in a mad dash to make it back home to his child and his parents, driven suddenly by a desire not to escape, but to get caught. He wished to hear the sirens that wouldn’t come. To have looked back and seen the police would have been a relief. Anything would have been better, Major said, than the invisible force that bore down on him from behind.

  EPILOGUE

  HOME AGAIN

  In June 2008, I moved to St. Louis with my wife, having lived away from my hometown for eighteen years. During the first week I was there, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper ran daily stories about a two-state murder rampage. First, as the killer was in the midst of his spree; then as he was apprehended; and finally, as the details of his situation made themselves clear. The murderer’s name was Nicholas Sheley, and he was from Rock Falls, Illinois, about eighty miles east of Oelwein. In the three hundred or so miles between Galesburg, Illinois, and Festus, Missouri, near St. Louis, Sheley beat or bludgeoned to death eight people in five days. The whole time, he’d been high on crank.

  In addition to the Sheley story, the Post-Dispatch ran several pieces during my first two weeks home about meth manufacture in Jefferson County, Missouri, which is just outside St. Louis. Jefferson County had become famous in 2005 for having the highest number of meth labs in America, as measured by the number dismantled each year. Missouri led the nation with 2,788 labs busted in 2005, and Jeff County, as it’s called, had an astounding 259 of them—nearly twice that of the next leading Missouri county of Jasper. Given that most police officers with whom I spoke figure they dismantle only one in ten labs at best, that’s as many 2,600 labs at work in rural, bucolic Jefferson County back in 2005. According to the Post-Dispatch, after a brief but precipitous fall in meth-lab busts during 2007, once the Combat Meth Act had passed, Jeff County was on track by June of 2008 to have 200 labs dismantled by year’s end: a clear indication that the batchers were back.

  The feeling I had while reading the stories of Jeff County and Nicholas Sheley reminded me of the feeling I had when I first started researching for this book, in May 2005. As I drove around Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, California, Georgia, and Alabama that summer and fall, there was a genuine sense of shock and fear in the towns I visited. People were confused by the thought that, somehow, just down the street or on the other side of town, a drug that could be made in a sink was making people do crazy things. Not long before I met Phil Price, the former special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, he’d had to arrest a good friend of his—forty-five years old, a father of three, and a new meth addict. Price, backed by the SWAT team, had talked his friend of two decades out of a motel room in rural Canton, Georgia, where the man had taken his own nine-year-old son hostage. It doesn’t take many stories like this to make people question what they know about one another and about themselves.

  The notion that the small-time crank business was back in full force was vexing to me as my wife and I settled into our new neighborhood. It was also frightening. One of my principal motivations for wanting to write this book is that my wife, who grew up in a small town in rural New York, is a recovering alcoholic. I have thought on a thousand occasions: What if meth had been as easily available when she was a teenager as it is now? What if crank, instead of booze, had been her drug of choice? It’s reasonable to suggest that I’d have never met her. Now she was pregnant with our first child. The notion that nothing had changed—for James and Sean in Greenville, for Jeff County, for the place in which I would soon raise my family—was more upsetting to me than it had ever been. Like the mothers and fathers I’d met in Canton and Benton and Oelwein in 2005, I wanted to know what kind of world my child would inhabit, and how things had gotten to be this way. It was as though I was back where I had started three years before.

  According to DEA, the Combat Meth Act was supposed to have effectively killed the home-brewed crank business. According to the nation’s drug czar, meth was dead. If we were to worry at all, it should be about the DTOs, not batchers in Jeff County. So why had the epidemic shifted in the one way that could not have been predicted? Now that meth making had come back home, as it were, people were once again comparing the drug to some kind of supernatural evil, just as had been common in 2005 and 2006. People were starting to panic all over again.

  In order to put things in perspective, I called Tony Loya. An hour-long conversation with him not only confirmed that meth’s genome had reassorted itself once again; it suggested something like a reversion to 1996, after Gene Haislip had finally succeeded in passing a law monitoring the use of powdered pseudoephedrine. Meth seizures that year went down, along with purity, signaling the first major DEA triumph over the drug’s spread. Of course, the victory was pyrrhic, once traffickers switched to the pill-form pseudo that drug lobbyists demanded remain unmonitored. The watering down of Haislip’s 1996 law is what opened the door to the single most destructive period of meth’s recent history, culminating nine years later, in 2005, with the highest rates ever of both domestic and international production of the drug. Now it was becoming clear that, in the wake of the Combat Meth Act, a new and destructive era of the meth epidemic was already under way.

  Loya is five feet six and slightly built. The first time I met him, in a secure room at the Federal Building in San Diego, he appeared behind photochromic gold-rimmed glasses and a deep tan to be in exorbitantly good health for a man of fifty-nine. Loya had the looming and insistently charismatic presence of a Vegas entertainer. He’s been a government employee for thirty-nine years: first with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement (BNE), then with DEA for twenty-five years, and now with the National Methamphetamine Chemical Initiative. He is thoroughly a company man, preternaturally slow to criticize the government or any government agency. He considers American industry “the reason we lead the world” and advocates the fiscally conservative desire for small government and limited regulation. Recent developments, though, had truly stretched many of Loya’s convictions.

  What was clear the day that I talked to Loya on the phone—nearly three years to the day after first meeting him in San Diego—is that he in some ways has found himself playing the role of Gene Haislip. Loya was one of architects of the Combat Meth Act. He also had unprecedented success in persuading the Mexican government to outlaw pseudoephedrine imports into the country in 2007, thereby depleting the amount available to the DTOs. Loya is proud of his work. He is also growing weary, four decades after going to work for a government that, as he put it, “seems ever willing to give new life to the same damn problem it purports to solve.” He went on, “Every decade, we get a chance to put meth on the mat once and for all. And we always fail.”

  According to Loya, the failure of the Combat Meth Act is, like the failure of Haislip’s 1996 law, the direct result of lobbying related to the pharmaceutical industry. The guiding philosophy behind the Combat Meth Act was to lessen domestic crank production by monitoring the sale of cold medicine nationwide. According to Loya, DEA gave Congress three stipulations for doing so successfully. One, the means of monitoring would have to be federally mandated, as opposed to being left up to individual states. Two, pharmacies would need to track cold medicine sales via computer, rather than through handwritten logs. Three, said Loya, DEA insisted that pharmacists’ computers would need “stop-buy” language built into their monitoring programs—meaning that if a customer who has already purchased the monthly maximum of Sudafed tries to buy more, the computer will automatically prompt the pharmacist to disallow the sale, or “stop the buy.”

  This time, it wasn’t Allan Rexinger’s Proprietary Association that objected to the key elements of a piece of antimeth legislation; it was the National Association of Retail Chain Stores, which represents, according to Loya, the five major pharmaceutical drug chains in the United States: Target, Wal-Mart, CVS, Walgreens, and Rite-A
id. The organization’s acronym, Loya noted sardonically on the phone that day, is NARCS.

  While the Combat Meth Act was being debated in 2006, lobbyists on behalf of NARCS argued that a “stop-buy” clause in the legislation would make pharmacists and retail employees into policemen. Why, for example, NARCS asked, should CVS employees have to tell a customer that he can’t buy something? Rather, NARCS said, the data should simply be made available following the sale to local police, at which point the police could do as they saw fit. The stores would be willing to comply, but they should not have to do so at the potentially unfair loss of sales.

  The counterargument, as Tony Loya characterized it, was this: “Does refusing the sale of alcohol and tobacco to minors amount to ‘policing’?

  “Yes,” Loya went on, “it does. And the drug chains have been doing that without complaint for years. So what’s the difference if they have to tell a few people that they can’t buy more than a certain amount of Sudafed? But the lobbyists insisted that any attempt whatsoever at keeping track of sales is a threat to their financial health. It’s just not true.”

  In the end, Congress rejected the “stop-buy” language. More important, Congress resisted DEA’s pleas that the law’s interpretation be federally controlled. Instead, Congress decided to make the Combat Meth Act more of guideline than an actual mandate, leaving specific interpretation to state governments. This, according to Loya, effectively laid the law bare to the powerful NARCS lobby. Meantime, the law’s leading advocates and negotiators—Republican Congressman Mark Souder and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California—declared the legislation a groundbreaking blow to meth.

  Loya characterized the failure of the Combat Meth Act in terms that would have been all too familiar to Larry Murphy back in 2005. States, he said, just like towns and counties, are businesses. Poor states like Missouri, just like poor towns like Oelwein, are loath to risk straining relations with chains like CVS and Rite-Aid. Back when Larry Murphy made the decision to rebuild his town by rejecting businesses that weren’t good for the community, he reconciled himself to the risk that Oelwein could become poorer still, and that he would be blamed. Oelwein gambled and won in 2005 and 2006. Missouri, faced with an implicit threat to its already teetering economy from NARCS, chose to play it safe, refusing to adopt DEA’s “stop-buy” language in its interpretation of the Combat Meth Act late in 2006. At the further behest of NARCS, Loya said, the state legislature allowed pharmacies to rely on handwritten logs of cold medicine sales, thereby saving chains the need to buy new computer programs. A year and a half later, Missouri once again has the highest per capita crank production in the United States.