Methland 5

Methland ends with Major, the former member of the Sons of Silence, the father of Buck, and the man living with his parents. He had been sober for a while, but he felt like his life wasn't right. The same with Oelwein's doctor, Clay Hallberg. After Hallberg had become sober, he felt like his life was empty. He noticed that his marriage of twenty years had died during his alcoholism. And he noticed that his body was feeling the wrath from years of drunkenness. Major went to a bar one night and had seen a friend of his from high school. She revealed to Major that she had a long-lived crush on him. Elated and drunk, Major reconnects with his friend. He has to force himself home, in fear of being caught by the cops because it would constitute a violation of his probation. He begins to walk home and as he does, the withdrawal from meth overwhelms him. He finds himself wishing the police would find him. He is puking under a tree with a reprise of paranoia that had left him since he became sober. 

There is not one good thing about meth. Not one! We are unable to control it. It comes from foreign countries in huge quantities. A user could start making the meth themselves. The ephedrine that comes from the cold medicines used to make meth will always be protected by the large pharmaceutical companies. Even with restrictions, it is impossible to control. If a person does chose to make a meth lab, there is a never ending list of things that can go wrong. 

 A meth user becomes physically dependent. Meth releases 6 times the regular amount of dopamine that the body can do on it's own. Then someone who does meth becomes dependent on it. While their dependency on it, their health declines. They need more and more crank to get the same high. They are effectively killing themselves. While high, a user may not need to eat or sleep for ridiculous amounts of time, sometimes around 16 hours. When the high begins to fade, they do more and the cycle starts over again. Users also become paranoid and hallucinate. It's not my cup of tea. 

I decided to do some research on the critique of Methland  and found something rather surprising. Many Oelwein, Iowa citizens aren't happy with the book and says that Reding has exaggerated the truth about Oelwein. Here's a link to the article:

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/51041562.html?refer=y

Nick Reding

Methland 4

Well, this book is exhausting me. I'll be honest. There are long stretches of seemingly nonsensical facts that seem to never end…
The last reading was equally as uneventful as the previous. Reding explains how the meth isn't predominately coming from the homes anymore. But rather, most of the meth was coming from Mexico. The meth was now easier to make and wasn't being made in the houses. A man who busted several meth dealers notes that "If Joe Blow torches his moms house, you have to respond. But if smart traffickers are quietly moving hundreds of pounds, totally out of sight, you don't really have to pick that fight. You're a small-town cop and federal help is two hundred miles away, in the state capital. You're probably smart not to look too close." (202).
This is the paradoxical truth about meth. When the producers became the cartels and not the users, it was almost easier to look the other way. The small-town police officers could handle one house at a time. This house, by the way, would only produce 3 to 5 grams per batch; they would be making it for themselves. The cops can handle that. But the cops can't handle armed cartels with hundreds of pounds of crystal meth in their trucks. The uneducated gang of men they call cops in Oelwein wouldn't stand a chance against the cartels. Therefore the epidemic spreads.
The parts of this book that really stick out to me are, of course, the really messed parts. On a meth lab raid, a cop said that in the living room of the house there was "three old fashioned porcelain bathtubs full of human excrement…the cook and his girlfriend would get high on meth…then the cook would instruct his girlfriend to insert a store-bought enema into his sphincter. Next, to keep the enema from coming out, she inserted pigs in a blanket, small hot dogs wrapped in dough sold frozen in bags at the grocery store…the cook's record was to have one full pound of pigs in a blanket in his anus at one time." (203). Need I say more? I think not.

Any drug that may make any human do this cannot be part of society. I'm glad that regulations on cold medicine have helped lower the amount of home meth labs, but the problem doesn't end there. It is now become an issue of border control. I am excited to finish this book and see the outcome of Oelwein, Iowa.

Methland 3

This last reading has been rather dry but informative. Things have gotten significantly better in Oelwein. Mayor Larry Murphy is serious about reconstructing a meth-ridden Oelwein. Murphy says that "rock bottom provides a firm foundation…Oelwein could do nothing but push itself up." (123). Murphy's plan is to rid the town of meth and build it up from the ashes. The first step was to build a foundation of economic growth. He had to make Oelwein seem as though it would be a sustainable place for a business and for people to raise families. Murphy had to get a grasp on the meth problem and get businesses that wouldn't stimulate the meth industry by offering lousy jobs. There had to be stable jobs.

Before anything could be done, Reding tells us how the Oelwein Police Department only have one person who has a college degree, the chief. It is difficult to have an uneducated ten-man police force clean a meth infested town. Murphy needed the town's empty meth labs to be cleaned up. To clean up a meth lab, it costs the town $6,000.  On average, the police would dismantle one meth lab every four days. Assuming they didn't run out of meth labs, that would cost Oewlein $547,500 per year. I had no clue a meth lab cost a town so much! The police force during this time also tightened up on everything.

They acted with regards to assuming "everyone is guilty and put the screws to them." (132). This, out of all things in the past reading, struck me. I understand 100% that the police force needs to take on such an aggressive principle in order to do things in a meth town. But at the same time, in America, don't we assume everyone is innocent until proven guilty? Especially in a small town where everyone knows everyone, wouldn't the cops be a little more lenient? Mildred Binstock, a local restaurant owner, called the police chief a Nazi. Fortunately, the police's efforts did make a difference. After around four years, Oelwein moved on to Phase II of their reconstruction.

After a while, the presence of small town cooks like Roland Jarvis dissolved and were replaced by large Mexican drug cartels. And with ephedrine illegal, crystal meth was becoming increasingly popular. Crystal meth is a much more powerful and pure form of the meth of the late 1980's. "Crystal was both a crank addict's and a crank dealer's dream." (152). Crystal could be made for less money, in higher quantities, and get users to higher inexplicable and undeniable tweaks.

There was no chance I would try meth before thus far in the book. And there is certainly no way I'm trying it after hearing of the "paranoia, the Parkinson's-like shaking, and the schizophrenic hallucinations" that users experience (152).

Methland 2

The last reading I did in Methland was rather uneventful. I was introduced to Major, a former meth junkie and member of the biker gang, the Sons of Silence. Major was living with his parents when Reding met him. He had just gotten clean from a long history of meth use. He was living with his 2 year-old son, Buck. Buck was a meth baby. Reding hasn't looked at how meth affects children. Reding did mention earlier in the book that "at least 7,000 kids were living every day in homes that produce five pounds of toxic wast, which is often just thrown in the kitchen trash, for each pound of unusable methamphetamine." (30). One would think that kids would be taken away. One would think that kids would know that their home isn't safe. But unfortunately, kids don't.

When Major lived with the mother of his children, he would microwave coffee filters that he used to strain meth's impurities. The heated paper would then give him a good deal of powdered meth. The microwave became coated in the powdered meth and then used to cook Buck's food. Buck had to have consumed ungodly amounts of homemade crank. It is disgusting to think a parent would give their kid meth.

Reding tells about the physical difficulties of trying to quit meth. While in jail, Major said that one guy became convinced that he had the ingredients to make meth in his body. He thought that his vein was a lithium strip and sat for hours uprooting the vein with his fingernails. Meth also causes users to become paranoid.

Reding says "This, really, is the genius of the meth business. Cocaine and heroin are linked to illegal crops--coca and poppied, respectively. Meth on the other hand is linked in a one-to-one ratio with fighting the common cold." (114).  The DEA was trying to monitor the importation of ephedrine, the main ingredient in both meth and Sudafed (or other cold medicines). The DEA had finally gotten to the point to where all the cold medicine companies weren't using ephedrine anymore, but they were using pseudoephedrine or pseudo, for short. Pseudoephedrine is the "mirror image" of ephedrine. The DEA had succeeded in stopping illegal meth production using ephedrine, but now cooks were making meth using pseudo and it was even stronger than the earlier meth. Why does crime have such aggressive loopholes? I don't know. I find it ironic how the government outlawed one ingredient and it only benefitted the criminals. The pharmaceutical companies would push against the governments monitoring. Therefore, the small town cooks, like Roland Jarvis, would be protected by the big pharmaceutical companies. It's a perfect scheme.

Methland 1

This semester, I am reading Methland by Nick Redding. I was wanting to read a book about marijuana in the United Stated but decided that Methland  would offer information about something I knew very little about. As the title suggests, Methland investigates the horrible power of methamphetamine in rural America. Specifically, Oelwien, Iowa.

I knew meth was a horribly addictive drug. I knew that meth could be made at home. I also knew that meth would destroy your mouth due to the glass pipes used to smoke meth. Other than that, I didn't know very much about meth. I decided to do some research about meth and watched some YouTube videos about meth. I learned that meth can be produced from any over-the-counter cold medicine.The ingredient in cold medicine that makes meth is psuedoephendrine. Federal law states that each person can only get about  9 grams (about 7 packs of cold medicine) each month. The meth producers will gather as much cold medicine as they can in a process called "smurfing". They gather as much as they can and then pool together their purchases. Sometimes they will steal. Others will pay other people to go and buy their limit in cold medicine.

The first section of reading revealed that meth was the #1 "feel good" drug. Redding explain that "the truly singular aspect of meth's attractiveness is that since its first wide-scale abuse--among soldiers during World War II--meth has been associated with hard work…crank has been the choice of the American working class." (16). It is pitiful to think that in the land of opportunity people need to resort to such damaging measures to get by.

Roland Jarvis, Oelwein's very own meth superstar is famous for blowing up his mothers house when a cook went bad. He lit a cigarette after pouring two gallons of hydrochloric acid down the drain in the floor. He then had turned his basement into a vacuum and it ignited. To me, what happens next is most powerful. "Jarvis looked down and saw what he though was egg white on his bare arms. It was not egg white; it was the vicious state of his skin not that the water had boiled out of it." (42). Jarvis was able to flick the chunk of skin off himself and didn't think anything of it. When the fire entire Oelwein Fire Department showed up, he begged for somebody to shoot him.

 Jeffrey Rohrick blew up his mothers basement while cooking meth.

If that's not bad, I don't know what is. Oelwien suffers from a meth epidemic and I look forward to see what comes of the town. Redding mentions that towns similar to Oelwien have disappeared over time.

A Blurb of Flu

This winter has been eventful for the flu. The flu season started early this year and it is likely it will stay longer. There have been 20 reported pediatric deaths because of the flu this season. I find this absolutely crazy. We can get flu vaccines at any local drugstore nowadays, and people are still dying! I don't understand why everybody doesn't take the small steps like washing hands and getting the flu shot. These simple preventative measures could save lives. According to the Huffington Post article "Flu Outbreak 2013: Many Americans Caught Off-Guard; CDC Unveils Updated Numbers", only 37% of Americans have received the vaccine. I understand a fear of needles. But there are other options out there. The very least people could do is regularly wash their hands.