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.