Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

(Bloomsbury, $25)

Methamphetamine continues to ravage small towns like Oelwein, Iowa, says journalist Nick Reding. As Oelwein’s family farms went belly up over the past few decades, and its factories started slashing wages, “crank” emerged as a growth industry. Harried line workers used it to keep alert while working double shifts. Struggling farm suppliers sold the drug’s raw ingredients in bulk to the region’s back roads producers. Countless addicts began supporting their habits by cooking and distributing their own kitchen-sink product. Before long, Oelwein’s police chief noticed that some of the kids riding bicycles on Main Street were strapping soda bottles to their fenders so as to mix low-grade meth.

More harrowing images pile up quickly, said Larry Getlen in the New York Post. “A jailed addict rips the veins from his arms. Children left alone by junkie parents drink their own urine to avoid dehydration. A meth cook blows up his mother’s house” and then is too high to notice that the flesh has been burned from his face. But Reding’s “unnerving” portrait of Oelwein and a neighboring town is distinguished as much by “old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting” as by its occasional visions of hell, said Walter Kirn in The New York Times. The Missouri native won the deep trust of numerous addicts, sellers, and authority figures. What’s more, he shows how global economic forces that feel “almost too great to comprehend” made rural America’s meth plague “nearly inevitable.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

No doubt he’s right that “the mass transfer of Iowa farmland from families to absentee corporations” has created fertile ground for mass addiction, said Bill Kauffman in The Wall Street Journal. Further, the illegal Mexican immigrants who work the town’s low-wage factory jobs “probably do make effective drug couriers, as he argues.” But it’s easier to be engaged by his detailed individual portraits than to accept his assertion that greedy pharmaceutical companies are to blame for addicts’ ongoing access to meth’s commonplace active ingredients. While meth can be a “dull and intractable” subject when written about as an abstract problem, Reding’s “piercing and poignant” character-driven stories make Methland memorable.