The police, says Jarvis, just watched. Jeremy Logan was still a sergeant, and a man with whom Jarvis had gone to high school. When Jarvis approached him, Logan moved away like a matador avoiding a bull, not because he took sadistic pleasure in Jarvis’s plight, but because, as Logan later told me, no one knew what to do. Jarvis begged in vain for someone to shoot him. He was burning alive, and the pain was unbearable. Not even the paramedics knew how to respond, says Jarvis. He says everyone watching—the gathered neighbors, the police, the entire Oelwein Fire Department—wanted him to die. “And I don’t blame them,” he says. “What else could you do with a man like me?”
Methamphetamine is synonymous with the kind of deranged behavior exemplified by Roland Jarvis both that night and in the nineteen years leading up to it. The stories that Jarvis tells would hardly be believable, were it not for corroboration among his friends and within the pages of police reports that exist solely to catalog the known exploits of a single Oelwein, Iowa, meth cook. Jarvis is just one of many local legends around Fayette County famous for, among so many things, staying high on crank for twenty-eight days straight, an entire lunar cycle. Meth is also responsible for the physical destruction that Jarvis’s body exhibits. By the time I met him, he’d had four heart attacks. He couldn’t sleep and rarely had an appetite. Almost all his teeth were gone, and those that remained were black and decaying. He was in almost constant pain; his muscles ached, and his joints were stiff. Meth’s destructiveness extended, said Jarvis, to his children, one of whom, born at the peak of his parents’ intravenous meth use, was wearing a colostomy bag by the age of ten. Unable to shoot up with the finger nubs left him by the lab explosion, Jarvis had taught himself to hold a pipe and lighter so that he could resume his meth habit once again.
So, too, had there been by 2005 thousands of stories across the country blaming meth for delusional violence, morbid depravity, extreme sexual perversion, and an almost otherworldly, hallucinogenic dimension of evil. In 2004, an Ojibwa Indian named Travis Holappa in Embarrass, Minnesota, had been tied to a chair in a rural swamp, tortured, shot eleven times, and then decapitated after running afoul of meth dealers. In a suburb north of Atlanta, in the space of one week that same year, thirteen bodies were found, bound and murdered execution-style in a single home used as a meth stash house. In Ottumwa, Iowa, a ten-year-old girl’s stepfather was jailed for his habit of getting high on crank and then repeatedly forcing the girl, at gunpoint, to perform oral sex on him, an act that he justified, in his hallucinogenic, psychotic state, by saying to police that the girl was the devil and that she had begged him to do it. In Oelwein, in June of 2005, a man high on meth beat another with a glass vase, and thinking he was dead, rolled him in a blanket, then shoved his body behind the couch, where his teenage daughter found him the next afternoon. And yet, methamphetamine was once heralded as the drug that would end the need for all others.
Nagayoshi Nagai, a Japanese chemist, first synthesized desomethamphetamine in 1898. Almost from the beginning, the drug was celebrated for the simple fact that it made people feel good. It was not, however, until Akira Ogata, another Japa nese chemist, first made meth in 1919 from red phosphorus and ephedrine, a naturally occurring plant that grows largely in China, that mass production of the drug became viable. Red phosphorus, the active ingredient on the striker plate of a matchbook, can be mined. Ephedrine, like coca or poppies, can be farmed. By 1933, meth was heralded in the United States as a drug on par with penicillin. In 1939, the pharmaceutical giant Smith, Kline, and French began marketing the drug under the name Benzedrine. In Japan, meth was sold as Hiropon; in Germany, it was marketed under the name Pervitin. In addition to narcolepsy and weight gain, methamphetamine in 1939 was prescribed as a treatment for thirty-three illnesses, including schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, the common cold, hyperactivity, impotence, fatigue, and alcoholism. In a world in which the winners were defined by the speed with which they could industrialize, meth suppressed the need for sleep, food, and hydration, all the while keeping workers “peppy,” as the ads read. The miracle cure could even aid in the nightmare of war, once the industrializing nations of Germany, Britain, Japan, and the United States began fighting for world dominance.
According to a presentation given by former Harvard sociologist Patricia Case, reports authorized by the U.S. government in 1939 suggested that meth had “psychotic” and “anti social” side effects, including increased libido, sexual aggression, violence, hallucinations, dementia, bodily shaking, hyperthermia, sadomasochism, inability to orgasm, Satanic thoughts, general immorality, and chronic insomnia. Nonetheless, Japanese, American, British, and German soldiers were all given methamphetamine pills to stay awake, to stay focused, and to perform under the extreme duress of war. Methedrine, according to Case, was a part of every American airman’s preflight kit. Three enormous plants in Japan produced an estimated one billion Hiropon pills between 1938 and 1945. According to a 2005 article in the German online news source Spiegel, the German pharmaceutical companies Temmler and Knoll in only four months, between April and July 1940, manufactured thirty-five million methamphetamine tablets, all of which were shipped to the Nazi army and air corps. A January 1942 doctor’s report from Germany’s Eastern Front is illuminating. Five hundred German soldiers surrounded by the Red Army began trying to escape through waist-high snow, in temperatures of sixty degrees below zero. Soon, the doctor wrote, the men began lying on the snow, exhausted. The commanding officers then ordered their men to take their meth pills, at which point “the men began spontaneously reporting that they felt better. They began marching in an orderly fashion again, their spirits improved, and they became more alert.” In an interview with the Chicago Tribune in 1985, one of Hitler’s doctors, Ernst-Günther Schenck, revealed that the Führer “demanded interjections of invigorating and tranquilizing drugs,” including methamphetamine. It’s widely believed by many that Hitler’s subsequent and progressive Parkinson’s-like symptoms, if not his increasingly derelict mental state, were a direct result of his meth addiction.
Even into the 1980s, methamphetamine was widely prescribed in the United States. Ads for “Methedrine-brand Methamphetamine—For Those Who Eat Too Much and Those Who Are Depressed” appeared all during the 1960s, largely in women’s magazines. Obedrin Long-Acting, according to another ad, was there to help a woman “calmly set her appestat,” a particularly apt pun given that meth is well known to raise one’s body temperature to dangerously hyperthermic levels. In 1967 alone, according to Dr. Case, thirty-one million legal meth prescriptions were written in the United States. In Dexamyl ads in Life magazine throughout the 1970s, a woman wearing an apron could be seen ecstatically vacuuming her living room carpet. How much legal pharmaceutical methamphetamine was being sold illegally, or without a prescription, during the period from 1945 to 1975 is hard to imagine. Headlines from the New York Times circa 1959 give some indication, however, citing multicity FBI stings in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Phoenix, Denver, Indianapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.