Curiously, the fate of towns like Oelwein, which for one hundred years had been places of great prosperity, began to change at just about the time that meth’s reputation began to disintegrate. Even as those towns started feeling the early effects of changes to the food-production industry, which would all but bankrupt them thirty years later, meth during the late 1970s and early ’80s was being illegally produced by bike gangs like the Hells Angels in California and the Sons of Silence in the Midwest. The change, which can be characterized by the shift from pharmacy to “lab,” is what would precipitate the modern American meth epidemic, itself only a large piece of the global meth pandemic. As Methedrine and Benzedrine became crank and speed, production moved from the controlled environment of corporate campuses to the underground production sites of bikers and outlaw chemists. The new form of meth, a drug that has always been popular among men and women doing hard labor, became both purer and vastly more available. It was no accident that just as rural economies were at the peak of their suffering in the mid-1980s, meth’s place in the United States was becoming more entrenched than ever.
Part of meth’s draw in U.S. small towns beginning in the 1980s is that it’s both cheap and easy to make from items available, in bulk, at the farmers’ co-op and the drugstore. The real basis of meth’s attractiveness, though, is much simpler: meth makes people feel good. Even as it helps people work hard, whether that means driving a truck or vacuuming the floor, meth contributes to a feeling that all will be okay, if not exuberantly so. By the 1980s, thanks to increasingly cheap and powerful meth, no longer was the theory behind the American work ethic strictly theoreticaclass="underline" there was a basis in one’s very biochemistry, a promise realized. And according to the magazine and newspaper ads, all of it came without any of the side effects which hardworking Americans loathe: sloth, fatigue, laziness.
In biochemical terms, methamphetamine is what is called an indirect catecholamine agonist, meaning that it blocks the reuptake of neurotransmitters. When you feel good, it’s because dopamine or epinephrine has been released into the synaptic gaps between the neurons in your brain. Metaphorically, this microscopic emission is a simulacrum at the tiniest, most ethereal level for the release and subsequent satiation one feels for having performed some kind of biologically essential task, such as having sex. Later, the neurotransmitter is soaked up out of the synapses, like water into a sponge, by the inverse neuronal process, one designed to be as efficient as it is perpetual. Indeed, running out of neurotransmitters, the feel-good chemicals that reward you for remaining biologically viable, would be tantamount to the nihilistic meaninglessness that Oelwein mayor Larry Murphy feared had engulfed his town by 2005.
Methamphetamine, like crack (and therefore, like cocaine, of which crack is merely a smokable form), encourages the first part of this biochemical transaction and blocks the second. That’s to say that because the reuptake of the neurotransmitter back into the “sponge” takes longer, you feel good for longer. Meth, though, appears to be unique among psychostimulants in one way, says Tom Freese, a doctor of clinical psychology at UCLA and a member of what is widely regarded as the foremost research team in the world studying the drug’s human effects. Freese says that both meth and crack “lurk” in the space between the brain’s neurons, where they stop the reuptake of dopamine, thereby “flooding” you with good feelings. But meth alone, says Freese, “goes inside the presynaptic cells to push dopamine out.” That, he says, “makes for more of a flood, if you will.” This ultimately might begin to account for why some neurological researchers see total depletion of neurotransmitters in sectors of the brains of chronic meth users. It’s perhaps no wonder, then, that the 1950s-era Methedrine and Benzedrine addicts depicted in the David Lynch movie Blue Velvet are associated with anarchy. Moving through the world, and the movie, unable to feel anything but rage, they are the embodienent of late-stage meth addiction, the political expression of the existential scourge and the bane of the work-based American dream.
Meth works on the limbic system of the brain, which is the brain’s reward center, as well as on the prefrontal cortex, where decision making takes place. A meth user’s feelings are reflected in what are called his executive actions, or what Freese calls “his ability to choose between what we all know to be good and bad.” Freese says that what feels good is tied directly to survival. The ability to make decisions, therefore, is in some ways controlled not by what people want, but by what they need. Meth, says Freese, “hijacks the relationship” between what is necessary and what is desired. “The result is that when you take away meth, nothing natural—sex, a glass of water, a good meal, anything for which we are supposed to be rewarded—feels good. The only thing that does feel good is more meth.” Moreover, he continues, “there’s a basic and lasting change in the brain’s chemistry, which is a direct result of the drug’s introduction.” The ultimate effects are psychopathology such as intolerable depression, profound sleep and memory loss, debilitating anxiety, severe hallucinations, and acute, schizophrenic bouts of paranoia: the very things that meth, just eighty years ago, was supposed to cure.
Sleep loss alone, Freese posits, can cause enough emotional and biochemical stress to result in long-term functional deficits. Once the effects of days of sleeplessness are compounded by the panic of memory loss and one of the more common hallucinations from which meth addicts suffer (for instance, that insects are crawling out of their skin), it’s no wonder that addicts do things non-addicts wouldn’t dream of. As Dr. Clay Hallberg, the Oelwein general practitioner, says, “I’d much rather be in the emergency room with a paranoid schizophrenic—and I’ve been in the ER with plenty—than a meth-head. They’re literally out of their minds.”
Roland Jarvis used to have a good job at Iowa Ham in Oelwein. It was a hard job, “throwing” hundred-pound pans full of hog hocks into a scalding roaster and pulling them out again, a process he likens to playing hot potato with bags of sand. But he made eighteen dollars an hour, with full union membership and benefits. That would be a lot of money today in Fayette County. In 1990, it was the kind of money about which a high school dropout like Jarvis could only dream. Jarvis had a girlfriend he wanted to marry, so he took double eight-hour shifts at Iowa Ham, trying to put away as much money as possible. On days that he worked back-to-back shifts, Jarvis had a trick up his sleeve: high on crank, with his central nervous system on overdrive and major systems like his digestive tract all but shut down, Jarvis could easily go for sixteen hours without having to eat, drink, use the bathroom, or sleep.
According to Jarvis and Clay Hallberg, it was common in the 1970s and 1980s to get meth from Doc Maynard, a general practitioner in nearby Winthrop, Iowa. Into his seventies, Jarvis and Clay say, Maynard wrote thousands of illegal prescriptions for Methedrine, mostly for young girls who wanted to lose weight, but also for farmworkers and industrial laborers. A more powerful kind of dope occasionally came to northern Iowa from California in those days, too. A local from Oelwein, Jeffrey William Hayes, who insists on being called by his full name, had gone to Long Beach to look for work among the small community of northeast Iowans living there. Hayes had come back to Oelwein with the dope, which was called P2P, for the ingredient phenyl-2-propanone. Every now and again, Jeffrey William Hayes would load his wife and his young daughter, Hanna, into an eighteen-wheeler cab, drive to Long Beach, pack the wheel wells with P2P crank, and drive home to sell it.