For the most part, though, the methamphetamine market in Oelwein was hit and miss. When there was a lot, there was a lot, and when there was none, it was bone-dry. And though Jarvis was heterosexual, and gossip spreads fast in Oelwein, he says he didn’t mind trading sex with men for meth. In fact, by the time he was working doubles at Iowa Ham, he’d do what ever he could to get the drug. Jarvis considered meth to be his job security. It made Jarvis into the ideal employee. He was like a gorilla throwing the ham trays around. Then he’d come home and he could have sex with his girlfriend for hours on end, drink without getting drunk, and be awake for work the next day without ever having slept.
By the early 1990s, more and more P2P dope was entering Oelwein via California, thanks in part to the connections that had been forged by Jeffrey William Hayes and his business partner, Steve Jelinek, whose parents owned Oelwein’s flower shop. In 1992, Iowa Ham, a small, old canning and packaging company, was bought by Gillette. Overnight, the union was dismantled, and the wages, according to Jarvis and Clay Hallberg, fell from $18 an hour to $6.20. For Jarvis, who now had the first of his four children, it became more important than ever to work harder and longer in order to make ends meet. His meth habit increased along with the purity of the dope. And then one day he did the math. On the one hand, he was making $50 every eight hours to do a job in which there was a 36 percent rate of injury, thereby making meatpacking the most dangerous vocation in the country. For this, Jarvis, now that he worked for Gillette, got no medical coverage for himself or his children, no promise of workers’ compensation should he be hurt, and no hope of advancement. (With Iowa Ham, every employee had not only gotten benefits; they’d owned stock in the company.) On the other hand, Jarvis was paying a hundred dollars at a time in order to buy enough meth to be able to work double shifts for five days straight. For Jarvis, the solution was clear: He would go into business for himself.
The high Jarvis has built his life (and at one point his livelihood) around has five parts: the rush, the high, the shoulder, the tweak, and the withdrawal. Snorting just a couple of lines of reasonably pure meth kept him involved in this continuum for at least twelve hours. Twelve hours is roughly the length of meth’s half-life, and a measure of how long it takes one’s body to completely metabolize the drug, as well as an indicator of how powerful the drug is. (The half-life of crack is only twenty minutes, or about thirty-six times less than meth.) The rush is just what the term suggests: an initial feeling of tremendous euphoria. Dr. Clay Hallberg describes it as “taking all of your neurotransmitters, putting them in a shot glass, and slamming them.” The high is the hours-long period of an exceptionally vivid confidence and sense of well-being that Jarvis experiences while dopamine and epinephrine literally pool around his brain’s neuronal synapses: a biochemical bacchanal. The physical effects include a litany of the body’s most ecstatic and powerful reactions. Core temperature spikes and blood flow to the heart increases dramatically. For men, so, too, does blood flow increase enormously to the penis, and for men and women both, there is an increased need and desire to have sex, a fact that helps explain why meth abuse in gay communities is linked to huge increases in AIDS and hepatitis C. And none of it—not the “full body orgasm” so commonly referred to, or the ability to drink without getting drunk, or the ability to have sex for hours at a time without losing an erection—comes at an obvious, outward cost: no slurring, no falling down, no passing out.
The rest of the meth high, though, is not high at all. The shoulder period is when Jarvis’s euphoria first plateaus and then decreases dramatically, on its way to falling completely to the floor. The fall itself is what’s called the tweak, so named for the physical manifestations of what amounts to the brain’s running on empty. The stores of neurotransmitters now depleted, and their synaptic effect no longer consistent with a sense of well-being, Jarvis becomes increasingly agitated. Tests on mice at the Scripps Research Institute by Dr. Kim Janda suggest an attribute unique to meth that would prove cause for increased agitation, to be sure: The body actually forms antibodies, effectively vaccinating itself against the drug and thereby making the “high” increasingly difficult to achieve. This, Dr. Janda’s research indicates, results in a kind of self-perpetuating biochemical loop: the more meth Jarvis does, the more difficult it is to get high, leaving him no choice but to do more meth.
Unaware of how hard his body has been working, and the deficit at which he is operating, Jarvis begins to show physical depletion. Shaking hands, severe sweats, muscle cramps, and shortness of breath are all symptoms of the impending withdrawal. So, too, does the paranoid conviction set in that he’s being followed—like the belief that a black helicopter was hovering above his house. (This hallucination is common; I heard the exact same story from dozens of addicts in Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky, Georgia, and California.) The desperation to make more meth, at what ever cost, and the hallucinations have been the defining features of Jarvis’s life for nearly a decade. Every time he came home from jail, he was cash-stricken and eager to feel good, and he redoubled his lab’s output.
Dr. Clay Hallberg was the company doctor at Iowa Ham when it was bought by Gillette in 1992. Within a year, he’d called the plant manager, an old friend who’d worked with Clay’s cousin years before at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Rapids. Clay told the manager that he’d noticed an unsettling decline in the morale of the workers coming to see him since they’d lost their benefits. Clay was worried about the increase in drug use as well; more and more workers, suffering from depression now that they’d lost two thirds of their income overnight, were turning to meth. The plant manager said he’d look into it. A week later, Clay was fired.
That the surge in meth use in Oelwein was a direct result of wage cuts at the Gillette plant would be hard to argue convincingly. After all, Roland Jarvis had already been using the drug for several years at that point. But it would be naive not to see those wage cuts as yet another difficult turn in the financial fortunes of Oelwein, just as it would be foolish not to notice the 400 percent increase in local meth production that happened at the same time, as reflected in the number of labs busted in Oelwein. Or, moreover, not to see the link between a steady long-term rise in the abuse of a drug associated with hard work and a steady long-term decline in the amount of work available in rural America’s defining industries. Not long after buying Iowa Ham, Gillette sold the plant to Iowa Beef Products (IBP); in 2001, Tyson bought the plant. With each sale, the number of workers was further cut and wages remained stationary despite rising inflation. In January 2006, Tyson closed the plant for good. By then, the initial workforce had been reduced from over eight hundred people to ninety-nine, a remarkable, devastating loss of revenue in a town of only six thousand.
The association between meth and work is part of why Dr. Stanley Koob, a neuropharmacologist at the Scripps Research Institute, and widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on drug addiction, considers methamphetamine to be “way up there with the worst drugs on the planet.” Hard work and meth conspire, says Koob, in formulating the drug’s “social identity,” which is essentially an attempt to analyze how acceptable a drug is. For eight decades, from the time Nagayoshi Nagai first synthesized meth in 1898 until the early 1980s, meth was a highly acceptable drug in America, one of the reasons being that it helped what Nathan Lein calls “the salt of the earth”—soldiers, truck drivers, slaughterhouse employees, farmers, auto and construction workers, and day laborers—work harder, longer, and more efficiently. It’s one thing for a drug to be associated with sloth, like heroin. But it’s wholly another when a formerly legal and accepted narcotic exists in a one-to-one ratio with the defining ideal of American culture. Meth’s most disastrous physical and psychological effects develop more slowly than its rate of addiction; one’s lucidity and ability to concentrate actually increases short-term. Add this to the fact that ours is a culture in which the vagaries of hard work are celebrated as indicators of social worth, and the reasons to do crank are in fact quite often—initially, at least—more numerous and compelling than the reasons not to do it. So much so that Patricia Case calls meth “the most American drug.” In the metric that took hold of Oelwein at the beginning of the 1980s with the farm crisis—and extended through the next decade with the complicated demise of Iowa Ham—the ability to make something in your basement that promised work, success, wealth, thinness, and happiness was not necessarily too good to be true.