Walking along the tracks that day, I found it hard to believe that, just as my father had predicted, three rooster pheasants picked at waste grain in the frigid midday sun. Somewhere to the east, buried in the snow, was the ball field.
CHAPTER 12
EL PASO
By the beginning of 2007, the Combat Meth Act had been in effect for six months. As Phil Price, now a former special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, had predicted two years earlier, the laws making it harder to buy cold medicine had indeed reduced the number of Beavis and Butt-Head labs across the United States. The numbers of addicts, however, hadn’t changed. This meant that those who had relied on home-cooked dope—15 to 25 percent of users, according to 2005 DEA estimates—were now doing business with the DTOs, meaning that 95 to 100 percent of the meth consumed in the United States came from Mexican-run labs. The DTOs had quickly adjusted to the difficulty of importing large amounts of pseudoephedrine into Mexico by purchasing it from a growing number of middlemen—mostly in China but also, increasingly, in Africa. This, in turn, resulted in increased production of the drug.
Also as Phil Price had predicted, the U.S. media by mid-2007 had completed an autopsy of the drug epidemic that, according to drug czar John Walters, was now all but over. Excluding the work of Steve Suo and a few others, the media’s rabid coverage of meth in 2005 and 2006 had treated the drug as a small-lab phenomena. Now that small-lab numbers had dwindled from Arizona to New Jersey, state politicians, magazines, newspapers, and evening newscasters took this reduction as the sole indicator that the epidemic was under control or cured. Seen another way, meth just wasn’t as interesting to report on once it could no longer be cast as a fundamentally American morality play whose acts were once carried out ad nauseam in trailers, kitchen sinks, and bathtubs across the nation. In many cases, the postmortem became a witch hunt, as bloggers and newspaper columnists called into question whether the meth epidemic had ever existed in the first place. Nowhere was this suspicion more candidly stated than in a March 2006 article in Portland’s Willamette Week, the rival paper of the Oregonian. Titled “Meth Madness: How The Oregonian Manufactured an Epidemic, Politicians Bought It and You’re Paying,” the article functioned as a compendium of questions regarding Steve Suo’s and the Oregonian’s integrity. Furthermore, Willamette Week accused state and federal officials of using the meth story for their political gain.
The gist of the criticism, as summed up by the Willamette Week article, was that meth, as a media phenomenon, had been propped up by numbers and statistics that seemed questionable, if not specious. For instance, Willamette Week took to task a report entitled Multnomah County Meth Tax written by an economic research firm called ECONorthwest. The report, oft-cited by Suo and both Oregon and national politicians—and ultimately imitated by other firms in other communities like Benton County, Arkansas—claimed that every household in Multnomah County paid the equivalent of $350 annually to compensate for the community problems caused by meth. That’s to say that every household in the densely populated area, which includes Portland, was paying the rough equivalent of their yearly state taxes to cover the rising costs of increased foster care, overtime staffing of police precincts, property damage, and missed work time attributable to a surge in meth use.
The Willamette Week article contended that the statistics on which the report was based were a mix of fact and anecdote, and therefore the study itself was preposterous. For instance, a Portland police chief couldn’t explain how he’d come up with the statistic that 80 percent of arrests in his precinct were meth-related. Nor, said the article, could the idea of a “meth tax” be taken seriously when it includes the cost of “meth-fueled property damage” that cannot be conclusively linked to the drug. According to Willamette Week, the Oregonian’s reliance on “bad statistics and a rhetoric of crisis… has skewed the truth [and] rearranged governmental spending priorities, perhaps without justification.”
Newspaper columnists from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Miami Herald agreed. John Tierney of the Times lamented that, thanks to meth, politicans had “lost sight of their duties.” Glenn Garvin of the Herald called the Oregonian’s coverage “nonsensical.” Craig Reinarman, whose criticism of the Reagan administration’s response to the crack epidemic was put forth in the book Crack in America, worried that the exorbitant meth coverage by papers like the Oregonian had further directed money to law enforcement and prison, and “away from the underlying sources of people’s troubles,” as he told Willamette Week. No one was more critical of the nation’s meth coverage than Jack Shafer of Slate.com, whose weekly columns tried to disprove every study on which the concept of a meth epidemic had stood. Among Shafer’s favorite targets were the estimated hundred million dollars annually that meth supposedly cost the state of Indiana, and a National Association of Counties survey that found meth had sent more people to local emergency rooms in 2005 than any other drug.
It takes a considerable lack of irony for one newspaper to loudly and dramatically accuse another of histrionics. Nevertheless, Willamette Week made one extremely valid point: drug studies and statistics are inherently flawed, insofar as the supposedly quantitative data is based largely on hearsay, observation, and common sense—which, depending on where you stand, may or may not seem common, and may fail altogether to make sense. It’s unfortunate, though, that Willamette Week—along with most of the other critics, Jack Shafer of Slate.com included—relied on equally unstable ground for their metrical evidence. What the paper and Shafer pointed to were the NIDA and University of Michigan reports, which found, via a deeply faulted system of their own, that meth use had remained stable or dropped in the United States between 2004 and 2006. Basically, one quantitative analysis proved to be as invalid as the other.
Meantime, as Willamette Week tried to disprove ECONorthwest’s findings by referring to the University of Michigan report, it seemed to be important to understand the true effect of recent changes in the meth market fostered by the passage of the Combat Meth Act. What would the law—along with an absent media—mean in Lori Arnold’s hometown of Ottumwa? As an answer to that question, I was reminded of two trips I’d taken there the year before.
On Halloween night of 2005, I’d met a former Mexican drug trafficker, along with his handler, in a small conference room at the abandoned commuter airport outside Ottumwa. The trafficker asked to be called Rudy. Now twenty-four, he was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, then moved with his mother and brother across the border to the Juárez’s sister city of El Paso, Texas. There, Rudy and his brother joined a gang and began dealing cocaine at the ages of thirteen and fifteen, respectively. By sixteen, Rudy was traveling from Juárez to El Paso with up to fifteen kilos of cocaine in a backpack. The Rio Grande between the two cities is dry for much of the year, said Rudy, and largely unguarded away from the busy international bridges. Rudy and his brother would pick a promising spot, descend into the riverbed, and climb up the other side. When they were discovered, Rudy and his brother would return to Mexico, have a soda to pass the time, and then try to cross again from a different spot a few hundred yards or a couple of miles away; they were always successful, he said.