Some of the deeper meanings of this drug’s hold on America had been evident back in 2004, in Greenville, Illinois. Since the farm crisis of the 1980s, many of the farmers there had long since foreclosed on their land. People left in large numbers. According to Sean and James, in nearby Hagarstown, Illinois, there is but one resident who remains. By 2004, many of the employment opportunities in Greenville and the surrounding area were half-time, with no benefits. Out by Interstate 70, just a couple hundred yards from Ethan’s Place, there were no fewer than seven major chain motels, none of which contributed more than a few minimum wage jobs to the town’s economy. Greenville, once a proud, vigorous farm town, now depended in part on reluctant passersby moving between St. Louis and Indianapolis in order to survive.
Soon enough on the night that Sean and James played pool with each other, they were talking about job opportunities. There were construction gigs closer to St. Louis, in Belleville, Illinois, or even farther still, forty miles beyond the Missouri line, in St. Charles, sixty miles from Greenville, one way. There was a night-watch job across the street from Ethan’s at the Super 8, a position held at the time by a forty-year-old divorced mother of two who was heading to Chicago to try her luck. And there was some work at Wal-Mart. James, who’d entered the Army a grunt and left it six years later a proud staff sergeant, was not enthused by these options.
Sean just laughed. He knew what he was going to do: make meth. The money was good, the drugs were good, and it garnered him access to all kinds of women who, once they smoked a foil or two, would do anything for more. Sean clearly didn’t give a shit about the consequences. The way he saw it, life in Greenville was a prison anyway. It was better to live well for a time and go back to jail than to pretend to make ends meet on two hundred dollars a week and no health insurance that Sean said a job at Wal-Mart would get him.
That night, it was unclear whether James was buying it. But it was impossible not to wonder at what point he would start seeing things through Sean’s eyes. After all, they’d immediately been able to overlook their immense surface differences: black skin, white skin; shaved head, military crew. On a deeper level, there existed a stronger, and ultimately more enduring, foundation: they were united by history. Life in Greenville had, in the course of their lives, changed fundamentally. And yet here they were together, finally home. If James planned to stay, how long could it be before crank, and Sean, seemed like his best option?
That’s not a question I will ever be able to answer directly, for in all the times I’ve been back to Greenville, Illinois, I’ve never seen James or Sean again. The nights I spent talking to them in 2004, though, drove me in my attempt to understand meth in small-town America. Along the way, I began to understand how greatly life in those towns has changed in the past thirty years. Oelwein is a simulacrum for Greenville, and by extrapolation, for the great expanse of the rural United States. Beginning in Oelwein, one can follow meth’s currents backward to the thousands of disparate sources from which it flows. From May 2005 until June 2008, I went back many times to Oelwein; I went to California, Idaho, Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, and Missouri, to big cities and small towns alike, in an attempt to put the events in that small Iowa town into some kind of large-scale perspective. Eventually, the story I’d once viewed through the lens of homespun crime became one that stretched from the Czech Republic to China to Washington, D.C., and involved not just addicts and prosecutors and public defenders, but also congresspeople and governors and U.N. officials; neuropharmacologists and macroeconomists; rural sociologists and microbiologists; and drug lobbyists and pharmaceutical company executives.
What it took three and a half years to fully understand (nine if I count back to my trip to Gooding, Idaho) is that the real story is as much about the death of a way of life as it is about the birth of a drug. If ever there was a chance to see the place of the small American town in the era of the global economy, the meth epidemic is it. Put another way, as Americans have moved increasingly to the coasts, they have carried with them a nostalgic image of the heartland whence their forebears came, as worn and blurry as an old photograph. But as the images have remained static, the places themselves have changed enormously in the context of international economics, like an acreage of timber seen in two photos, one in spring, the other in winter. Really, what James and Sean were confronted with that November night back in 2004 was nothing short of finding a place for themselves in a newly unfamiliar world.
PART 1
2005
CHAPTER 1
KANT’S LAMENT
Nathan Lein, the assistant Fayette County prosecutor, is twenty-eight years old. He has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Luther College in Iowa, a law degree from Valparaiso State University in Indiana, and a master’s in environmental law from the Vermont Law School. The latter two degrees he completed in an astonishing three years by attending Valpo, as it’s called, in the fall, winter, and spring and then transferring credits to Vermont in order to get his master’s after only three summers’ worth of study. Meantime, Nathan, a white farm kid from rural Iowa, financed all of it by working as a bouncer in an all-black strip club in the industrial wasteland of Gary, Indiana.
Nathan is six feet nine inches tall and weighs 280 pounds. He moves with surprising grace around his tiny, four-room house in Oelwein’s Ninth Ward. What evidence there is of the great burdens of Nathan’s life is limited to a habit of slowly raising his hand to his face and then rubbing the tip of his nose in one quick motion, as if to remove a stain that only he can perceive. Perhaps knowing that his size will lend extra weight to what ever he says, Nathan fashions his sentences from the leanest fibers. It’s a habit that underscores the gravity of the contradictions by which his life is defined.
Despite his size, Nathan—a card-carrying Republican—drives the same white diesel Volkswagen Jetta that he has been driving for 177,000 miles, or the rough equivalent of seven circumnavigations of the globe, most of it logged within the confines of a single Iowa county. To court up in the town of West Union, he wears a gray suit, a white shirt, a blue tie, and a ring on each thumb. His hair is dark blond and is short on the sides and longer on top, where Nathan, aided by the stiffening properties of hair gel, arranges it in a way that looks like neat, stubbled rows of winter wheat. The name Lein is Norwegian; beneath a wide forehead, Nathan’s eyes are sled-dog blue. On one window of Nathan’s Jetta is a sticker for the hallucinogenic-hippie band Widespread Panic, whom Nathan goes to see whenever they are within a reasonable driving distance, which for him means about 400 miles. Nathan has been to nineteen shows to date. In the trunk of the Jetta, there is a hunting vest in Mossy Oak camouflage, the pockets of which are stuffed with shotgun shells and wooden turkey calls; a cardboard crate of police reports and depositions; and a twelve-gauge semiautomatic Winchester X2 shotgun.
It’s mid-May 2005, and in the wake of a front that blew out of Regina, Saskatchewan, and overshot the Dakotas, the sky above Oelwein is gray and roiling. As there is more rain in the forecast, Nathan’s father will be planting corn till long past dark on the farm where Nathan grew up, twelve miles outside town, hoping to get the year’s crop seeded before the soil is too wet to plow. Meantime, there are plenty of chores to be done, most of which revolve around the fifty or so Lincoln long-wool and Corriedale sheep that Nathan’s parents raise: sweeping the pens, freshening the water, feeding hay to the rams and ewes. Changed from his suit, in ruined duck-cloth bibs and size 15 work boots, Nathan pilots the white Jetta north along Highway 150. He passes Grace Methodist, somber and maroon-red in the long, sunless dusk, then turns west on Route 3. The late-day smells of cut grass and wet pavement are underlain with the sultry, textured scent of pig shit. Twenty miles distant, the western sky is bruised black and green in a way that has the Amish urging their Clydesdales onward at a trot along the shoulder of the road, the plastic rain-doors already zipped tight on their buggies.