Nick Reding (12 page)

Chad asked if Ella was with me. Then he scratched the wooden bar with his long fingernails, as though the bar had an itch
that Chad could feel.

He asked me, in all seriousness, if I was having sex with Ella.

I said, “Right here?” When he picked up his empty beer bottle by the neck, I said, “She’s playing Keno.”

Chad said, “I can’t believe Ella’d fuck you. I can’t believe you’d do this right in front of me, Ella.”

Ella, hearing her name and looking up from the Keno machine, said, “Coming.” It was like a child’s response when being called
for dinner.

“He’s a total fucking stranger!” said Chad. “How can you just fuck him like this?”

At that point, I got up and brought Ella to him. I asked her to hold his hand.

“See?” I said. “Here’s Ella. This is Ella’s hand.”

Chad looked at her for several moments before he actually saw his girlfriend. When she let go of his hand and walked off a
few seconds later, Chad looked at me and said, “What the fuck are you doing here?”

I told him I was just passing through.

“You’re a liar,” he said. He stood up to his full height, a good six feet two. He appeared to weigh two hundred pounds. I
looked down the bar at the kitchen, into which Mildred had disappeared ten minutes before. There was no sign of her.

When Chad asked me if I worked for DEA, the window of diplomacy seemed to be closing once again. He said he’d be honest with
me: he hated DEA. Nor, he said, would it be any skin off his teeth to make sure I never came back to town again. I was drinking
whiskey; I wrapped my fingers around the tumbler so that if need be I could use it to break one of Chad’s eye sockets.

That’s when he sat back down. “Come on,” he said. “Are you a narc or not?” He seemed genuinely interested. It was suddenly
posed as a cordial question. He wanted to know, very sincerely, if I worked for DEA, for the reason that he had never actually
met an agent, and had always kind of wanted to.

I told him I was sorry, but that he was out of luck. In general, meth dealers and the people trying to catch them often seem
to dress in the same manner. Both constituencies are given to hair cut close to the scalp and a few days’ growth of beard.
I’d followed suit.

“Boy,” said Chad confidentially, “you sure look like a fed.”

“So much for fitting in,” I told him.

Chad laughed, and so did I. He slapped me on the back. We shook hands. The agony he was in just a few minutes before was gone
without a trace, replaced by a sense of euphoria that seemed to lift the heavy air of the bar. Both of us, I think, felt not
just relieved, but elated. Chad was back up on the shoulder of his tweak, and he gathered Ella and rode the smooth wave out
the back door of the Do Drop Inn into the alley across from the abandoned roundhouse. Right then, as though by magic, Mildred
reappeared. She been watching all along through the space of the doorjamb. She said, “Isn’t that terrible, the way people
act?”

In some ways, it’s true that, as people say around Oelwein, meth is confined to a few places. But it’s just as important to
see the places where meth is not in evidence, at least in its physical form. For even as the difficulties caused by the drug
are an everyday part of life in Oelwein, so, too, are the rhythms of life there extant with or without meth. In this capacity,
Clay and Tammy Hallberg excel. Much of Oelwein comes through Clay’s office on a weekly basis, or past him in the emergency
room. Or, as happens on several holidays a year, into the Hallberg home to celebrate.

Clay and Tammy’s house sits just across a narrow wooded gully from their neighbor’s home, off a long gravel driveway half
a mile west of town. Because Clay is not a farmer does not mean he doesn’t grow corn on a couple of acres of his property,
or raise a few chickens in the barn alongside his house. In front of the barn is the stable where Tammy keeps her horses,
with which she has won riding competitions as far away as Kentucky. They can see most of their fifty-acre spread from the
eat-in kitchen of the split-level ranch, with its big north-and south-facing windows.

It’s July 4, 2005, and Clay and Tammy are having their annual hog roast. It’s an occasion to be happy and to remember that
life is indeed good, if only people would take the time to eat well and drink a little bit and enjoy one another’s company.
Gathered in small groups in the backyard beneath a looming eighty-year-old live oak, city employees from the water company
mingle with bartenders and high school teachers, waiting for Tammy to give the word that a 250-pound pig provided by the local
UPS driver is, after six hours, finally done roasting. Clay’s twin brother, Charlie, is here, along with his wife. They’ve
brought with them another friend, a Chilean expatriate who works as a translator at a windowpane plant down in Cedar Rapids.

While the UPS man stands beside his custom-made hog oven, a submarine-shaped barbecue so large it had to be towed behind a
pickup, the Hallberg twins hold forth on their latest gig, which took place last night in a bar in Wadena, Iowa, where the
hundred or so listeners twice asked them to reprise Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” a crowd favorite for a quarter century.
Meanwhile, Tammy advises a group of women on the finer points of her famed beer-can chicken recipe, the gist of which is to
insert an open, full Bud Light into the gutted cavity of a homegrown broiler, then to stand the chicken, legs down, on the
grate of a charcoal grill. For the best results, says Tammy, use a medium-hot fire. And if your M.D. husband isn’t looking,
brush that sucker every fifteen minutes with a warm bath of salt, melted butter, and—as ever—more beer. After an hour of that,
she concludes in her thick drawl, you’ll never eat so good.

What unites the partygoers beyond the obvious bond of community is that Clay, all the while with Tammy working as his receptionist,
delivered most of the guests’ children. As the children grew (many of them were now adults themselves), he was their pediatrician,
even as he treated their parents for problems ranging from skin cancer to gout. During his tenure as assistant county medical
examiner, Dr. Clay made official the pronouncements of their parents’ deaths. Oelwein itself is a crossroads in northeast
Iowa, and Clay’s and Tammy’s lives together serve as a point of intersection of Oelwein’s socioeconomic and cultural axes,
the coordinates of which remain unchanged, even as Oelwein’s demographics have shifted further and further toward a baseline
of poverty. Oelwein, with its familiar and often complex social circuitry, is much like a family, and Clay and Tammy are in
many ways at the center of it. Regardless of the trends in community health in the last thirty years, and in the corresponding
changes in the chief medical complaint (it had once been sore muscles and broken bones; now it is depression and meth), if
you have a problem or a reason to celebrate, you go to see the Hallbergs.

The Chilean translator, whose name is Jorge and who goes by George, is at once the party’s most curious guest and its most
affable curiosity. He left Santiago de Chile when General Augusto Pinochet took over the country from Dr. Salvador Allende,
the socialist pediatrician who’d been elected president in 1970; had given over the vast holdings of Chile’s elite to the
underclasses; and had been killed three years later (while barricaded in his office at the Chilean White House) at the hand
of Pinochet’s coup. In a sea of Levi’s, Dockers, and short-sleeved polo shirts, George stands out in his Wranglers, denim
shirt, and shiny black cowboy boots. His wire-rim glasses and instinctive command of Marxist economics brand him a left-wing,
idealist intellectual of a certain era in Latin American history, one heretofore unknown in Fayette County. The nephew of
Salvador Allende’s secretary of education, George (by far) defines the furthest edge of the gathering’s largely centrist political
agenda, which hinges on keeping taxes moderate and crop prices high; putting more money in the public education system; and
keeping God in your life, but out of the government. By his mere presence, George also embodies the party’s, and the town’s,
intuitively inclusionist sensibility.

Nonetheless, most people think George is Mexican. In a place where everyone has a grandfather whose native language was Norwegian
or German or Italian, George represents the latest in the history of American immigration, complete with its unexpected quirks
and hard-to-understand accents.

George, once he’d been exiled by Pinochet under the threat of death, had somehow ended up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. From
there, a marriage took him to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by way of Memphis, Tennessee. Divorced now, he spends his weekends playing
music in local jazz ensembles. By day, he registers workers’ injuries to management at the windowpane factory on behalf of
the mostly Mexican and mostly illegal labor force, a job he likens to selling Bibles in Kabul. Tammy Hallberg allows how all
of that is “pretty darned interesting.” What she wants to know, though, is why more Mexicans can’t learn English. Even the
Amish, she says, can do that.

Clay, seeing an opening, offers his explanation in terms of Hegelian dialectic and Whorfian hypothesis. Basically it amounts
to this: If you’re not allowed to integrate into society (i.e., if you move from abusive job to abusive job, with no standardized
manner of tracking your movements), then your choice of language will reflect this. It is a response with which George agrees
so vehemently that only his native language can provide the right word to express his enthusiasm.

“Claro,” says George, nodding. “Claro.”

Tammy, too, relies on her native skills of communication, which are hammer-blunt. “Clay,” she says, “stop talking—right now.”
And Dr. Clay does.

The food, excluding the hog, is potluck. When the UPS man is done carving the pork and heaping it on platters, he takes the
platters to the kitchen. Tammy goes to the deck above the yard and rings a brass dinner bell. Surrounding the platters of
pork are every manner of dish and container—Tupperware and Ziploc and microwaveable glass. What the containers lack in continuity,
the foods make up for in their consistent use of corn as an ingredient and an equally consistent use of the loosest definition
regarding the word “salad.” There is corn on the cob and corn that has been boiled and then shaved from the cob and mixed
with butter and salt; corn bread with jalapeños; and roasted corn tossed with onions and chives. There is Idaho Red potato
salad, and next to that, an enormous bowl of the same dish, this one made with baby Yukon Golds. There’s Jell-O salad, and
bean salad, and a pot of boiled collard greens. For dessert, there is more Jell-O, this time molded like a wheel and resting
on a seashell-shaped dish, and slices of warm, thick-crusted rhubarb pie with homemade vanilla ice cream.

When it’s all gone, except for the unending mounds of pork, the women stay inside, smoking in the kitchen or helping with
dishes while Tammy divvies up twenty or so pounds of leftover hog meat into large bags, to be handed out to the guests when
they leave, like door prizes. Meanwhile, the men retire to the yard. There, the drinking, in the finest Lutheran tradition,
becomes steady and workmanlike as they sit in their chairs and smoke cigarettes and tell jokes, their voices hushed in the
still night.

George the Chilean sits next to Charlie and listens while Clay tells the one about Earl and Maynard down at the VFW.

“Maynard,” begins Clay in his smoke-scarred voice, “is drunk as usual, sitting on his stool at the bar with Earl. And the
next thing you know, Maynard pukes on himself.”

“I love this one,” says Charlie, leaning back in his camp chair. “This is a good one.”

“So Maynard says to Earl, ‘My wife just bought me this shirt. She’ll kill me.’

“Earl says, ‘Don’t worry. Just tell her I did it.’

“Earl reaches in his wallet, takes out a twenty, and puts it in Maynard’s chest pocket. ‘Tell her,’ he says, ‘that I gave
you twenty dollars for a new shirt.’ ”

Clay reaches out his hand and acts out the exchange by pretending to put something in the breast pocket of George’s cowboy
shirt.

“So,” Clay continues, “Maynard goes home, and his wife gives him hell. ‘But, honey, Earl did it!’ says Maynard. ‘And he gave
me twenty dollars for a new shirt.’

“Maynard reaches in the pocket, pulls out the money, and hands it to his wife.

“She says, ‘There’s forty dollars here.’

“ ‘Right,’ says Maynard. ‘That’s because Earl pooped in my pants, too.’ ”

PART 2

2006

CHAPTER 6

MIRROR IMAGING

D
uring 2006, meth, combined with America’s complicated reaction to it, began to accomplish what sociologist Craig Reinarman
had said is the central function of drug epidemic: to “trace a culture’s sociological fault lines.” This happened in several
ways. First, the American media made meth a cause célèbre. Second, state legislatures, tired of being ignored, began passing
their own meth laws. This, in turn, drove the federal government to react to a drug it had ignored since Gene Haislip’s first
failed campaign against meth at DEA, back when the Amezcua brothers were turning the drug into a blockbuster industry. Between
the newspapers—mostly the
Oregonian
, in Portland—and the anger directed against Congress by state legislatures, a history of the federal government’s complicity
in the meth trade was unearthed. What came into view is that pharmaceutical industry lobbyists had blocked every single anti-meth
bill in the last thirty years with the help of key senators and members of Congress. Moved by so much bad press to do something
immediately, Congress passed its first ever blockbuster meth law, the Combat Methamphetamine Act, in September 2006.

In some ways it was as though the United States was looking in a mirror, seeing itself in the rural towns to which methamphetamine
had drawn the nation’s and the government’s gaze. Ironically, meth made Olwein’s connection with the rest of the country stronger
and more visible than it had been for a long time. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Washington, D.C., where the drug’s
effect on small-town America was now a salient political issue. The effect, as it registered in the public pages of national
newspapers, was the kind of broad-scale unity that had never before existed, given that the drug had for ten years been regarded
as a regional, not a national, phenomenon. Suddenly people in New York City knew what—if not exactly where—I was talking about
when I mentioned meth in Oelwein, Iowa. The
New York Times
, the
Boston
Globe
, the
Washington Post
, and the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
joined the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, the
Des Moines Register
, the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
, and the
Los Angeles Times
in running stories about crank almost daily. The nation seemed to feel a shared and equal sense of outrage, whether over meth-induced
increases in HIV among San Francisco’s and New York’s gay populations, or the apocalyptic violence that resulted from shifts
in the meth market along the Texas-Mexican border. The message was that civilized society was falling apart, that people were
going crazy, and that the proof was no longer just in the hinterlands; it was everywhere.

When Congress began debating the Combat Meth Act, it was without a trace of bipartisan rancor. Indiana Republican congressmen
Mark Souder stood next to California Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein as they declared their moral obligation to take on
meth and win. This seemed to be a macrocosm of what was happening in Oelwein, where Mayor Larry Murphy and the heretofore
divided townspeople began to put aside their differences and rebuild. The message was that what was bad for the towns was
bad for Washington, D.C., too; when it came to meth, everyone was working for the same thing. On a clear day, flying from
New York to Los Angeles, or from Chicago to San Francisco, you might have looked at the small communities beneath the airplane
in a different way, understanding better what they were up against, and in that way, you might have understood something of
their vanishing place in the nation.

And then, just as suddenly as it started, the meth epidemic—along with the chance to understand what that epidemic really
meant—was over. President George W. Bush’s National Drug Control Policy director, or so-called drug czar, John Walters, announced
in August 2006 that “the war on meth,” for all intents and purposes, had been won. Shortly thereafter, the same newspapers
that had briefly made the drug a cause célèbre began questioning whether meth had ever been an epidemic or just the creation
of an overzealous media hungry for a good story. The popular media’s brief but intense exploration of meth in rural America,
highlighted by several documentaries on both cable and network television, also ended. As the drug went back to being a regional
bogeyman, the rural United States went with it, taking its place once again in anonymity.

What remained, however, was a town (and a nation) with a drug problem. The need to keep looking remained as well. In meth’s
meteoric rise into the national consciousness and its subsequent fall, there were many clues to its deeper meaning in American
culture. The fault lines, whether or not they made headlines, still overlaid the national topography just as completely as
before. And maybe more so. What continued to take shape for me was the portrait of a town that stood as a metaphor for all
of rural America and its problems. That’s to say that the evolution of the meth epidemic had occurred in lockstep with the
three separate economic trends that had contributed to the dissolution of small-town United States. By looking closely at
the events of 2006, one can see the parallel trajectories of meth and small-town economics—the one rising, the other falling—dating
back to the days of the Amezcuas. And the things that spurred this simultaneous rise and fall: the development of Big Pharmaceuticals,
Big Agriculture, and the modern Mexican drug-trafficking business. To look closely at the history of meth from 1990 to 2006
is to see more clearly than ever what Nathan, Clay, Murphy, Jarvis, and Lori Arnold have always been, and continue to be,
confronted by.

It’s important to understand how a government that had for upward of a decade completely ignored meth’s spread from the West
Coast into the Midwest and the Gulf States suddenly became alarmed. And how, just as suddenly, newspapers with only sporadic
interest in reporting on the drug became obsessed with it. In some ways, the driving force behind each was the same: Steve
Suo’s work at the
Oregonian
. Suo had written his first crank story back in 2003 when, in researching Oregon’s foster care system, he came upon a statistic
that startled him: Eight in ten children under the state’s care admitted that their parents used meth. It’s in that way that
Suo’s interest in the story changed. At first his question was, “Why is there so much meth in Oregon?” Eventually Suo turned
his attention to how the drug had gotten to Oregon. Answering that question led him to Washington, D.C., where he uncovered
the causal connection between meth, the pharmaceutical industry, and the U.S. government. By the time Suo left the meth beat
at the end of 2006, he’d written, along with other reporters, a combined 261 articles for the
Oregonian
in less than two years.

What Suo’s reporting revealed was a timeline of failure, most of it at the crushing and unfair expense of Gene Haislip, DEA’s
deputy assistant administrator in the Office of Compliance and Regulatory Affairs from 1982 to 1996. Up until 1987, Haislip
had worked against the lobbyist Allan Rexinger, who represented the pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert, to pass a bill
that would monitor shipments of ephedrine powder entering the United States. Companies like Warner-Lambert, which used the
ephedrine to make nasal decongestants, resisted the idea, fearing that it would lead to more stringent oversight. Rexinger,
by appealing directly to the Reagan White House, had won the battle with DEA, forcing Haislip into a compromise that allowed
bulk loads of ephedrine to enter the U.S. unmonitored, so long as the ephedrine was in pill—not powder—form.

The production of methamphetamine at the time was just industrializing, largely at the hands of the Amezcua brothers, who’d
understood the lucrative, illegal application of the lax laws governing ephedrine imports. Once Haislip’s watered-down law
passed, the Amezcuas simply bought ephedrine pills from legitimate sources, crushed them into powder, and used the powder
to make meth. In addition, they began importing ephedrine powder into the port at Mazatlán, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, then
driving the powder north across the border. As trade increased between Mexico and the United States, culminating in 1993 with
the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), truck traffic at ports of entry like San Ysidro, California,
increased 278 percent, according to a study by UC-San Diego economics professor Joan Anderson. As a result, border security
became more difficult to enforce, making it easier than ever to drive loads of ephedrine right into Los Angeles and the Inland
Empire. Months after Haislip’s weakened bill passed, according to Suo, meth purity was at an all-time high throughout the
West, indicating a glut in product. The spread of large amounts of the Amezcuas’ meth into Iowa and several other Midwestern
states—thanks in great part to Lori Arnold of Ottumwa and to lesser extent to Jeffrey William Hayes of Oelwein—is one of what
is sure to be many unreported side effects of this first, defining breakdown.

Haislip, though, was not done trying. By 1993, he was moving to close the loophole that his earlier bill had created, writing
new legislation to limit imports not only of ephedrine powder but of pills, too. The law passed and seemed to produce immediate
dividends: DEA, according to Suo, intercepted 170 metric tons of illegal ephedrine pills in eighteen months, reducing by a
large chunk the available methamphetamine in the United States. In addition, Haislip took the unprecedented step of approaching
the International Narcotics Control Board in Vienna, asking it to help DEA broker a deal with the nine factories in Germany,
India, China, and the Czech Republic that produced the ephedrine. All the companies agreed. Using bills of lading to trace
bulk loads of both raw ephedrine powder and finished pills that had been sent from their plants through third-party nations
to Mexico, DEA was able to limit the number of countries through which ephedrine would travel to only those nations willing
to keep serious records—all without significantly cutting into the profit margins of pharmaceutical companies. In just twelve
months, according to Haislip, DEA blocked or seized 200 tons of ephedrine, or one sixth of the world’s annual production at
that point, all of it earmarked for meth labs. Haislip’s sixteen-year-old plan of crippling the drug’s production by implementing
multinational precursor controls seemed to be bearing fruit: across California, meth purity was down to an average of only
40 percent, an indication that production was slowing to a crawl.

The problem was that Haislip repeated his earlier mistake and left a loophole in the ephedrine legislation that allowed pills
containing pseudoephedrine to remain unregulated, this despite the fact that DEA chemists had warned him that meth could be
made from pseudoephedrine just as easily as from ephedrine. The loophole, according to Suo, was the direct result of intense
lobbying, eight years after he’d derailed Haislip’s original anti-precursor bill, by Allan Rexinger, who proudly characterized
his involvement to Suo by saying that he simply “pulled the plugs” on DEA. In fact, pointing traffickers to pseudoephedrine
was the biggest favor that anyone could have done for the makers of meth; it set the stage for fifteen years (and counting)
of arguably the worst period in American narcotic history.

From a drug chemist’s standpoint, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or pseudo, are identical; good crank can be made from both.
But from a drug trafficker’s standpoint, pseudo is far superior. Ephedrine, as a licit pharmaceutical, has a strictly limited
number of uses: first, as a stimulant used to bring surgery patients out from under anesthesia, and second, as a nasal decongestant.
Pseudo, on the other hand, has for three decades been the dominant ingredient in cold medicine, 80 percent of which was (and
remains) controlled by American companies. As such, the availability of pseudo in the world, along with its importance as
a revenue source, is many orders of magnitude greater than that of ephedrine. And because pseudo is deemed the most reliable
precursor for megadrugs like Sudafed, Actifed, and NyQuil, the drug lobby protecting pseudo is many times more powerful than
that protecting ephedrine, which had already shown a proven ability to cripple DEA.

By 1996, the Amezcuas were in jail. In their absence, other Mexican drug-trafficking organizations, only too aware of the
lucrative potential of meth, had begun to fill the Amezcuas’ shoes. Slowly, those loosely defined organizations were melding
into what DEA would come to call the five major DTOs, each of which was destined to quickly become many times more powerful
than the Amezcuas had ever been. The DTOs were aided by the wider opening of the border and the expanding immigrant presence
in the United States engendered by NAFTA. Within the population of illegals streaming across the border to work in meatpacking
plants throughout the Great Plains, in the fields of California’s Central Valley, and in the orchards and orange groves of
the Southeast, there was unlimited potential for a narcotic retail and distribution force. One that, because it was nationwide,
mobile, undocumented, and protean, was almost impossible to track by law enforcement. In addition, the DTOs controlled the
manufacture of meth by following Amezcua’s practice of importing precursors into Mexico, thereby achieving business’s holy
trinity: dominance of the entire value chain. In one fell swoop, the Mexican drug traffickers directed every aspect of what
was now a major international narcotics phenomenon—in the same way that Cargill, Tyson, and ADM were taking control of the
food business “from plow to plate,” as the marketing slogan went.

Within months of Haislip’s newest legislation, the nascent DTOs made the switch to pseudoephedrine combined with red phosphorus.
This new Red-P, or Mexican dope, was considered to be more powerful still than the old P2P meth of Lori Arnold’s day, especially
when the traffickers soaked the powdered Red-P in refrigerated trays of denatured alcohol, a process that turns the drug into
the pretty, icelike shards that would come to be known throughout the world as crystal meth. This more powerful form of the
drug again increased the DTOs’ range and effectiveness, for the simple reason that it was more addictive, allowing them to
saturate old markets even as they opened new ones.