Methland

At the start of 2007, six months after the Combat Meth Act went into effect, the number of addicts hasn’t changed, even though the amount of pseudoephedrine has. DTOs buy pseudoephedrine from China and Africa, sidestepping American regulations. The closing down of small labs led the media to report that the epidemic was over. The media then reported that the epidemic had never been real and that the war on meth had been waged for political purposes.

In Ottumwa, Reding meets a former Mexican drug trafficker on Halloween in 2005. He calls him Rudy. As teenagers, Rudy and his brother used to bring cocaine across the Rio Grande River in backpacks. Traffickers killed his brother after he lost a load of drugs.

Rudy became a police informant after a speeding ticket led to an immigration investigation. ICE agents promised him a green card if he could help them convict enough traffickers. When ICE failed to deliver on its promise, Rudy fled to Iowa, reaching Ottumwa in 2002. Rudy is able to work undercover with the DTOs because they use Mexicans as their distributors and contacts. An agent named McAndrew tells Reding that Rudy is one of only three Spanish-speaking informants in the state; therefore, he is overused.

In July, Reding participates in a mock attack on a lab. He poses as a meth cook so that officers can practice taking down a lab and arresting its operators. 

The professor Thomas P.M. Barnett teaches at the U.S. Naval War College. He believes that one can divide any nation into two types: “The functioning core and the non-integrated gap, or disconnected states” (206). The disconnected states operate according to different rules, as well as the dictates of the black market. Reding views the manufacturers and distributors of narcotics as a set of disconnected states. He also compares many small rural towns to disconnected states within America.

Reding likens meth to a virus, writing, “You make a lock, and the virus makes a key. When the key turns, you get sick. What happens once in a lifetime, on average, is that these same RNA viruses ‘reassert’ themselves” (208). Drug trafficking mutates inside whichever system contains it. Meanwhile, the virus of a drug epidemic mutates with various sociological, economical, and psychological factors. 

Reding returns to Oelwein for the last time in December of 2007. He and Nathan go to court together. Reding got married two months prior and they talk about their relationships. He realizes that Nathan is his friend.

In court, they watch as a repeat meth offender is sentenced. Nathan is weary of seeing the man so many times. He also knows that the man will be back out in six months, given that the prisons are overcrowded.

Clay has spent the past two years trying to supplement alternatives to addiction counseling in Oelwein. He opens an office two doors down from his clinic. At this point he has been sober for 18 months. He leaves Mercy hospital in order to freelance at rural clinics, rather than fight the insurance companies.

Murphy begins his fourth term as mayor in 2007. He wants Nathan to run for city council. Nathan insists that he doesn’t like people enough to be a politician. Reding believes that Nathan likes everyone. In November of 2007, Murphy organizes what he calls a Community Burial Ceremony of Gloom and Doom. A symbolic coffin contains the city’s former helplessness. After the ceremony, Nathan says he would consider running for mayor if Murphy left office.

Reding goes to Independence to see Major. Buck is now four, and Major still lives with his parents. Their relationship is better now, although Major does not know if he will ever regain his parents’ trust. Buck appears to be developing normally, but Major lives in fear that his son will suffer an unforeseeable consequence of Major’s meth use. Without meth, Major says he cannot feel happy. Only meth satisfies him; he has lost the ability to feel rewarded for making good choices.

Reding recalls that the first time he met Major. Major took him to play Frisbee golf in a park. As Reding drives home, Major guides him on an unfamiliar route to see Bob, a man involved in the meth trade. Even though he had gotten clean, Major was pulled back towards the old life. When Reding refused and drove away, Major threatened to kill him. 

In June of 2008, Reding moves to St. Louis with his wife. During his first week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch runs several stories about a killer who bludgeoned eight people to death while on meth. There are also several stories about meth manufacturing in Jefferson County, Missouri.

With a pregnant wife, Reding is disturbed that the meth epidemic is worsening again. He calls Tony Loya, the National Coordinator for the National Methamphetamine Chemical Initiative, and talks to him for an hour. Loya says that the current meth situation in rural America resembles 1996, the year that Haislip had managed to win regulations for the use of powdered pseudoephedrine. He also sees himself as playing a role similar to Haislip’s. He was one of the architects of the Combat Meth Act, and he considers it a failure. For four decades he has worked for a government that “seems every willing to give new life to the same damn problem it purports to solve” (239). He blames the pharmaceutical lobby for the failure of the Combat Meth Act.

Loya views states as businesses, and businesses are understandably reluctant to sever or imperil relations with large pharmaceutical chains. Congress will not allow retail pharmacies to track the sale of Sudafed, even though they have no problem policing the sale of alcohol and tobacco. Loya says:

Here we are, the most technologically advanced nation in history, and we have thousands of people writing hundreds of thousands of names in notebooks. We pass a law, and then we basically tell these huge companies that they’re not responsible for complying. It’s stunning (241).

He ends his conversation with Reding telling him that the DTOs will never leave the meth business. With so much control over the manufacturing and distribution chains, meth will always be profitable for them.  

Nathan is elected to the City Council in 2008. Major graduates from a community college with a machinery repair degree, and Buck is about to start kindergarten. Lori Arnold is released from prison on June 3, 2008, and fails her first drug test one week later, receiving five years probation as a result. Reding checks in with Jarvis. He tells him that he isn’t completely clean and sober, but that he is still alive.