Would You Like Some Meth with Your Canned Ham?

You live in a small town in rural Iowa, or Missouri, or Kansas, somewhere in the Midwest where the sun rises and sets over the corn and your father and grandfather somehow made a living from the land, either farming it or working at a processing or meatpacking place. Year after year nothing changes, until you wake up one day and realize that half of your town is addicted to meth. All around you friends and neighbors are either using or making it, or both. How did this happen?

For an intimate look at meth in one small rural town, read Nick Reding's Methland. Reding spent three years living among the residents of Olwein, Iowa, and his ground-floor account of the ways meth spread through and ravaged one community, and the ways that community is trying to rebuild itself, is both engrossing and eye-opening. I won't give away the entire plot, because the book really is worth a read, but I will say that the culprit is both expected and unexpected. The culprit is agribusiness.

The consolidation of smaller family farms into conglomerates displaced people from their traditional livelihoods. This isn't news. Those who didn't farm went to work in plants; while the unionized meatpacking plant operated in Olwein, people could make a living. The shifts were long and the work was repetitive, and many meatpackers relied on speed to get through the day or the week, but the wages could support a lower middle-class life. Union plants were closed, though, and what processing work remained was non-unionized, the wages less than half what they used to be. Using meth became an antidote to despair; dealing meth became an antidote to economic hopelessness.

Food still needed to be processed by cheap labor. For various reasons, Mexican cartels cornered the meth market. Illegal immigrant labor became their distribution network. Illegals can move about undetected, transporting the drug with them. In this way the labor practices of agribusiness both created and sustain the rural meth market. As Reding shows, 20 years ago meth could be a homegrown operation, with a local dealer in control of both manufacturing and distribution. These days the local dealer is just a middleman. Meth manufacture is as consolidated as the production of ground beef, utilizing the same labor force.

Do solutions exist? Read the book to see what Olwein's civic leadership has done to stem the tide. Obviously, the real solutions are economic; only the creation of decent legal jobs can effectively combat an underground economy. Can that happen in Missouri, in Iowa, when more and more of our labor needs are exported each year? I guess that remains to be seen. In the meantime, Olwein awaits.