Free Nick Reding by Methland: The Death, Life of an American Small Town

it.
    For the most part, though, the methamphetamine market in Oelwein was hit and miss. When there was a lot, there was a lot,
     and when there was none, it was bone-dry. And though Jarvis was heterosexual, and gossip spreads fast in Oelwein, he says
     he didn’t mind trading sex with men for meth. In fact, by the time he was working doubles at Iowa Ham, he’d do what ever he
     could to get the drug. Jarvis considered meth to be his job security. It made Jarvis into the ideal employee. He was like
     a gorilla throwing the ham trays around. Then he’d come home and he could have sex with his girlfriend for hours on end, drink
     without getting drunk, and be awake for work the next day without ever having slept.
    By the early 1990s, more and more P2P dope was entering Oelwein via California, thanks in part to the connections that had
     been forged by Jeffrey William Hayes and his business partner, Steve Jelinek, whose parents owned Oelwein’s flower shop. In
     1992, Iowa Ham, a small, old canning and packaging company, was bought by Gillette. Overnight, the union was dismantled, and
     the wages, according to Jarvis and Clay Hallberg, fell from $18 an hour to $6.20. For Jarvis, who now had the first of his
     four children, it became more important than ever to work harder and longer in order to make ends meet. His meth habit increased
     along with the purity of the dope. And then one day he did the math. On the one hand, he was making $50 every eight hours
     to do a job in which there was a 36 percent rate of injury, thereby making meatpacking the most dangerous vocation in the
     country. For this, Jarvis, now that he worked for Gillette, got no medical coverage for himself or his children, no promise
     of workers’ compensation should he be hurt, and no hope of advancement. (With Iowa Ham, every employee had not only gotten
     benefits; they’d owned stock in the company.) On the other hand, Jarvis was paying a hundred dollars at a time in order to
     buy enough meth to be able to work double shifts for five days straight. For Jarvis, the solution was clear: He would go into
     business for himself.
    The high Jarvis has built his life (and at one point his livelihood) around has five parts: the rush, the high, the shoulder,
     the tweak, and the withdrawal. Snorting just a couple of lines of reasonably pure meth kept him involved in this continuum
     for at least twelve hours. Twelve hours is roughly the length of meth’s half-life, and a measure of how long it takes one’s
     body to completely metabolize the drug, as well as an indicator of how powerful the drug is. (The half-life of crack is only
     twenty minutes, or about thirty-six times less than meth.) The rush is just what the term suggests: an initial feeling of
     tremendous euphoria. Dr. Clay Hallberg describes it as “taking all of your neurotransmitters, putting them in a shot glass,
     and slamming them.” The high is the hours-long period of an exceptionally vivid confidence and sense of well-being that Jarvis
     experiences while dopamine and epinephrine literally pool around his brain’s neuronal synapses: a biochemical bacchanal. The
     physical effects include a litany of the body’s most ecstatic and powerful reactions. Core temperature spikes and blood flow
     to the heart increases dramatically. For men, so, too, does blood flow increase enormously to the penis, and for men and women
     both, there is an increased need and desire to have sex, a fact that helps explain why meth abuse in gay communities is linked
     to huge increases in AIDS and hepatitis C. And none of it—not the “full body orgasm” so commonly referred to, or the ability
     to drink without getting drunk, or the ability to have sex for hours at a time without losing an erection—comes at an obvious,
     outward cost: no slurring, no falling down, no passing out.
    The rest of the meth high, though, is not high at all. The shoulder period is when Jarvis’s euphoria first plateaus and