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

then
     decreases dramatically, on its way to falling completely to the floor. The fall itself is what’s called the tweak, so named
     for the physical manifestations of what amounts to the brain’s running on empty. The stores of neurotransmitters now depleted,
     and their synaptic effect no longer consistent with a sense of well-being, Jarvis becomes increasingly agitated. Tests on
     mice at the Scripps Research Institute by Dr. Kim Janda suggest an attribute unique to meth that would prove cause for increased
     agitation, to be sure: The body actually forms antibodies, effectively vaccinating itself against the drug and thereby making
     the “high” increasingly difficult to achieve. This, Dr. Janda’s research indicates, results in a kind of self-perpetuating
     biochemical loop: the more meth Jarvis does, the more difficult it is to get high, leaving him no choice but to do more meth.
    Unaware of how hard his body has been working, and the deficit at which he is operating, Jarvis begins to show physical depletion.
     Shaking hands, severe sweats, muscle cramps, and shortness of breath are all symptoms of the impending withdrawal. So, too,
     does the paranoid conviction set in that he’s being followed—like the belief that a black helicopter was hovering above his
     house. (This hallucination is common; I heard the exact same story from dozens of addicts in Alabama, Illinois, Kentucky,
     Georgia, and California.) The desperation to make more meth, at what ever cost, and the hallucinations have been the defining
     features of Jarvis’s life for nearly a decade. Every time he came home from jail, he was cash-stricken and eager to feel good,
     and he redoubled his lab’s output.
    Dr. Clay Hallberg was the company doctor at Iowa Ham when it was bought by Gillette in 1992. Within a year, he’d called the
     plant manager, an old friend who’d worked with Clay’s cousin years before at a Hy-Vee grocery store in Cedar Rapids. Clay
     told the manager that he’d noticed an unsettling decline in the morale of the workers coming to see him since they’d lost
     their benefits. Clay was worried about the increase in drug use as well; more and more workers, suffering from depression
     now that they’d lost two thirds of their income overnight, were turning to meth. The plant manager said he’d look into it.
     A week later, Clay was fired.
    That the surge in meth use in Oelwein was a direct result of wage cuts at the Gillette plant would be hard to argue convincingly.
     After all, Roland Jarvis had already been using the drug for several years at that point. But it would be naive not to see
     those wage cuts as yet another difficult turn in the financial fortunes of Oelwein, just as it would be foolish not to notice
     the 400 percent increase in local meth production that happened at the same time, as reflected in the number of labs busted
     in Oelwein. Or, moreover, not to see the link between a steady long-term rise in the abuse of a drug associated with hard
     work and a steady long-term decline in the amount of work available in rural America’s defining industries. Not long after
     buying Iowa Ham, Gillette sold the plant to Iowa Beef Products (IBP); in 2001, Tyson bought the plant. With each sale, the
     number of workers was further cut and wages remained stationary despite rising inflation. In January 2006, Tyson closed the
     plant for good. By then, the initial workforce had been reduced from over eight hundred people to ninety-nine, a remarkable,
     devastating loss of revenue in a town of only six thousand.
    The association between meth and work is part of why Dr. Stanley Koob, a neuropharmacologist at the Scripps Research Institute,
     and widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on drug addiction, considers methamphetamine to be “way up there with
     the worst drugs on the planet.” Hard work and meth conspire, says Koob, in formulating the drug’s “social identity,” which
     is essentially an