Nick Reding Read Online Free

the dank living room of Roland Jarvis’s small house, watching TV with the shades
     drawn against the bright May sunlight. Jarvis, a thirty-seven-year-old former meatpacking worker, had just smoked some crystalline
     shards of crank heated on a small piece of tinfoil, the vapor of which he sucked through a glass pipe. As we settled in for
     the denouement of the mobster movie Goodfellas , Jarvis told his story, principally about the night he blew his mother’s house up while cooking a batch of meth. That night
     had earned him three months in the burn unit at the University of Iowa Hospital in Iowa City, and had melted most of his hands
     and face off.
    Clay Hallberg is Roland Jarvis’s doctor. Nathan Lein put Jarvis in jail. On the frigid winter night in 2001 when Jarvis blew
     up the house, he ran screaming onto the street, begging then-sergeant Jeremy Logan—with whom Jarvis had gone to Oelwein High
     School in the 1980s—to shoot him. Such was the pain of burning alive. And so, too, is this just a small part of the difficulty
     caused a tiny rural community by the specter of a drug epidemic, which directs life there in a thousand unseen ways. Nathan
     Lein and his girlfriend, a caseworker with the Department of Human Services, hardly ever went out to dinner anymore, for fear
     of seeing people that Nathan had put in jail, or whose children his girlfriend had recommended be taken away by the state.
     Of Roland Jarvis’s four children, one, at thirteen, already needed a kidney transplant, a defect that Jarvis blames on his
     and his wife’s intravenous meth use while the child was in utero. Summing up the damage done to Oelwein one morning at the
     Perk, Tim Gilson, the former principal of the nearly bankrupt high school, was almost driven to tears remembering the harsh
     metrics of the job from which he’d recently resigned in order to finish his Ph.D. in education. “We just didn’t have the money
     and the staff to help the kids that needed the most of it,” Gilson said, describing the events leading up to asking the police
     to patrol the halls. “On the one hand, I had an obligation to my teachers, who were frightened of their students. On the other
     hand, is there anything worse than calling the cops on your own children?” He went on, “We’re in Iowa, for God’s sake. We
     don’t do that.”
    And yet, he did.
    The notion that bad things don’t—or shouldn’t—happen in small towns is not uncommon. What Tim Gilson’s disbelief suggests
     is that nowhere is that conceit more prevalent than in the small towns themselves. By 2005, meth was not just challenging
     Oelwein’s sense of itself; it had destroyed it. Gilson had much from which to draw for his incredulity. That same year, an
     analysis by Slate.com showed that U.S. newspapers had used the title “Meth Capital of the World” to describe no less than
     seventy different American towns, cities, states, and counties, from California to Pennsylvania. Several meth-related murders
     had become national news, most notable the murder of a nine-year-old girl in Cruthersville, Indiana, who’d inadvertently found
     a neighbor’s meth lab and was subsequently beaten to death.
    Throughout its history, America has panicked over narcotics perhaps more often and more extravagantly than any nation in the
     world. Measured by its habitual recurrence, drug addiction is our defining morality play. The first act dates to the late
     1700s, when alcohol consumption was blamed for everything from sloth to moral incertitude in the new and largely rural nation.
     Ever since then, most drugs and drug epidemics have been associated with urban life, whether expressed by the Prohibition
     raids of Chicago and New York speakeasies, LSD in San Francisco in the 1960s, or Wall Street’s and South Beach’s cocaine excesses
     of the 1980s. What set meth apart was not only the idea that one could make it in the bathtub, but also that the people doing
     so were poor or