Nick Reding Read Online Free Page B

finally home. If James planned to stay, how long could it be before crank, and Sean, seemed like his best option?
    That’s not a question I will ever be able to answer directly, for in all the times I’ve been back to Greenville, Illinois,
     I’ve never seen James or Sean again. The nights I spent talking to them in 2004, though, drove me in my attempt to understand
     meth in small-town America. Along the way, I began to understand how greatly life in those towns has changed in the past thirty
     years. Oelwein is a simulacrum for Greenville, and by extrapolation, for the great expanse of the rural United States. Beginning
     in Oelwein, one can follow meth’s currents backward to the thousands of disparate sources from which it flows. From May 2005
     until June 2008, I went back many times to Oelwein; I went to California, Idaho, Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, and Missouri,
     to big cities and small towns alike, in an attempt to put the events in that small Iowa town into some kind of large-scale
     perspective. Eventually, the story I’d once viewed through the lens of homespun crime became one that stretched from the Czech
     Republic to China to Washington, D.C., and involved not just addicts and prosecutors and public defenders, but also congresspeople
     and governors and U.N. officials; neuropharmacologists and macroeconomists; rural sociologists and microbiologists; and drug
     lobbyists and pharmaceutical company executives.
    What it took three and a half years to fully understand (nine if I count back to my trip to Gooding, Idaho) is that the real
     story is as much about the death of a way of life as it is about the birth of a drug. If ever there was a chance to see the
     place of the small American town in the era of the global economy, the meth epidemic is it. Put another way, as Americans
     have moved increasingly to the coasts, they have carried with them a nostalgic image of the heartland whence their forebears
     came, as worn and blurry as an old photograph. But as the images have remained static, the places themselves have changed
     enormously in the context of international economics, like an acreage of timber seen in two photos, one in spring, the other
     in winter. Really, what James and Sean were confronted with that November night back in 2004 was nothing short of finding
     a place for themselves in a newly unfamiliar world.

CHAPTER 1
    KANT’S LAMENT
    N athan Lein, the assistant Fayette County prosecutor, is twenty-eight years old. He has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy
     from Luther College in Iowa, a law degree from Valparaiso State University in Indiana, and a master’s in environmental law
     from the Vermont Law School. The latter two degrees he completed in an astonishing three years by attending Valpo, as it’s
     called, in the fall, winter, and spring and then transferring credits to Vermont in order to get his master’s after only three
     summers’ worth of study. Meantime, Nathan, a white farm kid from rural Iowa, financed all of it by working as a bouncer in
     an all-black strip club in the industrial wasteland of Gary, Indiana.
    Nathan is six feet nine inches tall and weighs 280 pounds. He moves with surprising grace around his tiny, four-room house
     in Oelwein’s Ninth Ward. What evidence there is of the great burdens of Nathan’s life is limited to a habit of slowly raising
     his hand to his face and then rubbing the tip of his nose in one quick motion, as if to remove a stain that only he can perceive.
     Perhaps knowing that his size will lend extra weight to what ever he says, Nathan fashions his sentences from the leanest
     fibers. It’s a habit that underscores the gravity of the contradictions by which his life is defined.
    Despite his size, Nathan—a card-carrying Republican—drives the same white diesel Volkswagen Jetta that he has been driving
     for 177,000 miles, or the rough equivalent of seven circumnavigations of the globe, most of it logged within the confines
     of a