EFFECTS OF METH EPIDEMIC RUN DEEP AND WIDE

In many ways, the spread of meth through the heart of America feels
like last year's story. It's something we've already tsk-tsked over
and then moved past, especially once it seemed like the epidemic had
ebbed after federal intervention - such as limiting customer access
to over-the-counter cold and allergy drugs containing pseudoephedrine
and ephedrine, meth's basic ingredients.

But in his new book, "Methland," journalist Nick Reding makes the
case that the epidemic is still with us, as is the devastation it
wrought in small-town America - particularly across the Midwest.

Reding could have focused on any of hundreds of small towns, but for
family reasons - his father hailed from nearby - he settled on
Oelwein, population about 6,000, in eastern Iowa, where globalization
and farm conglomerations sucked the local economy all but dry. The
personal connection feels forced, though, as if what had once been
the book's driving premise was abandoned for the more compelling
stories of key players on either side of the meth divide.

And those stories are what make this such a powerful work of
reportage.

Reding is vested in his characters in ways that he makes plain, both
those he likes personally and those whose lives have crumbled under
the weight of addiction. But his empathy doesn't affect his vision.
Heroes and villains are painted in full, including the ironic
alcoholism of Dr. Clay Hallberg, who made it his mission to try to
treat many of the people most affected by meth addiction.

Federal laws and enhanced local enforcement may have cut the number
of people cooking up batches in the kitchen - or in special tanks as
they ride bicycles around Oelwein - but that just means a shift in
drug manufacturing. Reding argues that, much like the co-option of
the family farm, cartels simply have corporatized the
distribution.

But it's the effects of the addiction, both on individuals and the
community, that propel "Methland."

Among the many small lives Reding explores is Roland Jarvis, a meth
maker famous locally for blowing up his mother's house in a 2001
explosion that also burned off his nose and most of his fingers. In
his last foray to a favorite local bar, someone punched him to feel
"what it was like to slug a man with no nose."

"That," Jarvis tells Reding, "kind of put a damper on my Saturday
night fever."

Yet Jarvis can't stop smoking meth. When Reding visits him in 2005,
the grotesquely scarred man lights up his pipe in his mother's
darkened living room just days before he - and his mother - are to
report to prison on drug convictions.

Reding's professional distance makes this book work. He's hard on
misguided government policies and inconsistent law enforcement, but
otherwise leaves the moralizing out. The result is a clear-eyed look
at a scourge that continues to afflict wide swaths of American
society - whether we want to acknowledge it or not.