Methland, USA

Methland by Nick Reding is a book covering the history of Meth and the effects it has had on the world, but most specifically, small town America.  For our class, we were given the prologue and second chapter to read.  In this portion of the book, Reding discusses a general history of methamphetamine  from it's initial synthesis by a Japanese chemist, to the widespread use of it at a prescription drug for decades.  But Reding seeks not just to give a concise history of the drug, his intent is much greater.  Reding brings the meth epidemic home, sharing the stories of those in small town America who are affected by it's use.  Users are not the only ones affected, so too are their families, and the police officers who are charged with putting them behind bars.  the effects of meth are far reaching, and touch every aspect of a community.  Through his story, Reding seeks to explain why methamphetamine use has become so prevalent, both because of it's historical prescription use, and because of what the drug itself has to offer.  Meth seems, at first, to complement the American ideal of hard work, and offers users a way to work harder, longer.  But this industriousness comes at a price.

G. Whittaker 7-2009

America is still rooted in the small town.  They are filled with a sense of nostalgia, and an attitude that bad things can't possibly happen there.  But bad things do, meth does, and meth is killing small town America.  As people are struggling in an increasingly difficult economy to survive, they come to the crossroads of Main Street America and Methamphetamine  and the choice isn't always as clear as we imagine.  

At first I was really not looking forward to reading the provided excerpt from Methland.  I grew up in a big city where drug usage was something that you could find easily if you looked for it.  We learned about the negative effects of various illegal drugs in school from at least middle school onward.  I have never had any interest in what I thought of as a counterculture.  But Methland explodes that view.  Methamphetamine isn't just an inner-city, counterculture problem, it is a wide spread cancer that is eating away at the American dream.  Meth culture has become a subculture, a way of life for those who have been drawn in by it.  And not just for users, but for everyone in their lives.  It touches all of us.  After living in the big city while growing up, I moved to semi-rural Ohio.  This is the small town world that Reding seeks to put on the map, the world that is being forgotten, and a world in which meth use is very real, and devastating.  Between there and living where I do now, I live in Navajo county Arizona, which at the time (2005-6) was considered the county with the highest per capita meth use in the country.  Reding struck a chord with me when he wrote of meth seeming to follow him, but that he discovered that it was actually already everywhere.

G. Whittaker 7-2009

We have an upcoming paper for my class regarding the book Winter's Bone about which I recently posted.  The book Methland will be a great resource for this paper because of the perspective it provides.  While Winter's Bone seeks to tell some of the same kind of tale, it doesn't go into the kind of depth that Reding's work does.  The descriptions he gives of the meth experience.  How Methamphetamine affect the body, how they are made, and what that high is like, are all elements of Reding's book that add a completely new level of understanding to Winter's Bone and the characters.  Through Reding's graphic description of how a man he spent time with was melted in a meth lab fire, we understand the character Teardrop better.  We get a better understanding for how truly gripping the addiction is when this man, despite immense physical disfiguring and resulting handicap, manages to still smoke methamphetamine.  Reding discusses how his eyes were opened to the presence of meth in his hometown, but for Ree Dolly meth has always been there.  Just like with an other culture, understanding more of the depth of what is going on helps to contextualize and understand more detailed elements of the experience.  Reding's work thus, provides a level of understanding not only for the context of Winter's Bone itself, but for Woodrell's own life, and how he used that in writing his fictional work.

Works Cited:

Reding, Nick. Methland. New York: Bloomsbury. 2009. Print.

Woodrell, Daniel. Winter's Bone. New York: Back Bay Books.2006. Print.