Nick Reding

by Methland: The Death;Life of an American Small Town

  DEA’s proposals are subject to long, withering debates and years of compromise. And that is where the administration, if not actually a political entity, is a highly politicized one. Back in 1986, even as Nancy Reagan gave her famous “just say no” speech, Haislip had to bow to pressure from Democrats and Republicans alike not to raise the ire of pharmaceutical lobbyists, whose job, in part, is to comb through legislative bills looking for anything that could potentially upset their clients’ sales. That’s how Haislip’s bill, according to the Oregonian article, came to the attention of Allan Rexinger, who was in the employ of a trade group called the Proprietary Association on behalf of Warner-Lambert. Rexinger didn’t like what he saw.

  For several weeks during 1986, according to Rexinger, he worked to change the language of Haislip’s bill in a way that would exempt Warner-Lambert from the potential bane of federal importation oversight. When DEA and Haislip continued to resist his pleas, said Rexinger, he had no choice but to get the White House involved by making a phone call to, as he proudly told Suo in 2004, “the highest levels of the United States government.”

  By the time Attorney General Edwin Meese III presented Haislip’s bill to Congress in April 1987, five years had passed since Haislip had initially imagined nipping meth production in the bud. Meantime, the Amezcua cartel had spread throughout California and the Desert West, and had linked up with Lori Arnold’s Stock-dall Organization in Iowa, which by now was well on its way to producing its own industrially manufactured P2P meth. The language in Haislip’s bill proposing oversight of ephedrine had been drastically altered as well, allowing for the drug to be imported in pill form with no federal regulations whatsoever. All that meth manufacturers had to do in order to continue making the drug would be legally to buy pill-form ephedrine in bulk and crush it into powder—a small, added inconvenience. What Haislip had imagined as an early answer to a still-embryonic drug threat instead became both a mandate and a road map for meth’s expansion.

  In 1987, the year that Cargill cut wages at its Ottumwa meatpacking plant from $18 an hour to $5.60 with no benefits, Lori Arnold sold a pound of pure, uncut crank for $32,000. This meant that with the very first ten pounds produced at her superlab, she had paid off the $100,000 initial investment in equipment and chemicals and had cleared a profit of nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or over a century’s worth of median wages for an Ottumwa adult that year. Meanwhile, she was still buying ten pure pounds at a time of Mexican Mafia dope from California, at $10,000 a pound, which she then sold for three times the price, again making nearly a quarter of a million dollars every time one of her runners returned from the West Coast.

  Where crank’s personality converges with its mathematics is this: No one with whom I spoke, and this includes varsity-level addicts like Roland Jarvis, can physically handle snorting, smoking, or shooting 98 percent pure methamphetamine. So while Lori only sold her product uncut, each pound, once it was distributed, equated to three or four pounds of ingestible crank, and probably more, given that each dealer along the line was likely to continue cutting it—with bleach, laundry detergent, or baking soda. Seen that way, Lori’s lab wasn’t producing ten pounds every forty-eight hours; it was producing the eventual equivalent of thirty to forty pounds. (By that stretch, the biggest labs in the Central Valley of California today would be producing the so-called street equivalent of up to five hundred pounds a day, while an Indonesian megalab would make five thousand pounds of saleable meth each week.) In one month alone during Lori’s prime, that’s somewhere on the order of a quarter ton of meth being distributed in the relatively underpopulated environs of the central Midwest. Add to that the dozen or so big loads she was getting from California each month, and it’s easy to see how Lori was, by her own admission, involved in one manner or another with “thousands of people” and making “hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly.” When pushed for an answer, Lori admits that she has no idea how much she made, in pounds or dollars.

  When Lori first got into meth, a gram would last her an entire weekend. By 1991, Lori was snorting up to three grams a day. She remembers not sleeping for weeks at a time. She wore, she says, a lot of hats. Multiple-business owner, mother, drug baron: Without the meth, she could never have done it all. She was, she says, one of the main employers in Ottumwa, and a benevolent one, at that. She donated plenty of money to the local police and to the county sheriff. She planned to open a day care center and video game arcade next to the Wild Side, so local kids would have somewhere to go while their parents were in the bar. Together, Lori and meth were an antidote to the small-town sense of isolation, the collective sense of depression and low morale that had settled on Ottumwa since most farms went belly-up, the railroad closed, and the boys at the meatpacking plant lost their jobs.

  If you ask her, Lori Arnold will say she did more for the state of Iowa than all the politicians put together, who let the place go to hell overnight. People were proud of her, she says, and they should have been: she gave them back the life that the government and the corporations took away. If there was ever a problem with meth, says Lori, it wasn’t with the clean dope she sold. Her dope wouldn’t do anything freaky to you. It was the rot-gut the batchers cooked up that made people crazy. And it was always Lori’s plea sure to put those people out of business—it was her civic duty to keep the likes of Roland Jarvis from selling too much crap-batch, getting people paranoid and blathering on about black helicopters and heads in trees. In Lori’s reality, she was a businesswoman, not a drug dealer in what she calls “the classic sense.” She’s right, insofar as she had an unprecedented vertical monopoly, which she claims to have run at least in part to assuage the detrimental effects of the very monopolies like Cargill and Iowa Beef Packers that were born in that same era of deregulation. Add to this that Lori’s rise required putting home cooks—the Iowa Hams of the meth world, if you will—out of business, and the self-styled Robin Hood of crank begins to look awfully corporate. At a deeper strata of irony, consider that Lori almost single-handedly ushered into the Midwest the next generation of the meth epidemic, which would be controlled by five Mexican drug-trafficking organizations that today enjoy the same kind of market control of meth that Cargill enjoys with respect to the food industry.

  Perhaps inevitably, like Roland Jarvis, the kind of small-time tweaker for whom she had the utmost disdain, Lori did see a helicopter, though in her case it was real. It hovered over her house one day in 1990 while agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) took photos of her meth lab in the woods. Later that day, Lori was zooming around town in her green Jaguar Sovereign doing errands when she got the call from a stable boy that things were getting a little weird out at the farm. There were cars parked along the country roads, said the boy, and men with binoculars trained on the place. That night, Lori says, the feds sent in an army: ATF, FBI, DEA—you name it. By morning, she was in the local jail, telling jokes to the agents who stood guard. After all, says Lori, if you don’t have a sense of humor, what do you have left?

  Six months later, Lori Arnold’s crank empire fell apart when she was convicted in federal court in the Southern District of Iowa of one count of continuing a criminal enterprise; two counts of money laundering; one count of carrying and using a firearm in conjunction with drug trafficking; and multiple counts of possession, distribution, and manufacture of methamphetamine. Floyd Stockdall was tried separately and sentenced to fifteen years in Leavenworth prison, where he died of a heart attack two months before he would have been paroled. Lori got ten years in the federal penitentiary in Alder-son, West Virginia, and was released after serving eight, on July 2, 1999. Her son and only child, Josh, was fifteen years old; Lori had been gone for half his life. By then, the meth business in the Midwest had mutated into something Lori couldn’t believe, though she was quick to comprehend that it was a new, much more fully developed phenomenon than that which she’d created along with the Amezcuas. And once Lori identified a spot for herself in the
new order, she did the thing she’d been doing all her life: She went right back into business.

  CHAPTER 4

  FAMILY

  In 2005, when I called Dr. Clay Hallberg, the Oelwein general practitioner, and asked him to characterize the meth epidemic in his hometown, Clay had told me that meth was “a socio cultural cancer.” What he meant, he said, was that, as with the disease, meth’s particular danger lay in its ability to metastasize throughout the body, in this case the body politic, and to weaken the social fabric of a place, be it a region, a town, a neighborhood, or a home. Just as brain cancer often spreads to the lungs, said Clay, meth often spreads between classes, families, and friends. Meth’s associated rigors affect the school, the police, the mayor, the hospital, and the town businesses. As a result, said Clay, there is a kind of collective low self-esteem that sets in once a town’s culture must react solely to a singular—and singularly negative—stimulus.

  It was clear from the minute I got to Oelwein that Clay’s position as a small-town doctor put him in the best possible place from which to observe the meth phenomenon. What would become clear to me over the next three years, though, is that the very thing he hoped to treat in others, the “collective low self-esteem,” also took a brutal, withering toll on Clay himself. The first time we talked, he’d likened each day at work to running into a burning motel and having fifteen minutes to get everyone out. The motel was Oelwein, and Clay never had enough time before he had to retreat, fearful he too would burn alive. Indeed, three years later, Clay would need saving. It’s partly in this way that his story parallels that of his hometown.

  Clay and his twin brother, Charlie, were adopted when they were one year old from the orphanage in Waterloo, Iowa, by Doc Hall-berg, Oelwein’s general practitioner since 1953. Clay and Charlie are identical twins. They have opposite dominant eyes and hands, and part their hair on opposing sides—Clay on the right, Charlie on the left. Clay plays the bass and Charlie the drums. Clay earned degrees in biology and chemistry; Charlie, meanwhile, majored in philosophy and theology, with a minor in Egyptology.

  From an early age, the boys had promiscuous interests, including chemistry; they used their chemical know-how to make pipe bombs and once blew up a neighbor child’s sandbox. They had a shared active sense of humor as well, and delighted in giving guests glasses of water, only to announce minutes later they’d gotten the water from the toilet. For the first few years of their lives, their mother would turn their shared crib upside down and stack books on top of it to keep them from getting loose in the house and wreaking havoc. As teenagers in the 1970s, neither twin was, to put it politely, unfamiliar with narcotics. After graduating together from the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Rapids, Clay went to medical school at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and Charlie to law school at Creighton University. In 1987, Clay, recently married and finished with his residency, came back home to join his father’s practice. Shortly thereafter, Charlie moved into a house down the street from Clay’s and began work as the Fayette County public defender.

  Clay is five feet eight and weighs 160 pounds. He has a welder’s forearms and the hands not of a musician or a surgeon, but of a farmer: thick in the meat, with large fingers and deep creases in the palms. Clay’s brown hair is going gray (“salt-and-turd,” he calls it), and he wears it combed back. He has a short, manicured goatee and intense grayish-blue eyes behind fashionable frameless glasses. In contrast to his wife’s deep northern Missouri drawl, Clay’s accent is more Minnesotan, extending each opening syllable toward the innards of a word. His lexicon is unmistakable and specialized; he often says “how ’bout” and “okay,” as when responding in the negative to a request: “How ’bout no way, okay?” Young men and women with multiple piercings “have gone face-first into a tackle box.” Bars are “unsupervised outpatient stress-reduction clinics that serve cheap over-the-counter medications with lots of side effects.”

  Clay goes to work every day in a small brick building across the street from Mercy Hospital. Mercy, as it’s called, is an imposing monolithic structure built sixty years ago by the Catholic church. Next door is the high school and a small residential neighborhood. Beyond that, the prairie starts in earnest, lonely and flat and constant. From the window in the waiting room of the Hallberg Family Practice, you can see a lot of sky, which makes the clutter of Clay’s tiny office at the back of the building feel that much more profound. There’s a desk and two chairs, one of which is inaccessible given the boxes of patient files that line the floor in stacks. On one wall are shelves covered with antique doctor’s implements; many of them once belonged to Clay’s father, who finally retired when his wife was killed in a car accident in 2003. Next to these are a hundred or so books attesting to the extent of Clay’s duties: Clinical Neuroanatomy, Pathophysiology of Renal Disease, General Ophthalmology, Patten’s Foundations of Embryology.

  True to his roots, Clay not only sees patients in the exam room across the hall; he drives to their houses and farms, and also works two nights a week in the emergency room. He has delivered babies in the backs of cars, and once, in a barn. A few years ago, he served as assistant county coroner, which is to say, assistant to his father. He’s also chief of staff at Mercy. In terms of what there is to see around Oelwein, Clay has seen it.

  Contrary to what many people might think, the rural United States has for decades had higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse than the nation’s urban areas. If addiction has a face, says Clay, it is the face of depression. Bad genes don’t help, either, says Clay, but all genes, bad or good, are susceptible to a poor environment. He knows of what he speaks. Back in the mid-1970s, after getting his B.S., Clay was back in Oelwein, casting about for something to do with his life. His father, Doc Hallberg, was abusive—a disciplinarian who limped around the rural towns of Fayette County for forty years performing minor medical miracles, all the while suffering from debilitating arthritis in his right leg, which, thanks to polio, is eighteen inches shorter than his left and compensated by a substantial shoe lift. Clay was good at giving his father reasons to be stern. He played in a band, had long hair, and did a lot of cocaine. His love of homemade explosives had not abated. One time, when the high school was closed because of a snow day, Clay set off a pipe bomb on the campus lawn, just to see what would happen. The next morning, the Oelwein newspaper called it a terrorist attack and demanded that the culprit be hunted down and prosecuted federally. (Clay was never caught.) The more Clay bounced around intellectually beneath his father’s brutal, withering glare without being able to land on something either of them found meaningful, the more Clay did drugs. Finally, he says, he realized he was either going to medical school or going to jail.

  Things in Oelwein at that point were just starting to deteriorate economically. It would be a few more years before the sky fell, once the Chicago Great Western and Illinois Central closed operations in town and the farm crisis struck, but Clay attributes much of his anger and malaise to a simple socioeconomic postulate: “If you got no money, you can’t go see the band. And if you can’t see the band, you’re fucked.” What he means is that, without good jobs, little disposable income remains in the community to be spent at all manner of locally owned businesses, including at the bars. And during the last good days of the 1970s, Oelwein bars were known from Waterloo to Wenatchie for having the best local bands in the Upper Mississippi River watershed.

  Once known as Little Chicago, says Clay, Oelwein boasted the best Italian food in the Midwest, every bar fielded a pool league in the winter and a softball team in the summer, and the Sportsmen’s Lounge served the best prime rib in Iowa, thanks to the fact that Oelwein was the first overnight stop west from the Chicago stockyards. In the 1930s and 1940s, Count Basie and Glenn Miller regularly played Tuesday nights at the Oelwein Coliseum on their way from Minneapolis to St. Louis. According to Clay, the Coliseum’s owner stipulated in the bands’ contracts that they couldn’t play any other venue within five hundred miles for a
t least one week following a show in Oelwein. Such was the clout of a town that employed two thousand people, or almost 60 percent of the working-age male population, in the lucrative rail business and could therefore be relied on for sold-out shows. In the 1950s, Buddy Holly played the Oelwein Armory four times. Once it was all gone, says Clay, the deep sense of disappointment that pervaded Oelwein only magnified the Hallberg twins’ sense of loss.

  Ever since then, the twins have fought to maintain a sense of balance through music, and in doing so, to share that feeling of wholeness with their community. Clay likes to say that he has been strumming and Charlie has been “banging on shit” since birth. When the boys were five or six, Clay, the aspiring bassist, would string fishing lines in the doorway to the kitchen; Charlie would hammer on pots and pans to bring the babysitter running, only to howl with delight when she tripped and fell over the strings. Clay, who still relishes a good bar fight, once reputedly pushed another band member out of a moving VW bus, then casually noted how the thud that resulted was in B minor. To this day, the brothers play venues all over northeastern Iowa in a variety of ensembles and make their own recordings in a studio that Clay bought, two blocks away from the IGA grocery store. For Clay, performing is an act of communal symbiosis; nowhere does he feel more at home and more complete than onstage with his twin, trying hard to make people dance and sing along to an ageless repertoire of good old-fashioned rock and roll.