Nick Reding > Quotes

“To look at them, leaning against the counter in the tiny kitchen, is to understand the connection between farming, itself an act of blind faith, and religion. If you can believe in a year’s worth or corn or beans, it seems, you can believe in anything.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“We invariably come back to testing as a means of understanding drug use, even though assuming these tests lead to truth puts one on shaky ground. You simply can't prove something to be true or false if the means of confirmation are easily questioned. Consider how the National Survey on Drug Use and Health concludes every four years how many meth addicts there are in the United States. First, surveyors ask employers to give their employees a questionnaire on drug use. The survey asks employees whether they have done amphetamines (not specifically methamphetamines) in their lifetime, in the last year, and/or in the last six months. First, it seems unlikely that drug addicts will take this completely optional test; will answer truthfully if they do take it; and will even be at work in the first place--as opposed to home cooking meth. Further, since methamphetamine is just one of a broad class of stimulants in the amphetamine family, an answer of yes to the question about using one amphetamine can't be taken as an answer of yes to using another. And yet, for the study's purposes, anyone who says they've done any kind of amphetamine in the last six months is considered "addicted to amphetamines," and--in a way that is impossible to understand--a certain percentage of these responders is deemed addicted to crank.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“German meth-amphetamine during the war, manufactured by the pharmaceutical companies Temmler and Knoll and sold under the name Pervitin, was in fact made in laboratories, and in huge quantities: millions of pills each month.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“the German pharmaceutical companies Temmler and Knoll in only four months, between April and July 1940, manufactured thirty-five million methamphetamine tablets, all of which were shipped to the Nazi army and air corps. A January 1942 doctor’s report from Germany’s Eastern Front is illuminating. Five hundred German soldiers surrounded by the Red Army began trying to escape through waist-high snow, in temperatures of sixty degrees below zero. Soon, the doctor wrote, the men began lying on the snow, exhausted.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“Two months clean on meth is nothing. Why not make it five years? Put money into building and staffing those places and try and keep people straight for years at a time while giving them something to lose—a job, a sense of security.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“Somewhere along the way companies grew to have no respect for the people whose lives their products perhaps intended to improve, refusing to provide workers with a decent wage or health insurance. Despite this, people fight to endure, just as they always have. And as they fight, some percentage of them will look to a drug that falsely promises help in that cause.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“in 1985, one of Hitler’s doctors, Ernst-Günther Schenck, revealed that the Führer “demanded interjections of invigorating and tranquilizing drugs,” including methamphetamine. It’s widely believed by many that Hitler’s subsequent and progressive Parkinson’s-like symptoms, if not his increasingly derelict mental state, were a direct result of his meth addiction.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“Nagayoshi Nagai, a Japanese chemist, first synthesized desomethamphetamine in 1898. Almost from the beginning, the drug was celebrated for the simple fact that it made people feel good. It was not, however, until Akira Ogata, another Japanese chemist, first made meth in 1919 from red phosphorus and ephedrine, a naturally occurring plant that grows largely in China, that mass production of the drug became viable. Red phosphorus, the active ingredient on the striker plate of a matchbook, can be mined. Ephedrine, like coca or poppies, can be farmed. By 1933, meth was heralded in the United States as a drug on par with penicillin.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“there were 1,370 methamphetamine labs seized in Iowa. In Illinois, the number was 1,098. Tennessee had 889, Nebraska had 65, and Georgia law enforcement officers seized 175. In Arizona, the number was 71, and in Oregon it was 322. Missouri beat them all with 2,087.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“By the time I met him, he’d had four heart attacks. He couldn’t sleep and rarely had an appetite. Almost all his teeth were gone, and those that remained were black and decaying. He was in almost constant pain; his muscles ached, and his joints were stiff. Meth’s destructiveness extended, said Jarvis, to his children, one of whom, born at the peak of his parents’ intravenous meth use, was wearing a colostomy bag by the age of ten. Unable to shoot up with the finger nubs left him by the lab explosion, Jarvis had taught himself to hold a pipe and lighter so that he could resume his meth habit once again.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“those whose addiction made everyone else pay the price. After three years as assistant county attorney, during which things had gone from bad to worse (in Oelwein), he found it harder and harder to see the nuances of life after meth.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“According to Jarvis and Clay Hallberg, it was common in the 1970s and 1980s to get meth from Doc Maynard, a general practitioner in nearby Winthrop, Iowa. Into his seventies,”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“the elderly residents were given excessive doses of opiates so that they would not wake up while the batchers worked. In one Iowa county, the school district banned bake sales after several children unwittingly brought to school meth-tainted chocolate chip cookies and Rice Krispies treats that sickened classmates. Like dioxin, meth residue possesses a unique ability to bind to food, countertops, microwave walls, sink basins, and human lung tissue for days after being synthesized. Making the drug is a dangerous undertaking.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“Recently, the husband of the woman who owned a local beauty salon had been hallucinating so badly one night that he accused his wife of having sex with a stranger in the bed next to him (she was hiding with her daughter in an adjoining room at the time), and then he tried to kill her. It was as though, said Murph, a sense of nihilism had become endemic to Oelwein.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“Meth works on the limbic system of the brain, which is the brain’s reward center, as well as on the prefrontal cortex, where decision making takes place.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town

“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.”
― Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town