Shadira

“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

“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

“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

“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