Methland

Methland
Author: Nick Redding 246 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started August 18 2009, Finished August 26 2009.

This examination of how illegal methamphetamine drug affects small town society succeeds most when in explores the nuts and bolts of meth usage, addiction, manufacturing and distribution. I found the first section quite compelling, the second, in which the author tries to draw far reaching connections between the rise of big pharma and agribusiness, the spread of meth and the collapse of small town America to be stretching-it-to-book-length filler and the third, where Redding follows up on people introduced in part one and provides an up to date assessment of the effectiveness of anti-meth legislation, well worth reading. The book clearly depicts the devastating addictiveness of this drug and the cataclysmic consequences for those addicted to it, their families and their communities. The book also makes a compelling case that big pharma has contributed mightily to the meth crisis by lobbying strenuously against measures that would have greatly reduced the availability of precursor drugs used to manufacture meth because such restrictions would have modestly inconvenienced the makers of over the counter cold medicines. When more effective legislation is put in place, albeit still watered down as a result of concessions to the drug lobby, and seems to be effective, anti-drug authorities quickly proclaim that the battle against meth has been won and the media declares the crisis over and possibly overblown in the first place; as the mucky-mucks rest on their laurels, the drug cartels figure out how to exploit the loopholes in the law to restore their supply of precursor drugs. As the author writes his final chapter, arrest statistic indicates that whatever progress had been had been lost and that meth is more prevalent than ever.

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… high on crank … Jarvis could easily go for sixteen hours without having to eat, drink, use the bathroom or sleep … he could have sex with his girlfriend for hours on end, drink without getting drunk and be awake for work the next day without ever having slept. (49-50)

Twelve hours is roughly the length of meth’s half-life, and a measure of how long it takes one’s body to completely metabolize the drug, as well as an indicator of how powerful the drug is. (The half-life of crack is only twenty minutes …) (51)

… the reasons to do crank are in fact quite often -- initially, at least -- more numerous and compelling than the reasons not to do it. … the ability to make something in your basement that promised work, success, wealth, thinness and happiness was not necessarily too good to be true. (54)

The lengthy description of the décor in the Mexican restaurant on page 170 was completely irrelevant and struck me as pure filler.

Whether meth changed our perception of the American small town or simply brought to light the fact that things in small-town America are much changed is in some ways irrelevant. In my telling, meth has always been less an agent of change and more a symptom of it. (183)

He was working hard -- at staying clean, at raising Buck, at making money. But without meth, Major found it impossible to feel, as he put it, “happy.” … Even when Major did the right thing, he couldn’t quite believe in its rightness, for that thing didn’t satisfy him -- meth did. (230-231)

Meth seizures that year went down, along with purity, signaling the first major DEA triumph over the drug’s spred. Of course, the victory was pyrrhic, once traffickers switched to the pill-form pseudo that drug lobbyists demanded remain unmonitored. (238)

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried
Author: Tim O’Brien 270 pp
My rating: 4*
Started July 19 2009, Finished July 22 2009.

In these finely wrought stories exploring his Vietnam experience, O’Brien mixes memoir and fiction, distilling potent material that whether imagined or remembered, feels very true, describing a world of stoned and terrified infantry grunts whose patrols lack senior officers, tangible enemies and any purpose whatsoever but are all the more deadly for these reasons. The intent is to capture the feel of the experience rather than exactly document it, so little explanation is given as to the wherefore and whys, an approach that worked well for me, except when a character engages in ambush by hand grenade (145), a weapon choice which seemed motivated by dramatic effect rather than combat plausibility.

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You’d be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you’d feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn’t water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you’d feel the stuff eating away at important organs. (37)

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. (41)

… it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead. (44)

Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference -- a powerful, implacable beauty -- and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. (89)