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Allow me to paint a picture:

After college, a few twists and turns left me as a social worker in the rural Midwest. When I go on home visits, I look for propane tanks with brass fittings turned teal green — or any tank fitting gone to rust. I test the air for the smell of cat piss. I look for sunken cheeks and lesions on the faces and arms of my clients. I see tweakers everywhere — you begin to just know, or think you do. You look for foil covering people’s windows, excessive paranoia. You wait for people to admit that they’ve called an entomologist about the bug problem that doesn’t exist.

Don’t bother watching Spun. It’s not even that glamorous.

Take the biggest city for 100 miles and drive 45 miles north. You get to a factory town. Remove all the factories with corruption and embezzlement. Remove the grocery stores and leave a gas station for grocery shopping. Diminish the population with poverty and age. Reduce the population to less than 2,000. Leave behind hundreds of families with young children, high gas and electric bills, and nothing to do. Add worry about how to feed your kids. Add boredom. Add bars. Add alcoholism. Add poor farmers with a steady stream of anhydrous ammonia. Make those farmers willing to sell since they can’t compete with corporate and research farming operations. Add nepotism in both legitimate and illegitimate business. Tell the people to lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

I know the man who was the first big bust in the county I work in — a young father of three with a small, struggling business who started using out of boredom and started manufacturing out of necessity, both for his habit and his bank account. He’s facing ten to life. He recalls how easy it was to get the anhydrous ammonia (in the west they use red phosphorous), a fertilizer that is expensive and relatively difficult to get legally. In the field you just run up and tap it when no one else is around and try not to blow yourself up, or you buy it from a desperate farmer. This is one of the necessary components to manufacturing meth. It’s also the most dangerous ingredient.

Publications in Oregon and elsewhere have been accused of hyping up the so-called meth epidemic. It’s not sexy, but it makes a good story and an excellent scare tactic in favor of the lost war on drugs. And the use of meth in the gay community isn’t a factor here — there is no gay community. In larger areas, in busier districts, there are other things that register on the legal radar. Where I work, it’s all about busting drunk drivers and meth users. I want to be an objective party, but in this environment, who knows how to separate the fact from the fiction? The people come to me too late, after a mental illness has been exposed by or created by the meth. I see them after they’ve been referred by probation or parole. I see their kids after they’ve been removed from the home, not before. Nearly all of the families I am in charge of monitoring have been touched somehow, in some way, by the use or manufacturing of methamphetamines.

And why wouldn’t they use it? With no jobs, with nothing to do, you make the high and you get the high. You lose weight, fuck better, feel better, and make some money on the side. The short-term gains outweigh the long-term costs for most of these families, many of whom have no access to higher education, job training, or even basic transportation. It isn’t uncommon for fifteen to thirty people to be busted in a month’s time, from elaborate labs in the middle of nowhere to travelling labs in the back of someone’s car — who needs a Mexican drug cartel when you’ve got the next-door neighbors? The kids do it at school, the parents do it at home. People smoke meth like I smoked pot in high school.

But here’s what scares the shit out of me: Most people I work with who manufacture meth will only consent to treatment after, after, they have cooked the “perfect” batch. This perfect batch, of course, never happens. Thus, they are forced to me by the courts. While most people believe that drug addiction is cured only in the willing, research shows treatment is most effective when it is forced.

Most of the time, meth addicts don’t even get that. They get prison time. I get their kids. Corporations pulling out of the countryside get off with tax breaks and federal loans. Government denies a problem, hires more police. Social services cleans up the mess.