Nick Reding Read Free Page A

had
     now conspired with an instinct to view the fullness of the place I’d left when I was eighteen. So, too, was the need to consider
     both parts of the puzzle growing more urgent. By mid-2005, meth was widely considered, as Newsweek magazine put it in its August 8 cover story, “America’s Most Dangerous Drug.”
    In the end, meth would have a prolonged moment in the spotlight during 2005 and 2006, which can in some ways be traced to
     a late-2004 series called “Unnecessary Epidemic,” written by Steve Suo for the Oregonian , an influential newspaper in Portland. In all, the Oregonian ran over two hundred and fifty articles in an unprecedented exploration of the drug’s ravages. Following the cover story in Newsweek , a Frontline special on PBS, and several cable television documentaries, the United Nations drug control agency in late 2005 declared methamphetamine
     “the most abused hard drug on earth,” according to PBS, with twenty-six million addicts worldwide. Even as global awareness
     of the drug grew, meth’s association with small-town America remained strongest. The idea that a drug could take root in Oelwein,
     however, was treated as counterintuitive, challenging notions central to the American sense of identity. This single fact
     would continue to define meth’s seeming distinctiveness among drug epidemics.
    In 2005, after six years of trying, I got a contract to write this book under the assumption that meth was a large-scale true-crime
     story. In that version of the meth story, the most stupefying aspect is the fact that people like Sean could make the drug
     in their homes. Or that Coco, the Mexican teenager I’d met in 1999, would risk deportation for a fourth time in order to come
     to Gooding, Idaho, to sell the drug. By 2005, many law enforcement officers were being quoted in newspapers predicting that
     the state of Iowa would soon take over from my native Missouri as the leading producer of so-called mom-and-pop methamphetamine
     in the United States. For this reason, and because Sean and James had made it clear that they did not want to be written about,
     I’d been focusing my research on the state from which half my family comes, and which seemed poised to become the newest meth
     capital of America. One day, while poring over archived newspaper articles in the Des Moines Register , I came across an interesting quote made by a doctor in the northeast part of the state. I called the doctor one afternoon
     from my apartment in New York City. We talked for an hour and a half, during which the doctor began to change my thinking
     about meth as a crime story to one that has much more pervasive and far-reaching implications. What struck me most was his
     description of meth as “a socio cultural cancer.” Later that day, I spoke at length to the doctor’s twin brother, who was
     the former county public defender, and then to the assistant county prosecutor. The doctor lived in Oelwein. I made the calls
     on a Saturday. The following Wednesday, I was driving north on Highway 150, following flights from New York to Chicago to
     Cedar Rapids.
    The doctor’s name is Clay Hallberg. Doctor Clay, as he’s known around town, is Oelwein’s general practitioner and onetime
     prodigal son. As his father had done before him for forty-five years, Clay has for two decades delivered babies, overseen
     cancer treatments, performed surgeries, and served as proxy psychologist, psychiatrist, and confidante to Oelwein’s wealthy
     farmers and poor meatpackers, to its Mexicans and Italians and Germans, its Catholics and Lutherans and evangelicals. Oelwein,
     replete with its humdrum realities and unseen eccentricities, passes daily through Clay’s tiny, messy office across the street
     from Mercy Hospital, one block north of the senior high school. Clay grew up in town and had come back following medical school
     and a residency in southern Illinois. He raised three children there with his wife, Tammy,