Meth: The Double Shift Drug
posted by Frank Pasquale
I recently listened to a chilling podcast on a book about methamphetamine use in a small town of 6,000 in Iowa. The town of Oelwein had lost over 2000 jobs since the early 1980s. Timothy Egan’s editorial gives an excellent account of the economic backdrop for rural meth abuse:
Journalist Nick Reding . . . spent nearly four years charting meth’s course in Oelwein, Iowa . . . There, the people who grow our food are agribusiness oligarchs, and the people who run our factories have cut their workers’ wages by two-thirds, dissolved the unions and shipped in illegals to work for a paycheck that would barely pay for dog food.
Meth is a symptom of this collapse, not a cause. . . . Reding says it is “the only example of a widely consumed illegal narcotic that might be called vocational, as opposed to recreational.” . . . [I]t’s a preferred stimulant for people working two jobs in low-wage purgatory.
Many have called for cognition-enhancing drugs to increase productivity in high status professions. We hear less about drug use to make low-wage, low-autonomy work bearable. But it’s surely something we’ll see more market demand for, as movies like Sleep Dealer suggest. According to Reding, the pharma industry also pushed hard against DEA proposals that would have made it harder to make meth.
Correlating the failure of US industrial policy with the need for increased policing due to meth abuse also helps vindicate Bernard Harcourt’s theory of “neoliberal penality,” as expressed by a blogger here:
The idea behind neoliberal penality is that as the norm against government intervention in the economy has increased, governmental energies have been channeled instead to an ever-increasing carceral sphere. Neoliberalism argues that the market is naturally ordered, and that government intrusion constitutes a distortion that generally should be avoided. By contrast, the penal arena is seen as an appropriate venue for government to flex its muscles. Consequently, the social forces which might press against increased penality are weakened, as crime and punishment are precisely the areas in which government is seen as having the greatest claim to authoritative legitimacy.
When work disappears, many of the natural impediments to addictions go with it. We should not be surprised if failure to invest in jobs programs leads to ever more spending on prisons, surveillance, and rehab. Thankfully, books like Reding’s are helping us “connect the dots among America’s agribusinesses, drug companies and global trade and problems like unhealthy diets, the destruction of small farms and farming communities.”
Image Credit: skittlbrau, Don’t Meth Around (street art).
July 21, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Posted in: Uncategorized
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Responses (5)
AYY - July 21, 2009 at 11:29 pm
“We should not be surprised if failure to invest in jobs programs leads to ever more spending on prisons, surveillance, and rehab.”
Investing in jobs programs? We had a New Deal that tried it and didn’t work out too well. Now we have a trillion dollar stimulus plan that’s not creating jobs. When we try to invest in jobs programs by fostering the private sector, the left complains about catering to corporate interests and tax cuts for the rich. But that’s what works to create jobs.
ratzaz - July 22, 2009 at 4:38 am
You’re saying that the New Deal jobs didn’t work out? Tell that to my grandfather’s family of ten who were able to survive off one son’s earnings from the Civilian Conservation Corps. You free market fanatics, you children of Herbert Hoover, need to learn some actual history before you spew.
AYY - July 22, 2009 at 7:57 am
Ratzaz,
Of course some people got jobs in the CCC. That’s fine. I’m not denying that. But there’s evidence that the New Deal prolonged the Depression by about seven years. So if we didn’t have the New Deal in the form it existed, maybe more than one son could have found a job. And BTW, Hoover was not a free marketer.
r.friedman - July 23, 2009 at 8:58 am
It is nice to hear that once in a while people are concerned about the mid-America meth belt, which has been centered in Cairo, Illinois for 40 years. Simply read 8th circuit opinions and you will see the vast numbers of people and quantities of the drug involved. Even more, you will see the complete breakdown of the Fourth Amendment as cops take out the public’s impatience with the trafficking. In the broad, empty expanses of the mid-West, where teenagers and young adults have no prospects nor illusions of them, meth is the only escape.
hujguygy8 - June 22, 2011 at 6:57 pm
horrible
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