Comments on: Broken Connections

By: Derby

Derby — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:50:03 +0000

I have friends that do or used to take stimulants, including meth, for work. One began using ephedrine, a component of meth, to work harder in a pay-for-productivity job, the other used it on the job, including I think to work long hours, but I’m not sure whether her primary use was for work or for pleasure/escape from her sucky life.

By: Magister Aurelius

Magister Aurelius — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:32:16 +0000

I think that while some of the symptoms of the meth epidemic can be related to the economic, social and other things, in my mind there is something far more important question. This question does rely on an assumption, that the users of meth are trying to fill some need or hole in their life/spirit/soul, and the question is what has gone wrong in the traditional life and faith structure that has so starved these people that they fill it with meth? I remember a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that had a discussion of weighty philosophy only to have Calvin state “Virtue needs more cheap thrills.” Clearly, tradition and faith structures stress the need for delayed gratification in many things and this is a good thing, but didn’t these structures also once offer at least something closer to “cheap thrills” to fend off vice. Are we forgetting the small pleasures and is the elimination of nearly all certainties causing the epidemic of drug use?

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:45:06 +0000

“But ignoring the enormous economic elephant in the room doesn’t help.”

Not trying to ignore it just trying to identify it. The problem, at least the economic one, is not one of exploitation, but of non-participation. Some of that non-participation is a result of changing economic realities and some of it isn’t.

Bottom line is though many of these people never were farmers, their fathers were never farmers, and there grandfathers got out of the business to work at the local Hudson dealership. Agribusiness got nothing to do with it. They started using in high school to keep the barn party going another six hours, because their girlfriend was using (to loose weight), or because they were on the basketball team and that’s just how they rolled.

ADM is a convenient scapegoat for an epidemic. It’s what NPR listeners are prepared to and want to hear. It doesn’t challenge the myth of “The Heartland” as the wellspring of the true, the good, and the beautiful. It allows people to continue to ignore the lives, the real lives, of the people who live there. It gives them a new myth, a myth of a class exploitation, hayseeds overwhelmed by forces outside their control. Hayseeds striped of their native innocence and degraded by faceless multinational corporations.

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 17:03:59 +0000

Dan, Chad,

Having lived in Mississippi, Arkansas, Illinois, and now Kansas, and having been a witness to lives destroyed by meth addictions, I sympathize with your harsh, direct judgment of those who indulge and spread the drug. I also have never heard of folks taking meth to help them stay up late and work two jobs to keep food on the table (but then, I also haven’t read Reding’s book, so I don’t want to dismiss his evidence out of hand). Still, I wonder if you’re missing the fact that Patrick’s condemnation of global agribusiness is directly connected to your point 1)…and, moreover, that the sort of dead-end service-oriented and assembly-line meat-packing jobs which remain are exactly the sort which discourage “abstract thought and thinking ahead.”

No one can or should deny all the other factors which contribute to drug acctions: boredom, alienation, looking for fun, cheapness, the thrill of breaking the rules, family collapse, aimelessness, etc. But ignoring the enormous economic elephant in the room doesn’t help.

By: Chad

Chad — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 15:32:45 +0000

Exactly my thoughts, Dan. As one who spent some time around tweekers myself, I can assure you that their reasons for snorting those tiny little razor blades up their noses wasn’t because they just HAD to stay up to keep working to make ends meet. Most people who do meth habitually could absolutely care less if the ends met or whether their children had clothes to wear.

They started doing it because it was readily available, it was cheap and it was fun. When you combine lack of education w/ a culture that doesn’t do so well w/ abstract thought and thinking ahead, well, you have a meth culture.

Sometimes the obvious explaination is really the most accurate.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:42:22 +0000

As a man who once lived among the tweakers watching police haul equipment out of the basements and CPS haul out children from the backrooms of the meth houses on a regular basis I can assure you that this is both an overly simplistic and ridiculous explanation.

Meth’s popularity in rural America is the product of three things:

1)The disproportionately higher unemployment and underemployment of rural America.

2) Meth is cheap

3)Meth is fun

It’s not too much work but rather too little that fuels the teeth and community destroying meth death wave.