Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power

Meth Wars

Alternative Criminology Series

General Editor: Jeff Ferrell

Pissing on Demand: Workplace Drug Testing and the Rise of the Detox Industry

Ken Tunnell

Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging

Jeff Ferrell

Prison, Inc.: A Convict Exposes Life inside a Private Prison

by K. C. Carceral, edited by Thomas J. Bernard

The Terrorist Identity: Explaining the Terrorist Threat

Michael P. Arena and Bruce A. Arrigo

Terrorism as Crime: From Oklahoma City to Al-Qaeda and Beyond

Mark S. Hamm

Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America

Jeanne Flavin

Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York’s Urban Underground

Gregory J. Snyder

Crimes of Dissent: Civil Disobedience, Criminal Justice, and the Politics of Conscience

Jarret S. Lovell

The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle

Michelle Brown

Who You Claim: Performing Gang Identity in School and on the Streets

Robert Garot

5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music, and the War on Drugs

Dimitri A. Bogazianos

Judging Addicts: Drug Courts and Coercion in the Justice System

Rebecca Tiger

Courting Kids: Inside an Experimental Youth Court

Carla J. Barrett

The Spectacular Few: Prisoner Radicalization and the Evolving Terrorist Threat

Mark S. Hamm

Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way

Nickie D. Phillips and Staci Strobl

The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk, and Social Order

Marc Schuilenburg

Covered in Ink: Tattoos, Women, and the Politics of the Body

Beverly Yuen Thompson

Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime

Edited by Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg

Progressive Punishment: Job Loss, Jail Growth, and the Neoliberal Logic of Carceral Expansion

Judah Schept

Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power

Travis Linnemann

Meth Wars

Police, Media, Power

Travis Linnemann

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

© 2016 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Linnemann, Travis, author.

Title: Meth wars : police, media, power / Travis Linnemann.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2016] | Series: Alternative criminology series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016023893| ISBN 978-1-4798-7869-7 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4798-0002-5 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Methamphetamine abuse—Social aspects—United States. | Methamphetamine abuse—Press coverage—United States. | Minorities—Drug use—United States. | Police—United States. | Drug control—United States.

Classification: LCC HV5822.A5 L56 2016 | DDC 362.29/950973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016023893

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Methamphetamine Imaginary

1. Walter White’s Death Wish

2. This Is Your Race on Meth

3. Governing through Meth

4. The War Out There

5. Imagining Methland

6. Drug War, Terror War, Street Corner, Battlefield

Epilogue: Endless (Drug) War

Notes

References

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

While it is my name alone on the cover, any work such as this is not a solitary but a collective effort. As such, any attempt to compile a full account of those who have helped along the way would invariably fall short. Perhaps, then, it is best to think of this as the first draft of a heartfelt thank you, to all those who have contributed to and supported my work. Meth Wars is the product of research and writing that stretched across seven years, three universities, and as many states. The book would certainly not have been realized if not for L. Susan Williams, whose support and encouragement gave me an initial foothold from which to begin my academic career. Thank you, Sue. Likewise, I would like to recognize Spencer Wood for his tireless commitment to his students. Thank you, Spence. I cannot begin to express my gratitude to university staff, particularly Karen Rundquist, Amy Eades, Tina Clark, and Stacy Groce. Thank you, all. To my first academic family at Old Dominion University, Allison Chappell, Mona Danner, Randy Gainey, Scott Maggard, Randy Myers, Dawn Rothe, Ruth Triplett, and Jeff Toussaint, your abiding warmth, humor, and friendship means more than you know. For continued intellectual and personal support, I thank my old friends and new colleagues, Avi Brisman, Victoria Collins, Kishonna Gray, Vic Kappeler, Pete Kraska, Gary Potter, Judah Schept, and Kenneth Tunnell at Eastern Kentucky University. For intellectual influence and for helping to create space for younger scholars such as myself, I thank Michelle Brown, Eamonn Carrabine, Jeff Ferrell, Simon Hallsworth, Mark Hamm, Keith Hayward, Yvonne Jewkes, and Majid Yar. I am grateful to Ilene Kalish, Caeyln Cobb, Dorothea Halliday, Andrew Katz, and the staff at NYU Press for their unparalleled professionalism and support. Many thanks to Bill McClanahan for his willingness to read and comment on drafts and for important contributions to my understanding of rural culture. I thank my good friends Don Kurtz and Laura Hanson for their contributions to the book and for years of humor and friendship. A special thanks is due Tyler Wall, whose contributions here are crucial and many. Lastly, I would like to thank Judy Linnemann, and Jessica Jones, for their unwavering love and support and for listening patiently as I have droned on about this project for years.

Introduction

The Methamphetamine Imaginary

You are normal. It’s the speed that made you a freak.

—Jerry Stahl, Bad

February 2014: According to local news broadcasts, the Benson family of Union County, Illinois, got the scare of their lives when drug agents raided their home expecting to find a methamphetamine lab. Laura Benson described the scene and her surprise, explaining, I heard the dogs barking. And I knew that meant somebody was outside the house. And I looked out the windows and I seen a truck coming up the driveway fairly fast. And an Anna police car right behind it. Apparently a few blue plastic barrels and tubing near some of the trees on the property had led one of the Bensons’ neighbors to alert police. I think my neighbors on their way to church see the buckets and stuff and think we’ve got a meth lab operation going on here, Benson explained. Much to the chagrin of the drug agents, the barrels and tubing had nothing to do with methamphetamine and instead were used by the Bensons to collect tree sap to make maple syrup. They [the police] pointed to the buckets and I told them my husband has a hobby of making maple syrup. Of course they realized it once they seen it, Benson explained. But I was quite startled this morning.¹

A few months later and several hundred miles away, another misguided raid driven by the anxious desire to police methamphetamine unfolded. This time, a nineteen-month-old boy was permanently disfigured and nearly killed by a flash-bang stun grenade carelessly tossed into his crib by a member of the Habersham County (Georgia) Sheriff Department’s Special Response Team. Earlier, a confidential informant sent to the home by police had purchased approximately fifty dollars’ worth of methamphetamine from one of its residents, Wanis Thonetheva. Because of a previous weapons charge, when the Special Response Team returned to arrest Thonetheva, they entered the home behind a battering ram and assault weapons in the familiar no-knock fashion. Not only did they ignore signs that Thonetheva’s relatives were visiting from out of town, terrify the family, and maim a young child, but police also failed to make an arrest or find any illegal drugs.² Even more troubling is that a Justice Department investigation into the circumstances leading up to the raid found that a Habersham County Sheriff Department investigator falsified information in order to obtain the initial search warrant.³ Neither these cases nor the hundreds similar, however absurd or tragic, should be dismissed as simply the unfortunate outcome of corruption or as human error or even regarded as all that unusual. Rather, all emerge from a shared political and cultural history stretching back decades, leading to a present in which police, politicians, and well-meaning neighbors see the risks and dangers of drugs like methamphetamine everywhere.

For the better part of two decades, I too have been looking for and perhaps seeing methamphetamine everywhere. For most of my childhood, I called Marysville, a small farm town in northeast Kansas, home. Of the nine small towns in Marshall County, Marysville is by far the largest, with a population of around 3,000. These are working-class communities, where most folks manage small family farms or look to the service industry, light manufacturing, and the Union Pacific Railroad for a paycheck. The county has been home to my family since the turn of the last century, and the farm that sets a mile or so off the west bank of the Big Blue River has been worked by my family since the 1920s. In the 1960s, when my mother was in high school, the county population was around 16,000. By the 1990s, when I was in high school, the population had dipped to 12,000 and now sits around 10,000. Leaving for college, I intended to be one of the many out-migrants never to return. But just a few years later, I found myself back home, working as a probation officer covering the four-county judicial district stretching across the top-right-hand corner of the state. This was the late 1990s, and widespread social anxieties over home-cooked methamphetamine were on the rise. At state-mandated trainings, I heard from doctors and dentists who graphically described how the drug literally dissolved the brain, flesh, and teeth of users and from proactive narcotics officers and social workers who described how meth was dissolving communities like my hometown, one family at a time. None of this was much of a surprise. Growing up in the small farm town, I had heard whispers of older kids taking speed to perform on the football field or wrestling mat and of bikers and rough locals who peddled crank out of local taverns. Because meth moves through the body so quickly, to catch probationers using it, my supervisors instructed me to drug test as much as possible, alternate routines, and surprise them whenever I could. As I was still learning the job, one of my supervisors led me on several dead-of-night excursions to visit probationers living in the tiny farm towns dotting Nemaha and Brown Counties. One night, after relentlessly banging on the doors and windows of a small run-down trailer home set yards off a muddy road, we managed to rouse a supposed meth head out for his court-ordered drug and alcohol tests. Because the home did not have electricity or running water, I collected the urine sample in a similarly run-down lawnmower shed, shining a flashlight on the man as he straddled a five-gallon bucket. As I read the results of the field test aloud—marijuana, cocaine, opiates, phencyclidine, methamphetamine—all negative, my supervisor could hardly contain his disappointment, offering the man no encouragement for passing, no apologies for forcing him out of bed, just an acerbic better luck next time as we packed up and moved on to the next home.

Encouraging, in fact demanding, such tactics while simultaneously ignoring years of the state’s own data showing that only a tiny fraction (2.7 percent) of high-risk probationers are caught using methamphetamine, we might say that Kansas, like my supervisor and I, stubbornly refused not to see methamphetamine in the lives of probationers.⁴ The same would hold for the citizenry of Kansas and other states across the country. In the coming years, nightly news broadcasts were overrun with reports of lab seizures and meth-fueled violence, while everyday journeys to work or the grocery store were interrupted by shocking antimeth billboards and checkout-counter bulletins warning to be on the watch for customers buying meth-making ingredients. After nearly fifteen increasingly frustrating years of work in criminal justice and social welfare, I left for a career in academia, as methamphetamine skulked in the background, not far from sight.

Seeking advice on my fledgling research agenda from a highly regarded criminologist, I explained my interests in the consequences of mass imprisonment for rural America, to which he replied, Well, you’re going to have to get to know methamphetamine then. However quick and misguided his rural + crime = meth calculus may have been, I still took it seriously, setting out to situate the so-called methamphetamine epidemic within a broader culture and politics of drug control and mass imprisonment. Toward the project’s beginning, I returned to the family farm curious if my aunt or her neighborhoods had meth-lab trash dumped on their land or had anhydrous ammonia stolen. Though neither she nor her neighbors had any such experiences, my aunt did provide a particularly interesting anecdote. One afternoon a man identifying himself as a Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) agent drove up her mile-long dirt lane and asked my aunt’s permission to hunt on the farm. As they made small talk, the agent remarked that he could not believe how many meth heads he had spotted as he passed through a nearby town. As he saw it, nearly every other person in town looked as though they were on meth. Perhaps the agent had mistaken a few, particularly rough-looking characters on their lunch breaks from welding at the trailer factory for burned-out junkies. Perhaps he was just trying to curry the favor of my aunt and uncle so he could hunt their land. It could even be that he truly believed he had encountered ground zero of the meth epidemic. And though the state’s own records show that police in the county have encountered just three meth labs in the past twenty years, the agent saw methamphetamine, and because of that, my aunt saw it too, retelling the story as certain fact.⁵

This sort of conjuring, searching for, and seeing methamphetamine, whether it is there or not, continues in rather interesting ways. As the criminologists Rodanthi Tzanelli and Majid Yar describe, a cottage tourist industry has sprung up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, around the hit television series Breaking Bad. Here televisual crime tourists mind-walk through the city, imagining important scenes and characters, mapping them and the broader narrative of meth-fueled crime and violence onto its landscapes. Not unlike police who raid homes hoping to seize drugs, only to come up empty-handed, Breaking Bad tourists produce a distinct sort of materiality, projecting fantasy onto Albuquerque’s streets—experiencing the imaginary as real.⁶

All of this cultural work serves as a conceptual reference point for what I call the methamphetamine imaginary. To be clear, invoking the imaginary in no way suggests that the problems associated with drugs are not real and thus without consequence. Rather, imaginary describes important yet often-overlooked mediated dimensions of social life. Taking a cue from the philosopher Charles Taylor, who understands the social imaginary as the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations,⁷ we can say that the methamphetamine imaginary encompasses the many ways in which methamphetamine mediates the social world—how individuals imagine themselves and their relations to one another through this particular drug.⁸ A dynamic generative practice, the methamphetamine imaginary encompasses the taken-for-granted, commonsense knowledges and everyday affects that surround methamphetamine, its users, and those who are concerned with controlling, treating, and punishing both.⁹ Mapping the imaginary then helps to explore the materiality of methamphetamine and the innumerable sites where meaning is made, remade, consumed, and contested. As I will show, the methamphetamine imaginary and the broader drug-war imaginary of which it is a part are circumscribed and animated by literature, television, film, news media accounts, public-service ad campaigns, word of mouth, and the pronouncements of police and politicians. So, for instance, in a speech designating October 1986 Crack/Cocaine Awareness Month, President Ronald Reagan uttered the rhetorical template that has structured the imaginary dimensions of the drug war for decades. He pleads,

Cocaine poses a serious threat to our Nation. Long masquerading as glamorous and relatively harmless, cocaine has revealed its own deadly truth—cocaine is a killer. It can cause seizures, heart attacks, and strokes. It is indifferent in its destruction, striking regular users and initiates alike. . . . Despite the best efforts by law enforcement officials, cocaine continues to come into our country at alarming levels, supplied by ruthless criminals who draw their power from public acquiescence. Bigger supplies and lower prices have put cocaine in the hands of people who were never before tempted to use it.

Today an even more devastating form of cocaine—crack—has appeared. Crack is smoked, producing immediate effects in the user. It is relatively inexpensive, but is so powerfully addictive that the user, even a first-time user, feels an overwhelming compulsion for more. Crack is used by people of all ages. Tragically, it is sold to and used by even 11 and 12-year-olds. To mothers and fathers, boys and girls at this age are children. To a cocaine dealer, they are just another market.¹⁰

While a month dedicated to broadcasting the ills of crack/cocaine may now seem odd, Reagan’s logic, language, and grammar are all too familiar. The warning goes, because of the irresistible laws of supply and demand, a new drug, somehow more potent, dangerous, and deadly than the last, threatens the very fabric of American social life. Its spread must be stopped and its peddlers punished. We know now, of course, that regardless of the veracity of this warning, the American public heard it loud and clear, roundly supporting a vicious narcopolitical project¹¹ the consequences of which are still uncounted and unpaid. Looking back through nearly four decades, Crack/Cocaine Awareness Month is one of many sad, ultimately futile moments in a history of disastrous, indifferent social policy. This is of course no revelation. It is no longer a radical position to cite the many failures of the drug war,¹² advocate for some form of harm-reduction strategy, or call for outright legalization of some drugs or all. Even among mainstream commentators, it is now conventional practice to describe the drug war as a literal war¹³ or Jim Crow oppression born anew.¹⁴ A history replete with contradictions, falsehoods, and failures makes the next and more recent chapter all the more disquieting. Twenty years and one month after Reagan’s proclamation, George W. Bush named November 30, 2006, National Methamphetamine Awareness Day. While the drugs had changed, the panicked and desperate language had not. Bush pleads,

Methamphetamine abuse shatters families and threatens our communities. On National Methamphetamine Awareness Day, we underscore the dangers of methamphetamine and reaffirm our collective responsibility to combat all forms of drug abuse. Methamphetamine is a powerfully addictive drug that dramatically affects users’ minds and bodies. Chronic use can lead to violent behavior, paranoia, and an inability to cope with the ordinary demands of life. Methamphetamine abusers can transform homes into places of danger and despair by neglecting or endangering the lives of their children, spouses, and other loved ones. Additionally, methamphetamine production exposes anyone near the process to toxic chemicals and the risk of explosion.¹⁵

Bush, like Reagan before him, confronts an epidemic driven by a new powerfully addictive drug that elicits violence, paranoia, and dependency from its users, shatters families, and destroys communities. Unsurprisingly, large swaths of the American public again took these warnings seriously, enlisting in the meth war taken up here. Yet, given the outcome of the crack panic, perhaps another bit of Bush’s sage advice—Fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again¹⁶—would have been more apropos. When it comes to illicit drugs, it seems as though the American public is indeed fooled and fooled again. This is particularly the case if we look beyond the Nixon administration, the point that many commentators mark as the drug war’s beginning. If the historian Kathleen J. Frydl is correct, we should instead mark the 1930s and the proto-drug-warrior Harry Anslinger’s Bureau of Narcotics—if not 1914 and the Harrison Anti-Narcotic Act—as the drug war’s beginning.¹⁷

So the question persists: If the American public knows its history, why does it seem that it is not only condemned but perhaps committed to repeating the mistakes of the past? Of course, I do not mean to suggest that the American public is monolithic or that each and every citizen secretly supports the drug war. Rather, I simply suggest that the drug war is something we (and hence the world) in the United States suffer to varying degrees, whether we like it or not. Is it that the drug war is simply the will of a state too formidable to oppose? Recent progress made by grassroots movements toward decriminalizing marijuana might suggest otherwise. What if the coercion, dispossession, and violence so often decried by people on the left and right as altogether avoidable products of bad policy are not the fault of the drug war at all? Could it be that we attach everyday violence, social exclusion, and death to the drug war because the alternative is much more terrifying?

What If We Need the Drug War?

Consider a question posed by the radical philosopher Slavoj Žižek: Who among us would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting a factory farm in which pigs are half-blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed?¹⁸ Žižek believes that once people witness a system of such brutality, suffering, and injustice, few could continue to participate in it. And though the horrors of factory farms are no closely guarded secret, animals are still mistreated, slaughtered, and consumed en masse. Why is this? For Žižek, it is not that we are blind or indifferent to the suffering of others. On the contrary, it may be that out of some sense of powerlessness to intervene in the horrors that surround us, we have developed a way to forget or ignore what we know to be true, if only so that we might continue to live our lives as we wish. Žižek calls this cultural-cognitive process the fetishistic disavowal. Here we say, I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know.¹⁹ Could it be that the drug war operates in this way? This is not to suggest the American public is simply mystified, in denial, or willfully ignorant of the drug war’s causes and consequences. Rather, the objects of the drug war, drug users and the drugs themselves, operate as fetish objects—symbolically articulated knowledge ignored by the subject—permitting the public to disavow and endure the many, in Žižek’s words, dirty compromises of American life.²⁰

The drug war du jour, an inexhaustible reservoir of constituents—marijuana, heroin, crack, meth, bath salts, krokodil—helps displace that which we know to be true. It is our participation in the violence, coercion, dispossession, and inequality of late-capitalist life that is denied. Displacing these inequalities onto methamphetamine or another from a veritable menu of fetishes permits the American public to act as if it did not know. With that, we can perhaps better understand why, even though it probably knows better, the American public seems ever willing to entertain the dangers of the next drug epidemic. And because the fetishistic disavowal obscures more immutable inequalities, we might also predict that so long as capitalism is the fundamental organizing principle of American social life, there will be a war—drugs, crime, terror—or several. It is no coincidence, then, that the American experiments with prohibitionist and punitive drug-control strategies did not begin with the Nixon administration but rather grew in lockstep with the inequality, unrest, slums, and ghettos²¹ of early industrial capitalism.²² Much like Marx’s understanding of religion, the drug war is not the cause of human misery but a symptom, the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions.²³

Methamphetamine, Epidemic, Emergency

Or course, methamphetamine is very much a part of this broader drug-war history and hence not all that unique. Like all drugs, illicit or otherwise, methamphetamine is really distinct only in terms of chemical composition and its effects on the human body. This might seem terribly obvious, but we should be clear from the outset about what methamphetamine is and what it does, so that we can better understand what it is not, what it does not do and, ultimately, for what it should not be blamed.

First synthesized in 1919, N-methyl-alpha-methylphenethylamine is just one of a number of stimulants in the amphetamine family.²⁴ Like the others, it improves concentration and wakefulness and increases blood pressure and heart rate in users to levels that are similar to those produced by vigorous exercise. Methamphetamine-hydrochloride, sold under the brand name Desoxyn since the early 1940s, has a number of legitimate medical uses. For decades, militaries have used it to keep soldiers awake and flying and fighting longer. Even in methamphetamine’s illegally produced, street form, it is nearly identical in chemical structure to the prescription drug Adderall, widely used to treat ADHD and narcolepsy.²⁵ Yet it is not the composition or physiological effects of particular drugs but rather their culture and politics that offer a unique lens through which to view the social world.

In the United States, illegal manufacture of methamphetamine in clandestine laboratories began in the early 1960s. Long thought to be the purview of outlaw bikers, speed or crank was a relatively common street drug throughout the 1970s. Perhaps because it was supposedly only consumed by working-class whites, available in similar forms legally, and not imported in large quantities into the United States, meth remained somewhat off the radar of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which at the time focused its attention on heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. It was not until the supposed emergence of ice or crystal meth in the late 1980s, according to the historian Philip Jenkins, that federal authorities began to take notice. From the late 1980s until the mid-1990s, what Jenkins has dubbed the ice age, a variety of politicians and journalists pushed the crystal meth issue despite the lack of a significant change in either production or consumption in the United States, outside of Hawaii and some parts of California. These observations led Jenkins to predict that the methamphetamine problem would reemerge from time to time regardless of how much of the drug was actually used by the American public.²⁶ Jenkins’s predictions in 1994 proved true in the coming decade, as politicians like George W. Bush and New York senator Charles Schumer began to sound familiar warnings. As Schumer once claimed, It’s 1984 all over again. Twenty years ago, crack was headed east across the United States like a Mack Truck out of control, and it slammed New York hard because we just didn’t see the warning signs. Well, the headlights are glaring bright off in the distance again, this time with meth. We are still paying the price of missing the warning signs back then, and if we don’t remember our history we will be doomed to repeat it, because crystal meth could become the new crack.²⁷

Borrowing Jenkins’s metaphor, like a glacier’s steady creep, the methamphetamine problem in the United States has advanced over decades, perhaps exceeding that of crack cocaine but not in terms of use and users. If there has been an ice age or methamphetamine epidemic in the United States, it has been one of culture, discourse, and imagination. Everyday news reports that frame the issue in dire terms as a matter of life and meth,²⁸ as well as aggressive policing and reactionary legislation, fix the broken language of war and epidemic in the public’s imagination. Known colloquially as poor man’s cocaine, redneck coke, white man’s crack, and so on, meth appears frequently in popular culture and everyday discussions as the white trash cousin of cocaine.²⁹ My own ethnographic work bears this out. For instance, when I asked a small-town Kansas police officer why meth seemed so resilient in out-of-the-way rural towns, he explained, I say its economics. Cocaine is an expensive drug by comparison to meth. Meth is a poor man’s drug. If you look at what we’ve been talking about and what we’re dealing with, we’re dealing with the disabled, welfare, those types of folks. They have limited resources. Following this thinking, the poor, mostly white, rural folks said to be the primary producers and consumers of meth, like 1980s crack heads, are seen as the cause or consequence of all manner of social change—job loss, withering populations, and unequal economic development.³⁰ In a recent documentary on the drug war, David Simon, the writer and producer of the critically acclaimed television crime drama The Wire, echoes this sentiment, offering this comment on the political economy of methamphetamine:

A funny thing happened on the way to the twenty-first century, which is that we shrugged off so much of our manufacturing base, so much of our need for organized labor, for a legitimate union wage, for union benefits, for the types