Why Midwestern Town Have Been Ravaged By Meth - Alternet

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Excerpt:

But Reding's ultimate aim is more subtle than that: he wants to situate the meth phenomenon as part and parcel of the broader economic and social forces that transformed the rural Midwest, in often wrenching ways, in the late twentieth century. The drug's Middle American evolution, he argues, was a basically rational product of a global economy that in many respects has not been much more forgiving to rural America's residents than the drug trade. "eth has always been less an agent of change and more of a symptom of it," he writes. "The end of a way of life is the story; the drug is what signaled to the rest of the nation that the end had come."

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Thanks to advances in pesticides, fertilizers, and bioengineering, heartland exports boomed, and farmers in the Midwest eager to sell in expanding global markets began borrowing against what seemed like a limitless future. But when commodity prices fell in the early '80s, states like Iowa and Nebraska found themselves in deep financial trouble, and a cascade of farm foreclosures ensued. Meanwhile, industrial agriculture corporations like Monsanto and Cargill, which had grown enormous off the spoils of the Green Revolution, were rapidly gathering under their corporate umbrellas as many links of the production and distribution process -- trucking companies, grocery stores, and other once-independent enterprises -- as they could. By the mid-'80s, once-robust regional rural economies were reduced to a patchwork of company towns, little different on paper from the corrosive resource-extraction economies of Appalachia's coal-mining country.

Sounds like the book might be worth checking out.

keep juggling your 3 uniquely american jobs.


Economics has as much to do with the meth problem as any personal weakness on the part of the users.

In the 1900's the land was distributed to homesteaders in 160 acre chunks. At that time, the labor of a large family, augmented by hired hands, was needed to operate the "family farm". The railroads were the main form of transportation for shipping grain and cattle to markets in places like Chicago. In terms of explotation, the railroads, who charged "whatever the traffic will bear", were the Monsantos and ADMs of the day. The great milling and meatpacking fortunes, including the Cargills, got their start in those days.

The railroads seeded the countyside with towns every few miles along their tracks. Other towns, often located on rivers where millponds could be created, were left to wither and die. But on the whole, agriculture based on horses and railroads, required a large rural and small town population.

The 20'th century saw the introduction of tractors and truck transport. With tractors the number of people needed to work the land decreased. Rural electrification and small electric motors powered the milking machines, refrigeration equipment, barn cleaners, etc to reduce the labor required for animal husbandry. Thus evolved the family farm, and the farm hands were no longer needed. Along with this, every third or fourth town along the railroad continued to grow, but the others stagnated or declined. Their fortunes also varied depending on whether the rairoad was paralleled by a new Interstate.

Machinery became larger and more sophisticated in the electrical systems and hydraulic controls. Laws were passed requiring ever more expensive equipment to produce commodities like milk, ostensibly for health reasons. Capital expenses went up. 160 acres could no longer support the capital investment needed and farms began to be consolidated. As the rural population declined, most of the small towns continued to wither and many of the larger ones lost ground as well.

The upshot is that the population today in most rural counties of the midwest is a lot less than it was in the 1890's. It will probably continue to decline.