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Letter to a Friend

Taylor Tobias

 4/13/15

Carroll

 WCI: Letter to a Friend           

            Hey Caite,

                        Me again. Things have been getting bad at home since you left, literally Cortland has turned into one giant meth pot and it’s kind of disgusting. Nick’s dad recently got sent to jail for having a meth lab in his car. Who would have ever thought that it’d actually get that close to home? That’s why I’m researching meth, you know, all the stuff that goes into it and makes it so addicting, the amount of money that is generated by the production/sale of meth, all of that good stuff. I guess I would just like to be informed, you know, considering Cortland had the highest number of meth incidents in the state last year.

            So finding useful articles that aren’t like specific government documents when researching meth is actually really hard, until I came across this book Called Methland, by Nick Reding. When I first saw it I wondered if it was going to be a story about a town like ours, and it kind of was. It’s actually a great book, a true story, about a woman in Iowa who developed the largest meth operation ever to have existed outside of California. There is a lot of money to be made in the meth trade, I can understand why someone would want to sell it, she was literally a millionaire over the course of like 3 years. Imagine that! The only problem is, the only book I have right now is that one, and I just ordered the other books yesterday, so I’m a little low on research.

            Anyway, I want to start of the paper that I’m writing by getting into the history of Methamphetamine; when it was first made, why, who invented it, where? I mean, meth in the united states started in California because it was brought in from mexico but I want to get really deep into the history of it all. Following that, I want to discuss the drug trade in America and how it has changed over the years, because even in the book I’m reading, the drugs basically stayed in one small town for a while and then it started spreading into states across the country and now it’s on the east coast. Well, meth anyway.

            I’m probably gonna get into some statistics about meth and how they’re impacting younger generations today, if they are. And I’m going to have to talk about all the basic stuff you know, the effects of using, short term and long term. Honestly, you know me well enough to know that I’m going to have absolutely no sense of direction with this paper up until the moment that I have to hand it in. Honestly, I would be so satisfied just writing a paper about this Lori Arnold, the huge female meth dealer. I find her story so interesting.

            Thinking about how I’m going to write this paper has had me thinking a lot about drugs in general, and you know, what if there wasn’t coke, or weed or heroin, what if it was all just meth? We’d all have no teeth stumbling around here until we eventually died. Josh is all bent out of shape because his best friend did 3 lines of  coke the other night and it’s like a huge deal because he’s from a town like ours. And when he was talking to me about it all I said was “well, at least it wasn’t meth.” And he thought I was kidding but I was so serious, like meth absolutely rips the human body apart. It rots you from the inside out and doesn’t spare a single thing. I think that it is so important that people are aware of the effects of meth and they should watch out for it and definitely stay away because that shit will ruin your life from day 1.  I can’t imagine why anyone would want to put it in their bodies in the first place. But I guess that’s the purpose of me writing this paper, it’s for me to find out what is so promising about meth that people are willing to try it in the first place.

            I don’t really know how I’m gonna wrap it up it, I have a lot of researching left to do. But hey, if you hear anything about meth in Tennessee, let me know.

Love you,

Taylor

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Methland Chapter 3 Summary

Chapter 3 is titled: The Inland Empire, and focuses on Lori, a woman living in Ottumwa, Iowa, who got into dealing Methamphetamine after her brother in law dealt to her to help feed her addiction.  Lori’s Husband, Floyd, was an abusive alcoholic and wasn’t around often. However, Floyd’s brother did stop in to the cabin from time to time, because he was  a “Grim Reaper,” (a motorcycle club that her husband was part of), and he had gotten Lori hooked on “biker dope,” some Meth produced in a lab in Southern California. Floyd’s brother gave her a little bit to sell, and after giving some away to hook her potential customers, she realized that she was in a market to make millions of dollars, and soon she started selling more and more. After a few weeks, Lori was buying quarter pounds of meth for $2,500 and selling them for about $10,000. Six months later, Lori was $50,000 richer.

By 1987, Lori was a big time dealer, selling to other people who were building their own Methamphetamine franchises in other states like Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, and of course Iowa. She was even dealing with a “Mexican mafia.” Soon, she was getting and selling P2P from southern California, P2P being the most powerful meth on the market. She was buying from Super Labs, having Floyd drive down to long beach to pick up up to 20 pounds of meth every 36 hours. By 1989 Lori owned a car dealership, 52 race horses, a 144 acre horse farm, and 14 houses to house all of her employees and to help launder her money. Her biggest and best idea though was the superlab she built under military tents in the hills of her horse farm. Her lab was the only super lab that was producing meth outside of California for almost 20 years.

Lori used a lot of the millions that she had been making to help boost the economy of her small, dried up town. However in 1990 she was discovered, convicted, and sent to prison. She was sentenced 10 years but was released after 8, and after she got out she went back into the meth business.

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Article 2 summary

This article basically talks about how Methamphetamine is more of a rural problem than a city problem, and there are a few charts showing what kinds of areas meth use is more common in and what age groups have more problems with the use of meth. Meth is seen as a problem less commonly than alcohol or cocaine, but that is because it’s a problem in rural areas rather than big cities.

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Article 1 summary

The article printed in the Atlantic discussed how meth production is becoming more annoying to people who don’t make meth these days because it is becoming more and more difficult to purchase cold/flu medication over the counter, because some of the ingredients are used to make meth. One of the ways that the government is considering combatting the meth trade is to make all cold/flu medicines prescription only, which is starting a bit of  controversy with normal people because we can’t really afford to “not be able to unplug a stuffy nose without going to a doctor.” The thing is, the ingredient to meth, pseudoephedrine, is generally only found in the good quality cold medicines—it’s a decongestant. And it isn’t really fair to say that keeping us from treating our colds with it is going to help keep people from making meth, because it isn’t.

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The Cost of Meth Prohibition

My husband is suffering from a pretty nasty cold.  Last night he had to duck out before dinner…