'Methland' highlights failing rural economy

"That problem is essentially that people can't make money anymore to do the jobs that have kept places in the middle of the country going for a century," he says during a telephone interview from his St. Louis home.

Meth "just sort of moves into the vacuum" as people struggle to earn a living now that farm and factory jobs have evaporated with the consolidation of the agriculture industry, he says.

In "Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town," Reding uses Oelwein, Iowa (population: 6,100) — but he stresses that the same story is unfolding in rural communities throughout the nation. The book has earned strong reviews and is drawing national attention to the issues behind meth's status as the heartland's drug of choice.

"Meth doesn't cause the problems faced by Oelwein ... economy does, and meth is just the lens through which to see that," Reding says.

The idea for the book came after visits back to his home state of Missouri and other Midwestern states in the late 1990s. At first, he was able to compartmentalize meth "into somebody else's problem, somebody else's part of America." But, he finally had to acknowledge, meth was everywhere in rural America.

"Small towns are not the places of social and cultural and economic healthiness and well-being that I was raised to think that they are," Reding says.

"To misrepresent it as only meth is the problem, or to misrepresent it even more horribly and say there is no problem, that's kind of hopeless then," he says. "When things are not well in rural America, where 20 million people still live, then it's an indication that things are not well all over."

Reding initially had a tough time generating interest for the book, and it took him three attempts to finally get a publisher to buy it.

Now, publisher Bloomsbury says 40,000 copies of "Methland" are in print. It debuted at No. 22 on The New York Times nonfiction best-sellers list on July 26 and was No. 30 on the latest list.