Nick Reding by Methland: The Death, Life of an American Small Town Page A

history been a very prosperous place. Also like Oelwein, Ottumwa was a kind of economic
     outpost, a wealthy waypoint on the trade routes running between St. Louis, Chicago, and Omaha. Thanks to the Des Moines River,
     which runs right through the middle of Ottumwa, industry and transportation came quickly to the area once it was settled by
     a land rush in 1843. In 1850, John Morrell and Co. opened a flag-ship, state-of-the-art meat-processing plant in the center
     of town. By 1888, there were 10,500 miles of railroad track in Wapello County. Fifty-seven passenger trains on seven lines,
     the Burlington Railroad being the most famous, crossed the county every day. By the turn of the twentieth century, factories
     in Ottumwa made everything from boxcar loaders to cigars, and corn huskers to violins. By 1950, Ottumwa was home not only
     to over fifty thousand people but also to the largest air force base in the Midwest. Almost half the working-age men in town
     were in the employ of Hormel (the modern incarnation of John Morrell’s packing plant) or John Deere, the farm-equipment manufacturer,
     where workers could hope, at a minimum, to maintain a lower-middle-class existence.
    By 1980, though, Ottumwa’s fortunes had, like Oelwein’s, begun to decline. The story was much the same. The railroad’s demise
     was followed by the closing of the air force base and then, in 1987, by the sale of Hormel to Excel Meat Solutions, a subsidiary
     of Cargill. Along with layoffs, wages, as they did a few years later at Oelwein’s Iowa Ham plant, fell by two thirds. Like
     the shrinking workforce, the population of Ottumwa itself dried up like a prairie pothole in a drought, falling by an astounding
     50 percent in just twenty-five years. Soon the town, starved of tax revenue and disposable income, was verging on bankruptcy.
     And, as had happened in Oelwein, methamphetamine moved into the new economic gap. The difference was that Ottumwa, more than
     any other place, defined the development of the modern American meth business in the Midwest. Meth from Ottumwa first helped
     to create, and then to sustain, the market not just in Oelwein but also in towns all over Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas,
     and the Dakotas.
    How this happened depended in several trends and events that merged seamlessly into one another: emigration routes from the
     Midwest to California as working-class men and women headed to the coast in search of employment; immigration routes into
     the heartland as increasing numbers of Mexicans worked against the human tide in order to take low-wage jobs at meat-packing
     plants; the rise of industrial meth production; the increased lobbying power of pharmaceutical companies; and finally, government
     apathy, if not disregard, for the very drug war that at the time had been newly declared by First Lady Nancy Reagan.
    At the center of it all, back in Ottumwa, stood a woman named Lori Arnold. It was she who was able to weave together these
     various political, sociological, and chemical threads into the Midwest’s first and last bona fide crank empire, the official
     moniker for which was the Stockdall Organization, so named for Lori’s second husband, Floyd Stockdall. Lori’s contribution
     to what at the time was not yet referred to as a “drug epidemic” was that she essentially wrote meth’s gene tic code in the
     Midwest. With her, the very concept of industrialized meth in places like Iowa was born, and it flourished in relative anonymity
     for the next ten years. The irony is that, while Lori worked, the Drug Enforcement Administration fruitlessly lobbied for
     laws that, had they passed, would have prevented Lori from ever going into business.
    Lori Kaye Arnold is Ottumwa, Iowa’s most famous daughter. Ottumwa’s most famous son is Lori’s brother, the comedian Tom Arnold,
     who is perhaps better known as the ex-husband of Roseanne Barr. Lori is forty-five years old, with shoulder-length light-brown
     hair