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The Alchemy of Meth: A Decomposition
Meth cooks practice late industrial alchemy—transforming base materials, like lithium batteries and camping fuel, into gold
Meth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users are awake for days and feel exuberant and invincible. In one person’s words, they “get more life.”
The Alchemy of Meth is a nonfiction storybook about St. Jude County, Missouri, a place in decomposition, where the toxic inheritance of deindustrialization meets the violent hope of this drug-making cottage industry. Jason Pine bases the book on fieldwork among meth cooks, recovery professionals, pastors, public defenders, narcotics agents, and pharmaceutical executives. Here, St. Jude is not reduced to its meth problem but Pine looks at meth through materials, landscapes, and institutions: the sprawling context that makes methlabs possible. The Alchemy of Meth connects DIY methlabs to big pharma’s superlabs, illicit speed to the legalized speed sold as ADHD medication, uniquely implicating the author’s own story in the narrative.
By the end of the book, the backdrop of St. Jude becomes the foreground. It could be a story about life and work anywhere in the United States, where it seems no one is truly clean and all are complicit in the exploitation of their precious resources in exchange for a livable present—or even the hope of a future.
Meth alchemists all over the United States tap the occulted potencies of industrial chemical and big pharma products to try to cure the ills of precarious living: underemployment, insecurity, and the feeling of idleness. Meth fires up your attention and makes repetitive tasks pleasurable, whether it’s factory work or tinkering at home. Users are awake for days and feel exuberant and invincible. In one person’s words, they “get more life.”
The Alchemy of Meth is a nonfiction storybook about St. Jude County, Missouri, a place in decomposition, where the toxic inheritance of deindustrialization meets the violent hope of this drug-making cottage industry. Jason Pine bases the book on fieldwork among meth cooks, recovery professionals, pastors, public defenders, narcotics agents, and pharmaceutical executives. Here, St. Jude is not reduced to its meth problem but Pine looks at meth through materials, landscapes, and institutions: the sprawling context that makes methlabs possible. The Alchemy of Meth connects DIY methlabs to big pharma’s superlabs, illicit speed to the legalized speed sold as ADHD medication, uniquely implicating the author’s own story in the narrative.
By the end of the book, the backdrop of St. Jude becomes the foreground. It could be a story about life and work anywhere in the United States, where it seems no one is truly clean and all are complicit in the exploitation of their precious resources in exchange for a livable present—or even the hope of a future.
200 pages, Paperback
First published November 5, 2019
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240 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 12, 2019
Jason Pine's The Alchemy of Meth provides an analysis of the meth as a form of everyday life, whether for those using, making, or living with meth. The book's vignettes reminded me of Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects, highlighting the everyday affects of meth use from eyeing neighbors that move in next door, to the readily available materials for cooking meth, and the relationship that meth creates with the countryside.
I found myself comparing this book to William Garriott's Policing Methamphetamine. Garriott describes the narcopolitical reality of meth in America, from the difficulty in policing the drug and institutions and groups attempt to manage or get rid of meth. While The Alchemy of Meth concerns itself with narcocapitalist America, or the way that these drugs (in particular stimulants) become entangled with the modes of labor that bodies find themselves engaged in within America's late/post industrial economy (pg. xiii). This book also helped me to understand Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, the idea that something you desire or are striving for is an obstacle to your life. in this way meth seems to be a drug form of cruel optimism, promising the world only to destroy the individual, Pine calls this the "toxic American Dream" (pg. xvii)
This book is an excellent read for those interested in understanding the allure of meth, and how this chemical reshapes the lives, landscapes, and communities where it is used. unlike most academic texts this book is accessible, moving, and engaging. When I finished I felt like I had been to this part of rural America, where meth labs can be found in the woods but the American Dream has long since moved away.
I found myself comparing this book to William Garriott's Policing Methamphetamine. Garriott describes the narcopolitical reality of meth in America, from the difficulty in policing the drug and institutions and groups attempt to manage or get rid of meth. While The Alchemy of Meth concerns itself with narcocapitalist America, or the way that these drugs (in particular stimulants) become entangled with the modes of labor that bodies find themselves engaged in within America's late/post industrial economy (pg. xiii). This book also helped me to understand Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, the idea that something you desire or are striving for is an obstacle to your life. in this way meth seems to be a drug form of cruel optimism, promising the world only to destroy the individual, Pine calls this the "toxic American Dream" (pg. xvii)
This book is an excellent read for those interested in understanding the allure of meth, and how this chemical reshapes the lives, landscapes, and communities where it is used. unlike most academic texts this book is accessible, moving, and engaging. When I finished I felt like I had been to this part of rural America, where meth labs can be found in the woods but the American Dream has long since moved away.
April 6, 2020
This book is the outgrowth of Jason Pines' 2007 article "Economy of Speed the New Narco-Capitalism" and his 2010 follow-up "Embodied Capitalism and the Meth Economy." I read these in a course on the anthropology of consumption, and have eagerly been awaiting this project ever since. Pines did not disappoint, though the end-product looks rather different from the two articles that were its forebearers. There are a couple passages that appear almost unaltered in the book treatment, but largely this is new material.
What I found innovative about this book was its emphasis on an affective relationship with meth from various standpoints: users, producers, pharmacy executives, law enforcement, neighbors, family, those in recovery, clergy, etc. This is Pines method of decomposition: breaking down the metanarratives about meth into this postmodern ethnography, which provides manifold and divers truths about the compound of meth. The fundamental comparison "Meth = sorcery" creates a powerful analytic to think about meth as an alchemical process. The alchemists were all in search of an elixir of life or a way to transmute base materials to purer substances like gold. So too the rural meth user-producer/prosumer transmutes the base substances of commercial retail and the American home into a way of "getting more life" and producing a hopefully pure form of value (Pines subjects never tire of telling us that $1,000 can become $10,000 very quickly).
In terms of form, the book has a very literary feel to it. I wanted to call this an experimental piece of memoir or even autofiction. I greatly enjoyed that Pines writes about himself in the third person based upon interviews he had others conduct. Not only does it reveal a personal connection to the topic (Pines mother is an addict and Pines himself struggles with legal amphetamines), but it seems a very effective way of accounting for the role of the ethnographer in shaping the material. The book is organized as a collage. Various voices are interwoven, with some (about seven) recurring and others appearing only once. Pines also includes many legal, bank, and other personal documents he found in the remains of a particular meth lab. These are traces of a life shown in the American ritual of bureaucracy and paperwork (à la David Graeber The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy).
I do wish the book had expanded on the more academic and theoretical constructs from his earlier articles and devoted more time to the structural subject of capitalism. However, Pines refrain is "what can a book really do?" In many ways this books is a response to his subjects who repeatedly express a desire that their interviews keep people away from meth. If this book had been more academically geared, it would have necessarily alienated the people who are presumed to want to read it from outside the ivory tower. One can easily make the connections and see the implicit (and sometimes explicit) threads the connect the book to the more political arguments related to the classing of drug consumption, so I don't see this as a big flaw.
I strongly recommend The Alchemy of Meth to anyone wanting to get a felt experience of what it is to take or be around meth usage and production, and to anyone interested in new approaches to anthropology/ethnography/American culture.
What I found innovative about this book was its emphasis on an affective relationship with meth from various standpoints: users, producers, pharmacy executives, law enforcement, neighbors, family, those in recovery, clergy, etc. This is Pines method of decomposition: breaking down the metanarratives about meth into this postmodern ethnography, which provides manifold and divers truths about the compound of meth. The fundamental comparison "Meth = sorcery" creates a powerful analytic to think about meth as an alchemical process. The alchemists were all in search of an elixir of life or a way to transmute base materials to purer substances like gold. So too the rural meth user-producer/prosumer transmutes the base substances of commercial retail and the American home into a way of "getting more life" and producing a hopefully pure form of value (Pines subjects never tire of telling us that $1,000 can become $10,000 very quickly).
In terms of form, the book has a very literary feel to it. I wanted to call this an experimental piece of memoir or even autofiction. I greatly enjoyed that Pines writes about himself in the third person based upon interviews he had others conduct. Not only does it reveal a personal connection to the topic (Pines mother is an addict and Pines himself struggles with legal amphetamines), but it seems a very effective way of accounting for the role of the ethnographer in shaping the material. The book is organized as a collage. Various voices are interwoven, with some (about seven) recurring and others appearing only once. Pines also includes many legal, bank, and other personal documents he found in the remains of a particular meth lab. These are traces of a life shown in the American ritual of bureaucracy and paperwork (à la David Graeber The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy).
I do wish the book had expanded on the more academic and theoretical constructs from his earlier articles and devoted more time to the structural subject of capitalism. However, Pines refrain is "what can a book really do?" In many ways this books is a response to his subjects who repeatedly express a desire that their interviews keep people away from meth. If this book had been more academically geared, it would have necessarily alienated the people who are presumed to want to read it from outside the ivory tower. One can easily make the connections and see the implicit (and sometimes explicit) threads the connect the book to the more political arguments related to the classing of drug consumption, so I don't see this as a big flaw.
I strongly recommend The Alchemy of Meth to anyone wanting to get a felt experience of what it is to take or be around meth usage and production, and to anyone interested in new approaches to anthropology/ethnography/American culture.
June 10, 2021
Saw this in a used bookstore and the back cover sounded interesting enough and after reading it... fuck.
I mean fuck man.
Even in the age where the opioid epidemic sits at the front of everyone's minds, the equally widespread and destructive methamphetamine epidemic gets ignored. Too depressing, too grotesque, too horrific to be acknowledged it gets ignored even as it continues to eat millions from the inside out literally rotting their bodies as they still live and destroying any trace of the lives they led.
I mean fuck man.
Even in the age where the opioid epidemic sits at the front of everyone's minds, the equally widespread and destructive methamphetamine epidemic gets ignored. Too depressing, too grotesque, too horrific to be acknowledged it gets ignored even as it continues to eat millions from the inside out literally rotting their bodies as they still live and destroying any trace of the lives they led.
April 1, 2020
The author talks about his experience taking ADHD meds. Legal amphetamines. How the pills help, how they don't. Going off for a couple days and being so drowsy, wondering if it makes sleep better or if it's just sleep deprivation. I felt seen.
December 1, 2023
this book made me almost tear up a couple of times. i think it did a good job of establishing how our culture -- steeped in ambitions of achieving that toxic American Dream -- is what leads people to meth. people need to feel productive; its practically a moral failing in the u.s. if you aren't productive, esp. with the idea of the Protestant work ethic. this book shows how it manifests in its most heightened form
July 21, 2022
Pine wrote an interesting narrative about the impact of the meth explosion on the area he lived in Northeast Missouri. He addressed the issue of users, dealers, cooks, law enforcement, and others impacted.
December 22, 2022
This book depicts how methamphetamine can affect a neighborhood, a workplace, children, a community, drug task force agents, big pharma, hotels, landlords, retailers, and all the players who buy ingredients, cook it, sell it, and take it, including those with ADHD.
November 22, 2020
A compelling ethnography of small scale meth production and consumption in Missouri. Very interesting use of writing technique and style.
April 30, 2024
I probably could’ve/would’ve read this if it was twice as long. Picture was certainly painted. Inside and out. Wonderful insight and thoughtful connections
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews