The Alchemy of Meth

A Decomposition

De: Jason Pine

Narrado por: Jason Pine

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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2019 Jason Pine (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing

Moving kaleidoscopic portrayal of much more than meth in America

Moving portrayal of chemicals and people and institutions intertwined in a story of the unraveling of the contemporary US. The author makes no judgments, only close observations, even when observing his own story. A unique tale that connects big pharma to the meth market, it portrays the experiences of a wide array of people with terse intensity. I got the full effect of this sweep by listening for long stretches. The kaleidoscope comes into view and it’s sad and frightening, if not surreal. This book is about much more than meth. It’s about the unlivable life available to many Americans.

Highly recommended and unexpectedly enlightening.

The real life stories of the characters, that are entangled, really bring you into the book as Jason Pine narrates his extremely informative and eye opening book The Alchemy of Meth.