Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town is a book by Nick Reding which documents the drug culture of Oelwein, Iowa and how it ties into larger issues of rural flight and small town economic decline placed in the historic context of the drug trade, particularly the manufacture and consumption of methamphetamine.

His focus is Oelwein, a once thriving small town that started to suffer economically by the end of the century.

He analyzes the causes of the rural economic decline: in the context of deregulation and globalization agricultural conglomerates have taken over local businesses.

When, after a long delay, cold medicine became more restricted as a precursor material, Mexican operatives moved in.

With superlabs in Mexico, drug lords used illegal immigrants hired as cheap labor by agricultural conglomerates as distributors for their networks.