Toxic meth houses

Read the NYT report here, dateline Winchester, Tennessee, population 7,329.

Rural doc to be next U.S. Surgeon General

Read about Dr. Regina Benjamin's appointment here. I'm delighted that news reports are playing up her accomplishment of "establishing a rural health clinic in Bayou La Batre, Ala. — a small, medically underserved shrimping village along the Gulf Coast." Bayou La Batre's population is 2,313.

Dan Barry from Indian Country in South Dakota

Dan Barry's most recent "This Land" report is from Eagle Butte, South Dakota, population 619. (The Census Designated Place, North Eagle Butte, is also rural under the U.S. Census Bureau definition, with 2,163 ). Barry reports on a new health care facility being built on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation there, supported with significant federal stimulus funds.

The story's headline is "A Rising but Doubted Dream on a Reservation," and an excerpt follows:

[I]n 2002, the Indian Health Service, the federal agency responsible for providing health care to American Indians and Alaska Natives, approved the proposal for an “alternative rural hospital,” with more attractive housing. Architects were soon traveling around the reservation to hear what people wanted, meeting in the bingo halls and community rooms of remote places like Bear Creek and White Horse and Thunder Butte. They especially listened to the elders.

Wonderful as the new facility sounds--with even a traditional healing room--it will not have a CT scanner. Lack of economies of scale and all that, or as the Indian Health Service spokesman put it, "a formula that takes into account several factors: staffing, workload and population size." The nearest CT scanner will remain a 3-hour drive away, in Rapid City, South Dakota, population 59,607.

Law and Order in the Ozarks (Part XXX): All about the Elk Fest

No crime is reported in the June 25 and July 2, 2009 issues of the Newton County Times, which are both full of news about the recent Buffalo River Elk Festival. Among the headlines are these, many of which are related to the festival:

• Elkettes 2009. This features a photo of three young women in swimsuits and apparently refers to a division of the beauty contest associated with the Elk Festival. The photo is of Miss Elkette and the alternates are shown. They are from as far away as Everton and Mountain Home. The later editition shows the winners of the Miss Elk Fest division, which apparently includes slightly older women, up to the age of 20.
  
• Three jobs clubs formed for summer youth employment. This reports on a six-week program funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and overseen by the Arkasnsas Workforce Center. The program mostly familiarizes participants with child labor laws. The program also offers youth transportation to get jobs.
  
• New 4-H Dog Project meetings start Thursday. This reports on a program to teach people proper dog care and dog training techniques.
  
• Post Offices observing Independence Day early. This is the lead story in the 2 July edition and simply reports that post offices around the county closed at noon or 12:30 on July 3.
  
• Elk Summit conducted during festival. This "summit" was part of the state Game and Fish Commission's process for developing a statewide "strategic elk management plan." The elk were transplanted from the Colorado Rockies about three decades ago, and the greatest contorversy regarding them seems to relate to the amount of tourist traffic they generate in the Boxley Valley, where they are most concentrated. The five stated goals of the management plan are resource, habitat, sociological, education, and enforcement.
  
• No local winners in elk permit drawing. This means that no Newton County resident got a permit to kill an elk during this fall's season.
  
• Marie Holt '09 Farm Woman. This reports on an 88-year-old resident of the county who has been named by the Farm Bureau as Farm Woman of the Year. She still keeps 65 head of cattle and grows a large garden each year. Of her marriage, which began in 1934, the story reports: "they lived off of what the farm produced. They smoked their meats, canned produce and had corn milled into meal. Mrs. Holt said she even mde lye soap for a time. The only food items they really had to buy were flour, sugar and coffee. Chickens provided eggs and cows gave milk."
  

I'm not so excited about the exhaustive coverage of the regional beauty contest (with numerous photos of all age divisions), but I suppose "girls" putting on swimsuits and sequined gowns could certainly be considered better than having crime on which to report.

Is California's Central Valley the "new Appalachia"?

Listen to this NPR report, "Central Valley Disconnect: Rich Land, Poor Nutrition." The dateline is Kettleman City, California, population 1,499. Here's an excerpt that quotes Kettleman native Yesenia Ayala, 20, who works for Food Link, which distributes free fruits and vegetables to the community.

"We are a rural community surrounded by fields and crops."

* * *

"We don't have grocery stores, which is very hard," Ayala says. "We have to drive 35 miles in order to get to our nearest grocery store."

A city ordinance in nearby Fresno actually prohibited farmer's markets until last year. The story continues with a quote from Mark Arax, the grandson of an Armenian fruit picker who formerly reported for the LA Times:

"We're living in a region that produces the finest fruits and vegetables in the world, and yet the children of this valley rarely taste those fruits and vegetables," he says.

Alongside the most intensive farm belt the world has ever known, he says, is this stunning poverty. Some neighborhoods in Fresno have the most concentrated poverty of any city in the country, and all the pathology that goes along with it: the drugs and the gangs.

"We produce more meth and more milk than any region in the country," he says.

Big NYT headline: Stimulus funds for transportation flow to rural areas, cities lose out

Here's the link. Here's the lede:

Two-thirds of the country lives in large metropolitan areas, home to the nation’s worst traffic jams and some of its oldest roads and bridges. But cities and their surrounding regions are getting far less than two-thirds of federal transportation stimulus money.

* * *

Now that all 50 states have beat a June 30 deadline by winning approval for projects that will use more than half of that transportation money, worth $16.4 billion, it is clear that the stimulus program will continue that pattern of spending disproportionately on rural areas.

The rest of the story is well worth a read. Brookings Institution experts take their usual stance, promoting Miracle Mets ....

More on rural substance abuse (this time from Australia) with a local autonomy twist

Norimitsu Onishi reported in Sunday's New York Times about efforts in Western Australia to curb alcohol abuse by Aboriginals. It is an interesting tale of local autonomy following the lead of federalist intervention in responding to a serious social and public health problem. The headline is "Facing a Crisis, Aborigines Stage Interventions of Their Own." The dateline is Halls Creek, population 3,100, with about another thousand in surrounding villages.

Here's an excerpt:

Four decades after a constitutional amendment guaranteed equal rights for Australia’s Aborigines, including the right to legally drink, an increasing number of indigenous towns and smaller communities deep in the outback are curtailing the sale of alcohol. Many Aboriginal leaders say the restrictions are necessary to reverse the effects of a drinking culture that has led to widespread alcoholism, violence and child abuse.

The self-restrictions here in Western Australia and other states reflect a tougher approach toward Aboriginal communities taken by the federal government in the past two years in the Northern Territory, a federal region with the country’s highest concentration of Aborigines. Called “the intervention,” it has angered many Aboriginal people nationwide, especially older ones with direct experience of Australia’s colonial-like policies toward its indigenous people.

The federal government's Northern Territory "intervention," as it is known, has spurred Aboriginal leaders elsewhere to seek curbs on alcohol, and four towns and smaller communities have achieved restrictions or outright bans on alcohol in the last year and a half. Four others have requested such bans. One Aboriginal woman who led the campaign in Fitzroy Crossing, 180 miles west of Halls Creek is quoted as saying, “What we saw happening in the Northern Territory made us think, ‘Well, we need to do something about our situation as well.’”

Serial killer dead after spree in nonmetropolitan Cherokee County, SC

Read the latest from the New York Times here.

Gaffney, South Carolina, where the five killings occurred, has a population of 12,968 and is part of the Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson Statistical Area. Gaffney is in Cherokee County, which appears to be micropolitan, with a population of about 54,000.

The news reports of recent events seem to reflect the vulnerability associated with rural places. Here's an excerpt from an AP report on 5 July:

An 83-year-old woman and her daughter were shot to death on Wednesday, and a 63-year-old peach farmer was found dead at his home a week ago.

The killings have alarmed residents, who canceled Independence Day holiday plans and armed themselves.

Sheriff Blanton warned people selling door to door to stop knocking, and he cautioned anyone who broke down on the county’s rural roads to wait instead of walking to a house for help because he worried “people are going to start shooting at shadows.”

In this short excerpt are rural themes of self reliance/self help--specifically involving guns, as well as vulnerability due to spatial isolation and the attendant limited presence of law enforcement.

Acknowledging rural challenges to healthcare delivery and reform

In her story on the two sides seeking to influence the views of the U.S. Senators from Maine on healthcare reform, Abby Goodnough explains her focus on this New England state which, in spite of its smallish population (1.3 million), has proven particularly challenging in terms of health care coverage and delivery.

The state has large rural, poor and elderly populations with significant health needs. It has many small businesses and seasonal workers, and few employers large enough to voluntarily offer employees insurance. Meanwhile, most insurers no longer find it profitable to sell individual coverage here, leaving a few companies to dominate the market. (emphasis mine)

The dateline is Presque Isle, Maine, population 9,511. Presque Isle is the largest city in Aroostook County, a sprawling county along the Canadian border. Aroostook County's population is 71,676 (down from 73,938 in 2000), but its population density is just 11/square mile.

Methland reviewed in NYT

The cover story for the Book Review section of the New York Times on Sunday featured Nick Reding's book Methland, reviewed by Walter Kirn. Kirn describes the book in a most compelling way as "Nick Reding’s unnerving investigative account of two gruesome years in the life of Oelwein, Iowa, a railroad and meatpacking town of several thousand whipped by a methamphetamine-laced panic whose origins lie outside the place itself, in forces almost too great to comprehend and too pitiless to bear." Oelwein's population is 6,692.

This passage again echoes the global-local link in Methland, which Kirn cals a "ballad of cultural invisibility," while also highlighting what Kirn sees as Reding's movitation:

Reding, a loyal native of the Midwest who’s frankly sentimental about its past and starkly lucid about its likely future, invites his rushing readers to gaze down at the “flyover country” of America and see not a grid of farms and county roads but a patchwork of failed institutions and aspirations. There’s the hospital, groaning under a load of uninsured patients with ­minimum-wage jobs and maxed-out household budgets. There’s the school, imperiled by dwindling tax receipts and students with ever more grown-up problems.

The link to manufacturing is especially interesting in light of an empirical study presented at the recent Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association (LSA). Professors Ralph Weisheit and Ed Wells reported there on their study of predictors of where meth labs are located. One of few statistically significant predictors they identified was the presence of a manufacturing facility in the vicinity. Those participating in the LSA panel speculated that the repetitive motion involved in manufacturing was consistent with meth's effects on the body.

So, does meth make factory line workers more competitive in this age of global competition? That certainly seems consistent with Reding's apparent thesis--that the meth phenomenon, even in small town America--is by no means strictly local in cause or effect.

My own recent article on drug abuse in rural locales is here.