Giving Compass' Take:

• In his new book The Alchemy of Meth, anthropologist Jason Pine chronicles how meth addiction reshaped rural Missouri, and beyond.

• What is an example of a comprehensive public health solution for opioids and meth? 

• Read about the role of catalytic philanthropy in public health crisis. 

Scouring the roads of Eastern Missouri for methamphetamine labs one day in 2013, Jason Pine came across a likely looking property: 20 vacuum cleaners hung from the trees in the yard; a truck, strangely filled to bursting with jewelry and Barbie dolls, decayed in the yellow grass. Nearby sat a beached speedboat, a riding mower, and a selection of gardening implements. Rusting mechanical bits formed patterns on the lawn.

A lot of nearby yards resembled this one, scattered with scrap metal and rusted bicycles and plastic bins. They’re not junkyards, Pine says—under the careful hands of small-town tinkerers, even crushed and broken appliances and household objects can be repaired and sold. They’re just yards full of stuff.

Missouri is a state where “minding one’s own business often goes with the territory,” Pine writes in The Alchemy of Meth, a new book about how the drug—cooking it, selling it, and taking it—overwhelmed one rural county. It’s easy for neighbors to hide what’s going on behind closed doors. But sometimes a particularly cluttered yard, pulsing with “bent energy,” betrays what’s going on inside nearby homes and trailers. “Tweaker yards” are wilder than others, in part because cooking meth generates a lot of trash. The disorder also reflects the seemingly boundless energy the drug provides, turning addicts into maniacal collectors seeking “some kind of material world to anchor,” Pine says.

The toothless man who lived in the trailer framed by the doll-filled truck was a meth cook, Pine says, and the objects in his yard were part of “his own détourned Walmart.” He called his ad-hoc side-of-the-road discount store “Last Chance Incorporated.”

Read the full article about America's rural meth labs by Sarah Holder at CityLab.