When you use it, you don't quite feel that you're intoxicated. You feel more alert, more capable, more alive - in the ways you feel you're expected to be, without realizing you feel that expectation. So you fall into line with the imminent demand to be productive, to be useful, to be courageous, social, proactive, filled with endless energy and entrepreneurialism and ideas and exploratory behavior. In a sense meth is perfect, other drugs are not as good for syncing up with an everyday demand that just seems 'right.'

Anthropologist Jason Pine examines the transformative powers of meth in post-industrial America - on a population of workers left behind by work, as an industrial poison in a long series of industrial poisons in our environment, and a way to be alive under a system that doesn't care about killing us.

Jason is author of The Alchemy of Meth: A Decomposition from University of Minnesota Press.