Lori Arnold Is a Crook

Lori Arnold is a Crook

After the meatpacking plant closed, farms started going out of business, and people began leaving Oelwein, Iowa, the town was left in a state of economic distress. To fill the gap, workers began using and/or selling methamphetamine in what would be known as “mom and pop” meth labs. Biker gangs like The Sons of Silence, The Grim Reapers, and The Hell’s Angels took the opportunity to bring in their own meth and sell it to the vulnerable and increasingly desperate people of Fayette County. Along with the biker gangs, other drug-trafficking organizations, such as The Mexican Mafia, also took advantage of the worsening situation. It is because of these people and organizations that Oelwein’s “meth problem” became an epidemic and has affected the lives of people, not just in Iowa or the Midwest, but all over the United States. Out of all the possible suspects, the person most responsible for Oelwein’s meth problem is the large-scale, Iowa-specific meth dealer, Lori Arnold. Without her enterprise, connections to other drug-trafficking organizations and opportunistic senses, the spread of meth into Oelwein would have come much more slowly, if it came at all.

The enterprise that Lori Arnold created made the wide-spread distribution of meth into Oelwein possible. What started as small-scale Methedrine (pharmaceutical meth) dealing for a landlady eventually turned into “the Midwest’s first and last bona fide crank empire” (Reding, 60). In 1984, the first time Lori was high on meth, she tried her hand at dealing and found her calling in life. Somehow she figured that if she gave away half of her meth she would gain new customers due to its highly addictive properties. From that moment on she began the construction of her enterprise. Her success came quickly, within a month she was able to go around her brother-in-law and The Grim Reapers biker gang to deal with their middleman in Des Moines. In the late 1980’s, Lori rapidly climbed...
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