“Dreamland” by Sam Quinones
January 23, 2016
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Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones
Dreamland was the spring 2016 LARB Book Club pick. To join the Book Club, where we put you in conversation with editors and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, become a LARB Friend member today.
“Fascinating . . . a harrowing, eye-opening look at two sides of the same coin, the legal and illegal faces of addictive painkillers and their insidious power.” —Publishers Weekly
From a small town in Mexico to the boardrooms of Big Pharma to main streets nationwide, an explosive and shocking account of addiction in the heartland of America.
In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became the vital center of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America — addiction like no other the country has ever faced. How that happened is the riveting story of Dreamland.
With a great reporter’s narrative skill and the storytelling ability of a novelist, acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two classic tales of capitalism run amok whose unintentional collision has been catastrophic. The unfettered prescribing of pain medications during the 1990s reached its peak in Purdue Pharma’s campaign to market OxyContin, its new, expensive — extremely addictive — miracle painkiller. Meanwhile, a massive influx of black tar heroin — cheap, potent, and originating from one small county on Mexico's west coast, independent of any drug cartel — assaulted small town and mid-sized cities across the country, driven by a brilliant, almost unbeatable marketing and distribution system. Together these phenomena continue to lay waste to communities from Tennessee to Oregon, Indiana to New Mexico.
Introducing a memorable cast of characters — pharma pioneers, young Mexican entrepreneurs, narcotics investigators, survivors, and parents — Quinones shows how these tales fit together. Dreamland is a revelatory account of the corrosive threat facing America and its heartland.
Sam Quinones is a journalist, former LA Times reporter, author, and storyteller.
His new book of narrative nonfiction — DREAMLAND: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic — was published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Press. It has received rave reviews from Salon.com, Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus Reviews, and a bunch of Amazon.com readers. His previous two acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction about Mexico and Mexican immigration made him, according to the SF Chronicle Book Review, “the most original writer on Mexico and the border.” His first book — True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2001) — is a collection of nonfiction stories about contemporary Mexico. His second — Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration (UNM Press, 2007) — was called “genuinely original work, what great fiction and nonfiction aspire to be, these are the stories that stop time and remind us how great reading is.” (S.F. Chronicle). In 1998, he received an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, and Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2008, for a career of excellence in reporting about Latin America.
He returned to the United States in 2004 to take a job with the LA Times, where for 10 years he wrote stories about immigrants, street gangs, drug trafficking, and marijuana growers in Northern California.
To view all Book Club picks, please visit the LARB Book Club page.
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“Fascinating . . . a harrowing, eye-opening look at two sides of the same coin, the legal and illegal faces of addictive painkillers and their insidious power.” —Publishers Weekly
From a small town in Mexico to the boardrooms of Big Pharma to main streets nationwide, an explosive and shocking account of addiction in the heartland of America.
In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became the vital center of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America — addiction like no other the country has ever faced. How that happened is the riveting story of Dreamland.
With a great reporter’s narrative skill and the storytelling ability of a novelist, acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two classic tales of capitalism run amok whose unintentional collision has been catastrophic. The unfettered prescribing of pain medications during the 1990s reached its peak in Purdue Pharma’s campaign to market OxyContin, its new, expensive — extremely addictive — miracle painkiller. Meanwhile, a massive influx of black tar heroin — cheap, potent, and originating from one small county on Mexico's west coast, independent of any drug cartel — assaulted small town and mid-sized cities across the country, driven by a brilliant, almost unbeatable marketing and distribution system. Together these phenomena continue to lay waste to communities from Tennessee to Oregon, Indiana to New Mexico.
Introducing a memorable cast of characters — pharma pioneers, young Mexican entrepreneurs, narcotics investigators, survivors, and parents — Quinones shows how these tales fit together. Dreamland is a revelatory account of the corrosive threat facing America and its heartland.
¤
Sam Quinones is a journalist, former LA Times reporter, author, and storyteller.
His new book of narrative nonfiction — DREAMLAND: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic — was published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Press. It has received rave reviews from Salon.com, Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus Reviews, and a bunch of Amazon.com readers. His previous two acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction about Mexico and Mexican immigration made him, according to the SF Chronicle Book Review, “the most original writer on Mexico and the border.” His first book — True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx (Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2001) — is a collection of nonfiction stories about contemporary Mexico. His second — Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration (UNM Press, 2007) — was called “genuinely original work, what great fiction and nonfiction aspire to be, these are the stories that stop time and remind us how great reading is.” (S.F. Chronicle). In 1998, he received an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, and Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2008, for a career of excellence in reporting about Latin America.
He returned to the United States in 2004 to take a job with the LA Times, where for 10 years he wrote stories about immigrants, street gangs, drug trafficking, and marijuana growers in Northern California.
¤
To view all Book Club picks, please visit the LARB Book Club page.
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