Sam Quinones, Dreamland: Book Review

In March of 2013, WW ran a cover story titled "Who Wants to Save a Junkie?" It described a drug, Narcan, that could snap users out of heroin overdoses. By then, American OD deaths from opiates had quadrupled in 13 years to one every half hour. An equally germane question might have been, "Who Wants to Hook a Junkie?” In Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury Press, 384 pages, $28), veteran reporter Sam Quinones answers with an eye-popping lineup of pushers. 

Purdue Pharma kicked off the plague in the 1990s with drug salesmen triumphantly hawking a cure for chronic pain: OxyContin. Doctors launched pill mills across the heartland, prescribing medication that was effectively heroin in a time-release capsule. The kids of Kentucky coal miners turned their unemployment checks into an Oxy racket, and by 2003 were dealing painkillers to rich, white teenagers in suburbia. And the villages surrounding Xalisco, a town in southwestern Mexico, were filled with their own adventurous teens. The "Xalisco Boys" spread through 25 states, selling black tar heroin, founding dope franchises with an emphasis on nonviolence, carhop delivery and customer service. 

Quinones tells a horror story of supply creating demand. "OxyContin first, introduced by reps from Purdue Pharma over steak and dessert and in air-conditioned doctors' offices," he writes. "Within a few years, black tar heroin followed in tiny, uninflated balloons held in the mouths of sugarcane farm boys from Xalisco driving old Nissan Sentras to meet-ups in McDonald's parking lots." (Portland remains one of the top markets—read an excerpt from Dreamland here.)

The best chapters in Dreamland are ghastly farce, like the Coen brothers directing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Cops learn to distinguish a pill mill from a legit medical clinic by looking for people waiting in their pajamas or ordering pizzas in the parking lot. Junkie shoplifters pillage Walmarts to create a shadow economy where an 80 mg pill is the standard currency to buy stolen power saws and baby shoes.

But Quinones also manages a quality rare in drug sagas: empathy. He spends equal time on each side of the Rio Grande, drawing full motivations from the Mexican heroin entrepreneurs and their victims. The title Dreamland, taken from a shuttered community swimming pool in Portsmouth, Ohio, mutates to encompass several troubling meanings. It's the lure of quick riches for the Xalisco Boys, the narcotic nightmare hidden behind a suburban kid's bedroom door, and the medical industry's delusion of a miracle cure. Most of all, it's the condition of a nation dulled by comfort into believing it deserves a special exemption to pain. 

GO: Sam Quinones will read at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651, on Tuesday, April 28. 7:30 pm. Free.

WWeek 2015