Winner of the NBCC Award for General NonfictionNamed on Slate’s 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Past 25 Years, Amazon’s Best Books of the Year 2015–Michael Botticelli, U.S. Drug Czar (Politico) Favorite Book of the Year–Angus Deaton, Nobel Prize Economics (Bloomberg/WSJ) Best Books of 2015–Matt Bevin, Governor of Kentucky (WSJ) Books of the Year–Slate.com’s 10 Best Books of 2015–… the Year–Slate.com’s 10 Best Books of 2015–Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Books of 2015 –Buzzfeed’s 19 Best Nonfiction Books of 2015–The Daily Beast’s Best Big Idea Books of 2015–Seattle Times’ Best Books of 2015–Boston Globe’s Best Books of 2015–St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Best Books of 2015–The Guardian’s The Best Book We Read All Year–Audible’s Best Books of 2015–Texas Observer’s Five Books We Loved in 2015–Chicago Public Library’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2015
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.
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A good friend strongly recommended Dreamland when it came out, but I stayed away because I thought it would depress me.
I’m glad I finally decided to read it. Dreamland is not the dump of depressing data I feared. Rather, it’s an engrossing narrative shedding light on some of the forces responsible for today’s opioid epidemic. Profiling the Mexican farm boys dealing heroin from their cars, the medical researchers who broke down the long-held stigma attached to opioid pain treatment, and the swaths of mostly white small towns and suburbs decimated by opioids, Quinones makes the epidemic more personal and more understandable.
Quinones is the real deal. He is the kind of reporter who understands how to get into hard to report from places, and difficult people, and he understands how to write about bigger forces like trends in medicine and policy. Highly relevant today for understanding how the prescription opiate epidemic happened, and how it evolved into the heroin epidemic.
My family is from around the Portsmouth Ohio area so this book was a good read to me about the tragedy that has played out around this area. Very fond memories of the area growing up though. So sad. These things are happening in many places in our country. Lives just totally wasted and destroyed in others. But from those that are trying to better their lives by selling and promoting drugs they underestimate the collateral damage to others to give themselves a chance at more in life. Just Sad.
I picked up this book at the suggestion of a person I admire. It details the convergence of our national Opiod crisis and heroine addiction, fueled by criminal drug marketing techniques, an anti-pain revolution, Mexican drug dealers, Medicaid, and more. The web of factors was very interesting and I commend the author for attempting to connect all the dots. His writing, however, was tedious and repetitive. If this book had been edited, it would have been so much better. I was tempted to give up many times, but there would be another nugget of good information that kept me going. I do not recommend the audiobook as the narrator mispronounced dozens of words, diminishing the credibility of an already sloppy bit of writing.
Accurate reality told by great writing
A brilliant, fascinating account of the rise of opiate addiction in America. This is a masterwork of research and writing that traces the factors — from pharmaceutical marketing to the invasion of black tar heroin — that created a perfect storm and ruined the lives of millions. More frightening than anything I could ever write.
very informative well written account of how the opiate epidemic got started. Shocking.
Absolutley outstanding! Well researched and written. This book reveals the many facets and surreal elements of the opiate issue, from the small, impoverished Mexican villagers to pill clinics, to the fate of addicts to greedy pharmaceutical firms. Laid bare are the intriguing connections with high school sports, Wal-Mart, coal mining, and small to medium sized city markets. Once started, I could hardly put this book down.
Hits at the epicenter of illegal immigration and the drug trade.
Although this book is dated, it provides a clear picture of the beginnings of the opiate crisis in our nation. There were clear warnings regarding reading a brief research outcome and not checking more deeply into the criteria used and the population involved in the research. It is a book I would highly recommend!
Here’s the thing about pain. The aversion to pain is seated deep within our brains, and coping with pain is fueled by billions of advertising dollars annually for over-the-counter pain relief medications. Now, the combined demand for legal painkiller prescriptions and illegal heroin has created one of the largest and most lucrative businesses in North America.
The research in this book results in a stinging indictment of the USA healthcare system and the lack of oversight by government regulators. That combination allowed and encouraged rampant abuse of opiate prescription painkillers by profit-driven pharmaceutical companies and unscrupulous doctors.
But the book is much more. It’s also about the demand for illegal and cheap heroin that opiate addicts turned to after they could not obtain more prescriptions, and after black market prescription painkillers became too expensive. It continues today, with users across the USA in small towns and big cities—rich and poor, young and old, all ethnic origins, all religions, from students to Oscar-winning actors and billionaires. In some areas, more people are dying from opiate abuse than from car crashes.
A nagging question left almost unanswered in the book is whether anyone in the USA has the courage to confront the national epidemic, and deal effectively with the twin problems of demand and supply. The U.S. “War on Drugs” launched in 1971 has failed, and so have slogans such as “Just Say No” in the 1980s or “Three Strikes” laws in the 1990s. Some cities and states have tried more practical solutions, with limited success. Current national political posturing about walls and tens of thousands of “boots on the border” is unlikely to stop planes destined for private landing strips, or boats heading for coastline coves from the Pacific to the Gulf to the Atlantic. The business is too big and too well organized, and big business can thwart law enforcement efforts.
I’ve never met Sam Quinones, but I’d like to shake his hand and give him a bear hug for pursuing this story over several years and getting it published. The book won the National Book Critics Circle award this year for nonfiction, so you know it’s well worth reading—the personal interviews with patients who got hooked and became abusers, and with surviving relatives, shake the very soul. And I want to encourage him to continue his one-person crusade to find solutions, one city at a time.
I grew up in Dreamland. Or rather, a town that could have been Portsmouth, Ohio, whose community pool by name of Dreamland opens this book. When I read these first pages, infused as they are with small town Midwesterness, I felt home. When I read the description of the Dreamland pool, it could have been the Ella Sharp pool where I spent so many happy childhood and adolescent hours, such were the similarities. Sadly, like Dreamland, that pool has since been filled in, and the similarities don’t stop there. Like many of the Rust Belt towns that fill Sam Quinone’s Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, Jackson’s employers slowly disappeared leaving the town a shadow of its former self and easy prey for the bleaker elements of society.
Quinones, as he proves time and again, knows this story too well. Dreamland gives readers an in-depth look into the causes and early stages of the opioid epidemic which have ravaged towns from Portsmouth and Jackson in the Midwest, to Albuquerque and Boise and points in-between. In a word, this book is an indictment. It is an indictment of a pharmaceutical industry eager to make a buck, of a health insurance industry that has put doctors into straitjackets by limiting the procedures they will and won’t cover, of drug laws and SSI and Medicaid cards that turned too many with limited means (and a few with plenty of means and the cunning to pull it off) into small-time OxyContin dealers through Medicaid’s coverage of the pills in almost unlimited quantities.
Quinones does an excellent job of laying all of this out and helping readers make sense of this tangled public health crisis. The facts and realities are event more damning than the shear number of deaths, if that’s possible. Too, Dreamland, with Quinone’s wide-reaching networks and research in the heart of the opium-producing and trafficking provinces in Mexico, offers a far more comprehensive account of global heroin supply chains than does Fariba Nawa’s Opium Nation, which, when it takes its focus off Afghanistan, primarily looks at Asian markets and suppliers.
This is not a book to be read when unwinding before bed. It is a hardcore, depressing read: prepare to be angry.
(This review was originally published at https://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2018/02/dreamland-true-tale-of-americas-opiate.html)
There are currently many books available that attempt to explain how the opiod crisis began. This one is very thorough and, though the subject matter is quite grim, it is quite readable. The vast greed of the pharmaceutical industry, along with the stupidity of the medical establishment, created an overwhelming problem at an immense price to society.
Great book about the opioid drug-abuse epidemic in this country. Gives all the stats and details and should be a must-read for every American. Interesting that while we are in relentless criminal pursuit of heroin and opioid prescription drug sellers and users, there have been no arrests of the drug company personnel who put those drugs on the street and lied about how addictive they are, thus causing the problem.
Great non fiction about the opioid crisis
After reading this book, the question is why more people involved in the “Legal” drug trade are not in jail.
Perhaps the best and most informative book on the opioid epidemic and , how it began and how one Mexican town had an impact.
It creates a better understanding of how coddling illegal criminal aliens is killing United States citizens.
Everybody should read it. It was shocking.
informative and heavy. a bit repetitive