Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones. Sam is a freelance journalist today and was previously a reporter for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2014. In 2021 he published The Least of Us, a National Book Critics Circle Award best nonfiction nominee.
This is a storyline that is certainly as powerful as the four previous books that I have chosen to read in order to understand the ongoing opioid crisis. Dreamland begins in Portsmouth Ohio, the book title from this community’s large historic public pool. This opening chapter certainly allowed me to remember a similar environment in northwest Ohio in my youth. However Sam then traces the explosion of black tar heroin in Columbus Ohio and Huntington West Virginia like delivery pizzas.
In fact, Sam’s story of young men who escaped poverty in Nayarit Mexico seems not uncommon. When presented with a choice of a colonial-era life that would take young men decades to acquire enough money to build a house versus selling black tar heroin for a year in the US, the choice is rather simple. By saving money the young men certainly returned with status symbols: Levi 501 jeans. This also permitted the men to quickly build lavish homes around Xalisco Nayarit.