Books Worth Reading - Dreamland

A couple weeks ago Congress did something unusual with the likes of Trey Gowdy wandering it's halls; they a bipartisan committee meeting to "tackle" America's growing opiate addiction.  At around the same time The New York Times came out with one of their great interactive map pieces http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/07/us/drug-overdose-deaths-in-the-us) about the spreading rate of drug overdoses in this country. Someone beat them both to the punch, and his name is Sam Quinones.  His book is called Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, and its a scary story.  Basically, folks, we are are all pill heads.

Opi-whats?

The first recorded use of opium as a pain reliever appears in the writing of Homer around 300 B.C. Since then humans have been using the juices of the poppy plant to take the edge off life on planet earth.  Today it comes to us in pill form with names like Vicodin and OxyContin, or in a drip bag hanging by your hospital bed as morphine.  Increasingly it now comes in a brown sticky ball, squeezed into a balloon and tucked into the mouth of your delivery driver. Oh and turns out that  there all addictive not sure if there's a word missing or should it just be "they are" (all addictive)

Short Stories

The synopsis of Quinones' book goes as follows. In the late 80s and early 90s the medical community, with prompting by the drug companies, began to think differently about pain management. Cronic pain was a growing problem, but new time release drugs were coming online that allowed those affected to live more normal lives. So doctors began to prescribe these meds in growing numbers to thousands of hurting people.  The only problem with that plan was that one of those new pills was OxyContin, a powerful opiate that when crushed and snorted, or liquefied and injected gives you all the pain relief at once.  I once heard the high associated with Oxy described as suddenly feeling like a 15 year old boy again; one that can run through a brick wall and feel nothing.

All of a sudden in places like Appalachia and the rust belt cites of the Midwest, folks who had hard lives and lived in dead towns could feel good again.  Soon thousands of people had prescriptions for Oxy and thousands more spent every waking minute of each day trying to get their hands on some. Pill mills run by crooked doctors sprang up and did nothing but write fraudulent prescriptions. Desperate addicts sold their bodies or their food stamp cards to neighbors for cash to buy pills. Whole towns collapsed into a state of near anarchy.  Meanwhile in Mexico another monster was beginning to awaken...

More specifically in and around the town of Xalisco in the state of Nayarit, some smart guys figured out a way to get us all potentially hooked on black tar heroin.  The plan is a simple one.  Runners bring Nayarit's cash crop across the border in small batches often totaling around a pound.  From there the heroin is sent to places like Denver were its split into tiny single hit sized balls and hidden inside balloons.  The next step is to find customers which isn't hard when you give out free samples or charge as little as fifteen dollars a dose,; Oxycontin has a street value of between $60- $100 a pill.  Once you have a customer base your drivers, (also from Nayarit) pop a balloon or two in their mouth and deliver it.  As Quinones says in the book, it's as easy as delivering pizza.  Oh and guess what, you can now have black tar heroin delivered to your door anywhere in this country.

My Take

Do I think you should read this book?  Absolutely!  Sam Quinones does a great job telling a story that most of us have no idea is going on right under our noses.  Drugs aren't just a poor or urban problem anymore. "Safe" white places like Salt Lake City and Portland are full of normal everyday folks that have a secret they hide from the rest of us.  Pain is a bitch, and addiction and pain together are deadly.  Go get this book!