Summary Of Dreamland By Sam Quinnoes

In his talk about his book dreamland, Sam Quinnoes discussed the drug war epidemic in the United States. He discussed that this is the first time in history where drug abuse and sales is seen all across the country and not isolated in a specific area. Sam Quinnoes, was a crime reporter in Stockton, CA, as well as, a reporter for the LA Times after he spent about 10 years living in Mexico. As a reporter he began investigating the prevalence of black tar heroin trafficking from Mexico to a small town in West Virginia after reading that in the span of 6 months a dozed people died from overdose. He was working with a team of reporters trying to answer the question of “how drugs are trafficked once they cross the boarder into the US, and how do

they get to the rest of the country.” After talking to the DEA and doing a little digging he discovered that most of the drug traffickers were immigrants from the same town in Mexico. These immigrants had learned how to operate and deliver heroin after trafficking it into the US and then sold it in the same way a pizza delivery business operates.

A big claim in his talk was the revolution in American medicine and the introduction and greater use of pain medications.

Originally pain medications were very limited and believed to be very addictive by most doctors. Doctors would first recommend more holistic ways to treat pain such as physical therapy and meditation. However, with the development of more pain medications big pharmaceutical companies convinced hospitals and doctors that opiates were virtually non addictive when used to treat pain, but they were careful not to describe the doses in which they were non addictive so they could sell more. Once doctors began using these drugs, big pharma kept pushing for the use of opiates in more patients with less severe cases, expanding their use beyond just those suffering from terminal diseases. The opiate, OxyContin, was promoted this way with aggressive sales men stating their research showed these drug were not addictive. This lead doctors to prescribe these drugs more frequently and in higher doses. In fact, every year since 1996 the prescription rate of these drugs has

increased.

Sam Quinnoes, explained that dreamland was a time and place when families would bring their kids to the community pool, and kids would play outside in their neighborhoods.

There was a focus on expanding the community resources like softball fields and parks, not the commercial resources, such as strip malls. However, when big companies like strip malls and pharmaceuticals it took over dreamland. It then became a neighborhood of isolation, near a pill mill, and everyone had easy access to opiates. The traffickers saw this as an opportunity to exploit the people addicted to OxyContin and bridge them to the next best thing, heroin. In towns like this, heroin thrived, and the drug suppliers did everything they could to keep their customers coming back.

People saw opiates as a quick way to fix their complicated problems, but it led to even worse problems. People were too ashamed to admit their love one died from a opiate overdose (prescription or not) and the problem was hard to address. However, now as it has become more open the problem is no longer hidden and we can start trying to fix it. We can start getting people back to school, work and into the community. We can start rebuilding

communities.

The description above was how Sam Quinnoes described the rise and current state of the opiate epidemic in the US today. Although, I have always known drugs and addictions were issues in our society I never realized the large scale of the situation or the history of how it got started. I think that my generation, since I was born in 1996 about the time this started, is seeing the large scale effect that pain medication and over prescribing them has had on our neighbors, school peers and people we never though would be addicts. I also think that all of the technology that started becoming more popular as our generation grew up and the generations below us are being raised on, will make a lot of my generation want to bring back community. A lot regarding the long term effects of technology is still unknown, but I think our generation is quickly recognizing many of the short term effects. I think that technology is only driving human isolation more so than the decline of communities, making people more prone to drug addiction. Especially, since many social media apps and video games are rewarding us in the same ways that drugs are.