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dizzy_reception 's review for:
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
by Sam Quinones
I loved this book. I found it very insightful, and I really appreciated the parallels between overconsumption and addiction. Our environment certainly creates a breeding ground for addiction. I also liked learning that the Opiate Epidemic really took off based on experts and professionals almost willfully misinterpreting the findings of an important study done on pain. It is best to defer to the experts the vast majority of the time, but it is also important that experts are made aware of their own biases and cognitive blind spots, and that is really hard to do when salespeople are consistently pressuring doctors to give in to wishful thinking. The ending was extremely uplifting and hopeful which made up for a very long and depressing journey through the Opiate Epidemic.
However, this book was extremely repetitive. The book could have been significantly shorter if the author didn't feel the need to remind us of the details of how the Xalisco Boys operated every other chapter. The readers presumably don't have the memory of a goldfish, so there is no need to remind us for the 54th time that the Xalisco Boys deliver heroin like pizza. We get it.
However, this book was extremely repetitive. The book could have been significantly shorter if the author didn't feel the need to remind us of the details of how the Xalisco Boys operated every other chapter. The readers presumably don't have the memory of a goldfish, so there is no need to remind us for the 54th time that the Xalisco Boys deliver heroin like pizza. We get it.