booyakki 's review for:

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones

5.0

---

A fascinating look at how legal and illegal drug systems overlap to trap customers, and create and maintain addicts. Using Dreamland and Portsmouth as a focal points helps to ground the data through the downward spiral and the hard fought (and ongoing) recovery. Also appreciated the thoughtfulness in applying context to both the Pain Revolution and the Nayarit cells, when it would be easy to write them both as ignorant and/or evil. One note: there’s a very brief mention of the Sinaloa and Zeta cartels territory war towards the end of the book and the Nayarit clans fleeing to Guadalajara- it would have been helpful to have more discussion about that, as I’m not sure if that meant the Nayarit cells were absorbed by the Zetas or they stopped production entirely, which would lead to two very different outcomes in the black tar heroin trade, but understand that wasn’t necessarily the purpose of this book. Overall, a very important and very worthwhile read.