tastyspore 's review for:

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

1.5

challenging sad tense slow-paced

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The topic of this book is something that America desperately needed— too bad Sam Quinones was the one to write it. My gripes with Dreamland boil down to three categories: formatting, structure, and shitty biases. 

Formatting: there were so many stupid typos and formatting issues I double checked multiple times that I hadn’t somehow gotten my hands on an AR copy. How these got by the editors is a mystery to me, but someone on that team needs to be fired. 

Structure: Quinones constantly jumps around between locations, dates, and people with no discernible rhyme or reason. He frequently would mention someone in one sentence, then expect you to remember who they were and why we should care multiple chapters later. There was no coherent flow between chapters or even paragraphs. 

Shitty biases: the blatant glorification of law enforcement and their disregard for civil liberties was appalling; I actually had to put this on a brief hiatus because of it. Quinones clearly supports conspiracy statutes and dismisses the very valid criticisms of them. 

There’s a lot of focus on the perspectives of medical professionals dealing with chronic pain patients, but essentially none from those patients. On the surface, that might not necessarily be a bad thing, but the way these professionals talked about their patients was disgusting and no attempt was made in balancing that or adding nuance to that specific topic. 

In his afterword, Quinones points to the advocacy of trigger warnings as evidence that American youth are spoiled and bored and ultimately why they seek opioids.  I couldn’t fathom the stupidity and arrogance in that and didn’t read the rest. I doubt I really missed anything, considering he wrote a lot of words but ultimately said nothing prior to that. 

All of this made for an incredibly boring book. I generally enjoy narrative nonfiction and usually finish a book within a couple weeks, but this took me six months. Dreamland is a slog I cannot in good conscience recommend.