messylichwholivesfordrama 's review for:

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

3.0

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I read this because it was quoted in Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. It's is a well told and comprehensive story. Quinones definitely writes from the perspective of a crime reporter, not an activist. He's uniformly friendly to cops and does a fair amount of personal responsibility moralizing without much attention to the economic forces that shaped the opioid epidemic or the industrial decline in the rust belt epicenter or poverty in rural Mexico.