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

0.25

This was one of the dullest, worst-written books I’ve ever read. If you’re reading this review and want to learn about the topic, read Empire of Pain instead.

The author tries to weave together 2 stories - one about the Xalisco drug gangs, one about the Sackler family and Purdue Pharmaceuticals, interspersed with sad stories of dying drug addicts. The problem is, it fails at this. The book reads like 30 long-form articles which have been pasted together in a random order, meaning there’s a huge amount of repetition of key ideas, even within the same story. I feel like I’m being told the same thing 20 times with 5 different examples. 

It all really falls apart in the afterward. The author decides to start ranting about the theories from “The Coddling of the American Mind”, a well-debunked book, and how a straight line can be drawn between opiate use and not riding a bike enough as a child and needing trigger warnings about racism - essentially completely negating his (and the widely accepted) original theory of pharmaceutical marketing being responsible, and leaving a question as to how the previous wave of opiate addicts came to be. Other highlights in the book include: a long description of the shutting down of a municipal swimming pool, describing two politicians as being “like French resistance fighters” before passing a bill with unanimous support(?), and pages on the outsourcing of the American shoelace industry. The author seems to think that anything that happened in a small Ohio town is relevant to the book because a lot of opiate addicts lived there.

Another issue is the sheer number of people in the book. Almost everyone has their full name printed, even if they only have the most tangential relation to the story. There’s also very little clarification as to who anyone is after the first mention of their name, and together these two factors make the book almost impossible to follow at times. You never know which names you need to memorise and which are pointless chaff.

I finished this book, purely out of stubbornness, but I think it might be the worst-written book I’ve ever read in my life. If you’re interested in the topic, I implore you to read something else - anything else.