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raykluender 's review for:
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
by Sam Quinones
Quinones does an excellent job shepherding the reader through the economic forces that led to the explosion of both black tar heroin and Oxycontin, and the way they combined to create the opiate crisis.
I don't think I fully appreciate how totally debased the scientific standards were in pushing the idea that prescription opiates were not addictive. It's frankly pretty fucking appalling that we charged on through millennia of pretty irrefutable evidence on the addictive nature of opioids in an effort to believe we could cure chronic pain. It's a real testament to human ability to believe what we want so desperately to believe. But I really left this half of the book totally ashamed by the embarrassing failure of science and research and government regulation of prescription drug advertising.
Quinones has clear sympathy and admiration for the Nayarit drug cartels. These poor sugarcane farmers who come to America, working on a salary, delivering convenience and customer service with an excellent product. Theirs is a business model worthy of a case in my entrepreneurship class at HBS.
My main gripe: This book is a FULL 100 pages too long. A fair number of chapters literally repeat what sounds like exactly the same set of sentences and is certainly the same set of ideas. It feels like there was no editing, and Quinones just stitched together a bunch of old news articles in one place. The flow kind of works, but you're constantly taking two steps forward in the story and then circling back to a redundant point. By the end, I found this pretty frustrating and was not on board with all of Quinones preaching, but there was enough good research and necessary-information-to-be-an-informed-citizen to make this worthwhile.
I don't think I fully appreciate how totally debased the scientific standards were in pushing the idea that prescription opiates were not addictive. It's frankly pretty fucking appalling that we charged on through millennia of pretty irrefutable evidence on the addictive nature of opioids in an effort to believe we could cure chronic pain. It's a real testament to human ability to believe what we want so desperately to believe. But I really left this half of the book totally ashamed by the embarrassing failure of science and research and government regulation of prescription drug advertising.
Quinones has clear sympathy and admiration for the Nayarit drug cartels. These poor sugarcane farmers who come to America, working on a salary, delivering convenience and customer service with an excellent product. Theirs is a business model worthy of a case in my entrepreneurship class at HBS.
My main gripe: This book is a FULL 100 pages too long. A fair number of chapters literally repeat what sounds like exactly the same set of sentences and is certainly the same set of ideas. It feels like there was no editing, and Quinones just stitched together a bunch of old news articles in one place. The flow kind of works, but you're constantly taking two steps forward in the story and then circling back to a redundant point. By the end, I found this pretty frustrating and was not on board with all of Quinones preaching, but there was enough good research and necessary-information-to-be-an-informed-citizen to make this worthwhile.