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seeceeread 's review for:
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
by Sam Quinones
dark
informative
sad
slow-paced
💠"Discussing [the morphine molecule], you could invoke some of humankind's greatest cultural creations and deepest questions: Faust, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, discussions on the fundamental nature of man and human behavior, of free will and slavery, of God and evolution."
Quinones has a good story to tell: "It was about America and Mexico, about addiction and marketing, about wealth and poverty, about happiness and how to achieve it." More specifically, he seeks to document a collision. On the one hand, opiate use increased due to aggressive marketing campaigns among Big Pharma that relied on a misreading of near non-existent research on addictive potential. On the other, would-be sugar cane workers from one far flung rancho in Nayarit, Mexico innovated a 21st century delivery model for black tar heroin that helped people across the country transition from prescription pills to a street drug. The author colors in broad outlines with reporting from a variety of US heartland cities and voices.
The second time through, I was exasperated; this doesn't seem to have aged well and instead reflects the appetite for #OpioidCrisis tales at the moment it was published. First of all, this feels written to skim and could have been half as long. Quinones is ridiculously repetitive: "Farm boys from Xalisco" making heroin delivery "like pizza" to addicts, or "slaves to a molecule." [I'm tired of "slave" beung misused as a supposedly meaning-making frame. "Chaotic" and "uncontrolled" is what he means - and not enslavement. Meanwhile, he calls slavery a large "influx of foreign-born labor."]
Quinones' diction reinforces normative power structures. Especially in the first half, he phrases women as possessed objects. He also makes unnecessary racial, ethnic and class asides that cast aspersion on everyone but WASPs.
Confused about how to discuss a public health problem within his crime beat, Quinones introduces a lot of police. He also glorifies policing as "making a difference" even as he describes the contrary. Nearly every city profiled features an officer although in their own words, they "have had no impact." By the end of the book, he's eagerly profiling activist parents, former addicts and trained fast food workers as effective crusaders against the national march of opiate death. Compared to earlier topics, he gives these mostly cursory treatment: one mention without much detail.
Quinones has a good story to tell: "It was about America and Mexico, about addiction and marketing, about wealth and poverty, about happiness and how to achieve it." More specifically, he seeks to document a collision. On the one hand, opiate use increased due to aggressive marketing campaigns among Big Pharma that relied on a misreading of near non-existent research on addictive potential. On the other, would-be sugar cane workers from one far flung rancho in Nayarit, Mexico innovated a 21st century delivery model for black tar heroin that helped people across the country transition from prescription pills to a street drug. The author colors in broad outlines with reporting from a variety of US heartland cities and voices.
The second time through, I was exasperated; this doesn't seem to have aged well and instead reflects the appetite for #OpioidCrisis tales at the moment it was published. First of all, this feels written to skim and could have been half as long. Quinones is ridiculously repetitive: "Farm boys from Xalisco" making heroin delivery "like pizza" to addicts, or "slaves to a molecule." [I'm tired of "slave" beung misused as a supposedly meaning-making frame. "Chaotic" and "uncontrolled" is what he means - and not enslavement. Meanwhile, he calls slavery a large "influx of foreign-born labor."]
Quinones' diction reinforces normative power structures. Especially in the first half, he phrases women as possessed objects. He also makes unnecessary racial, ethnic and class asides that cast aspersion on everyone but WASPs.
Confused about how to discuss a public health problem within his crime beat, Quinones introduces a lot of police. He also glorifies policing as "making a difference" even as he describes the contrary. Nearly every city profiled features an officer although in their own words, they "have had no impact." By the end of the book, he's eagerly profiling activist parents, former addicts and trained fast food workers as effective crusaders against the national march of opiate death. Compared to earlier topics, he gives these mostly cursory treatment: one mention without much detail.