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knbee 's review for:
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
by Sam Quinones
Well-written, eye-opening narrative nonfiction packed with information about the modern history of opiates, focusing on the connection between the rise of black tar heroin as organized and peddled through a connection of poor and working class Mexican farmers (at least at the bottom) and the oxycodone epidemic affecting poor and working class, mostly white rural Americans (at least in the beginning). Lots of unexpected parallels not only between farmers and users but also between heroin ring organizers and pharmaceutical companies, heroin business structure and retail business structure, small town oxycodone economics and large scale capitalistic economics… There are lots of players who knowingly or not, legally or not, contributed to some seriously devastating results for families and entire towns. Regardless of how and why they arrived, glad more and more decision-makers realize that the way out of a drug epidemic is not through their traditional “tough on crime, lock ‘em up” policies. If only that realization would've happened decades earlier before so many urban, mostly Black American lives were irreparably damaged.