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oxnard_montalvo 's review for:
Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
by Sam Quinones
More like 3.75 stars. Dreamland has a lot of scope; we start off in Mexico, looking at the socio-economic conditions in one town that helped foster the rise of heroin dealing as a cottage industry. The methods and model of the US based dealers and their unique customer service approach that hadn't been done before in street dealing, or at least not done on such a widespread level.
Quinones writes lucidly and clearly lays out how all the disparate links of economic struggles, social poverty, isolated communities and prescription painkillers come together to fuel the rise of heroin use.
He does tend to repeat the same points every few pages and I felt the book could easily have been a 1/4 or even a 1/3 shorter without losing any of the heft. It was feeling particularly bloated towards the end. And one thing I felt was implied throughout but only briefly made explicit was how it was only when the opioid crisis begin touching the fringes of the white wealthy upper-middle classes was it deemed to be a startling problem. Only then was it seen to be a crisis worth responding to.
If the opioid use and deaths among white users skyrocketed, I wish he had included some statistics about use/death/recovery rates of black addicts. It's barely mentioned despite saying how heroin use had been traditionally seen as a 'city' problem and using this idea to highlight just how shocking it is to see heroin in predominantly white suburbs. So while, yes, heroin use, painkiller addiction and economic stagnation has devastated rural communities, they are also the focal points and beneficiaries of new methods of recovery and treatment.
What I want to know is how does the crisis compare elsewhere? I get that the focus of the book is to specifically look at rural communities, but I don't think that story would have been undermined with the inclusion of statistics and stories from black users.
Quinones writes lucidly and clearly lays out how all the disparate links of economic struggles, social poverty, isolated communities and prescription painkillers come together to fuel the rise of heroin use.
He does tend to repeat the same points every few pages and I felt the book could easily have been a 1/4 or even a 1/3 shorter without losing any of the heft. It was feeling particularly bloated towards the end. And one thing I felt was implied throughout but only briefly made explicit was how it was only when the opioid crisis begin touching the fringes of the white wealthy upper-middle classes was it deemed to be a startling problem. Only then was it seen to be a crisis worth responding to.
If the opioid use and deaths among white users skyrocketed, I wish he had included some statistics about use/death/recovery rates of black addicts. It's barely mentioned despite saying how heroin use had been traditionally seen as a 'city' problem and using this idea to highlight just how shocking it is to see heroin in predominantly white suburbs. So while, yes, heroin use, painkiller addiction and economic stagnation has devastated rural communities, they are also the focal points and beneficiaries of new methods of recovery and treatment.
What I want to know is how does the crisis compare elsewhere? I get that the focus of the book is to specifically look at rural communities, but I don't think that story would have been undermined with the inclusion of statistics and stories from black users.