Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

Sam Quinones (1958-) is a freelance American journalist and author who has focused his career on writing about Mexico, Mexicans in America, and the opiate epidemic. In Dreamland Quinones draws on his experience as a crime reporter in Stockton, California; his background covering the Mexican drug wars for the Los Angeles Times, where he was working when he first identified the trends and characters that led to him write Dreamland; and his experience living in Mexico for a decade, where he wrote two books of nonfiction stories on the country. This latter experience gave Quinones a special insight into the roots of black tar heroin trafficking in the United States, an insight he relays in describing an encounter with a DEA agent who thought traffickers were coming from Tepic, the capital city of Nayarit. With his knowledge of Mexico and specifically rancheros—small towns or villages where residents often focus entirely on one trade, such as making popsicles or pimping young women—Quinones knew the heroin trafficking operations were likely based in one of those communities, an insight that eventually led him to Xalisco. In describing his reporting credentials in this way, Quinones demonstrates that he is uniquely qualified to tell this story and that he has a deep understanding of the factors on both sides of the border (including five years of research specifically for this story). He uses his reporting skills to take the reader on a journey, tracing the roots of the opiate crisis and underscoring the improbability that the crisis could be so driven by Mexican traffickers operating out of a no-name village.

Quinones situates himself in the text in another way, by describing how his research brought him in contact with addicts and their families. In describing these encounters, Quinones evokes the extent of the opiate epidemic—for instance, in a 2013 chance meeting in Kentucky, where he was speaking with some other diners in a restaurant, Quinones found that one of them had two family members who died from heroin overdoses. In describing his visceral reaction to this and other encounters, Quinones highlights how the opiate epidemic has touched an unprecedented number of lives, making it the most fatal drug crisis to ever hit the United States. Quinones also helps give voice to those who have endured this crisis, breaking the silence held by so many people for so long, whether out of stigma or ignorance or indifference.

Finally, the story is composed of many characters with whom Quinones came into contact, including the early black tar heroin pioneer the Man, who helped push heroin into many new markets in the United States before being arrested in Operation Tar Pit. In positioning himself as an interlocutor among the people involved in the opiate crisis, Quinones brings these characters—their actions and personalities—into the text, resulting in a more comprehensive and nuanced depiction of the opiate crisis.