Book Report – Dreamland

By now, most of us reading knows at least one family affected by the opiate epidemic that’s swept the country – and has been especially hard on the heartland of Ohio.

By all accounts, the seminal book chronicling the horrific rise of this national nightmare is 2015’s “Dreamland” by Sam Quinones.

The book is more frightening than any fiction. And it’s even more frightening that now, just two years later, with the rise of fentanyl-laced heroin and the spike in overdoses, it’s already outdated.

In some ways, “Dreamland” is the tale of two small, poor areas – and the thousands of lives they destroyed and enriched. One, a small city in southern Ohio – Portsmouth, along the Ohio River. The other, a small county on Mexico’s west coast – Xalisco, Nayarit.

By now, it’s easy to be desensitized to the “Narcos-Scarface-Blow-Snowfall” piles-of-money sequences. Walter White had to keep his stacked Benjies on a pallet, bitches. After a while, stacks of drug cash becomes a cartoon character.

Through exhaustive research, Quinones shows how we got here with heroin – and it’s a vastly different tale. No kingpins. No Pablo Escobar. No Gus Fring. Just crew after crew of clean-cut ranch boys from Xalisco – working in small cells of five and six guys for six months at a time. That’s how the problem spread from West to East.

Here in southern Ohio, the OxyContin scourge began with a rash – literally – of pill mills and an industry push in one of the country’s most impoverished regions. Doctors – some with good intentions, others with the exact opposite – somehow twisted an obscure study in medical journal from 1980 into what led to the opiate epidemic. From Ohio, it spread south and west.

The Xalisco Boys capitalized on their cheaper, more pure black tar heroin using a simple, strict, effective system – making ordering their brand of poison, as Quinones repeatedly says, “as easy as ordering pizza.” Rapidly, the Xalisco Boys – polite young ranch kids, never armed – found that targeting rich, white suburban areas and staying away from gangs was the way to spread their system.

In southern Ohio, Northern Kentucky and West Virginia, addicts and dealers were figuring out how easily available the Oxy had become and – with very little employment – the pills quickly became their own economy, with addicts using the local Wal-Mart to sustain their habit.

“Dreamland” also acutely illustrates that previously hard-on-drugs hawks in local politics – especially in the Right-leaning areas of the country – had softened their stance now that it was touching the privileged children of friends and donors. This was not South Central. This was everywhere.

If you want to understand how this epidemic got started, read “Dreamland.”

The reader can almost sympathize with the Xalisco Boys. They were organized, non-violent, non-competitive kids choosing this over the sugar cane fields. They didn’t use the product. They wanted 501 jeans and a house back in Mexico.

In this country, pharmaceutical companies made hundreds of millions from poisoning its own people.

One day, we’ll look back on this time – however we get it fixed – and wonder how the country got here and how much we inflicted this on ourselves.

“Dreamland” is a sobering education. And a reminder how far we have to go.