About the book
In 1929 a company in Portsmouth, Ohio, a blue-collar city, put up a pool as big as a football field and called it Dreamland, and it became the center of local life. Journalist Sam Quinones sets that memory against the addiction that later devastated Portsmouth and hundreds of other small towns and suburbs across America. Two stories collided. One is the loose prescribing of painkillers in the 1990s, which peaked with Purdue Pharma's OxyContin campaign. The other is a flood of cheap black tar heroin from one small Mexican county on the west coast, moved by sugar cane farmers through a distribution system independent of any cartel. The book became a New York Times best seller.
David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of Basecamp, put it on his list of books he read in 2018, noting that a few small hospital studies changed how pain was treated, and that much of the US medical community came to see opioid pain pills as close to non-addictive.
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David Heinemeier Hansson (Co-Founder/Basecamp)
Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic accounts how a few tiny studies on low rates of opium addiction for hospital patients lead to a whole new paradigm for treating pain in the US. From mid 90s to late 2000s, opium pain pills were basically considered non-addictive by much of the medical community. This led to crazy over-prescription, subsequent addiction, and a whole new market for heroin once someone was hooked and couldn’t afford the pills. This heroin market was served in large parts by on-demand delivery services driven by small-town Mexican heroin cells. It’s really an interesting tale of medical hubris, corporate greed, the devastation of whole areas to addiction, and more. It could have used a lot more editing, though. So many phrases, “black-tar heroin delivered like pizza”, just keep repeating over and over again. But it’s a solid recount of how we got to this tragic point that opium overdoses is now a leading cause of death for many demographic groups in the US. More people die from drug overdoses than from car crashes now. Tragic.
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