Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic
Ratings47
Average rating4.2
Fairly extensive look at the opioid crisis and the intersection with the Mexican black tar heroin trade. This book is incredibly repetitive. The subject matter is fascinating in its own terrible way, and I recommend reading this if it's a topic of interest but by all means skim if you find yourself thinking “he just talked about this anecdote a chapter ago.”
I thought this book might be a 5-star read, but it lost steam as it went on. Quinones does a great job at explaining the conditions that led to the opioid epidemic, including the ready availability of cheap Mexican heroin, the unchecked explosion of prescription opioids, and failing small town economies where the only business opportunities revolved around either one of the two. The description of the novel approach that the Mexican drug dealers took to marketing and selling their product was very interesting, for the first time....but by the time Quinones had portrayed it for the fourth or fifth time with little variation it had lost its impact. It is important to understand that the epidemic happened all over the US but we didn't necessarily need to read about its development in numerous different towns and cities because the story was basically the same in each one. And then at the end Quinones really lost me when he started moralizing about the reasons that Americans were so prone to getting hooked on either legal or illegal opioids - it had something to do with how permissive parents shielded their kids from hardship and then included the dangers of a world that uses trigger warnings. Huh? I also read Beth Macy's [b:Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America 37486540 Dopesick Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America Beth Macy https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1533010748s/37486540.jpg 59097428] and although that book had its flaws too, I think it did a better job of capturing the essence of the crisis in fewer pages while imparting the same information and avoiding the unnecessary preaching.
While individual sections are well written and interesting, there is a great deal of overlap and redundancy in the book that could have been eliminated.
Great informative read
As someone who sort of works in social services and sees heroin and prescription drug abuse I️ was looking for a book that provided some good information about where it all came from. This provided that and more. The writer is excellent and provides a fascinating background for this epidemic all while being non-judgmental and sowing the seeds for hope. This writer has been extremely thorough in investigating this whole ordeal and while he shows this epidemic spreading like a web throughout our country he shows the growth and progression of the epidemic using a town in Ohio which reminded me so much of my own hometown and several other hometowns in states that I️ have visited. Well worth the read
Well-written, blistering book about the opiate explosion. The author skillfully draws together many strands of a complicated story. However, somewhere after the middle of the book, he tells the same story over and over and over and over and...
