Remember how I used to be obsessed with life in North Korea? For weirdly similar reasons, I’m obsessed with life in the United States. That is a messed up country that I would not want to live in. And a fascinating aspect of this hellhole country is its health system and, directly due to that, opioid crisis. So it’s one of these things that I seem to never stop reading about.
So, of course I had to read Dreamland.
Unfortunately, the book was bad.
The good
Let’s start with the positive: I was encouraged by the explanation of methadone because I’ve literally never understood what methadone is or how it works. The explanation was still not satisfying, but there was one, which is more than most resources can say.
The book was also broader in scope than the very good, but very limited, Pill Mill Killer.
Now, on to everything else.
Wait. What’s the point?
What is this book trying to do?
It felt to me like Sam Quinones really wanted to write a book on the small-time but somehow also ubiquitous heroin dealer gang from Mexico, his editor told him to add context, and he ended up writing a book that was half Mexican heroin dealers, half opioid crisis to have a good excuse to write about those.
Of course, adding to the problem, he simply does not have enough to say about the dealers to fill a whole book, and could not find it in himself to keep it to a couple of chapters. So he ends up with a very long book, half of which is about telling one story ten times, the other half doing half-assed work on the general picture without showing too much interest in that; these halves keep jumping around so you’ll get whiplash from the lack of coherent narrative or context.
However, you will find something very consistent: when Sam Quinones is happy with a sentence turn, he will use it twice per chapter, and yes, the dealers sell heroin like pizza, three times in the final 20 pages.
Research? Empathy? What for?
When you write about a killer epidemic, you might want to cite sources. I fully understand that interviews are just that, but there are many statements in this book that would have made me feel a bit better with footnotes.
And shoutouts to this incredible quote to explain why Portsmouth has a bunch of gyms now: « People got so tired of seeing addiction and fat people » – not every quote is worth including in your book, Sam! A journalist interviews people but they’re also supposed to curate the information, Sam! (Sam doesn’t like fat people. He mentions them very often. Apparently being fat makes you take opioids or something – not that there’s a source for that, or even that it’s said outright.)
And, oh man is this guy weird about people on disability and social security. Clearly, it’s all part of an elaborate plot not to have to work. He at one point explains that men in a mining town have « a whole lifestyle » of… retiring at age 45 with black lung disease and kicking back and enjoying the sun on taxpayer money, I suppose.
The lack of empathy for the people he systematically calls « junkies » and « addicts » is incredible. They get a backstory only because it shows they’re not black (more on this in a second). They’re terrible, lazy people who refuse to work – not that Sam would try to connect that to the fact that the town’s companies collapsed and there are no jobs left. He’s here to talk about Mexican dealers, remember?
Speaking of them. I understand that the black tar heroin dealers hate black people, but it’s very hard to read this book and not wonder if the author hates them too. The language is always derogatory, and it’s always about how the victims are surprisingly respectable (white), whereas heroin deaths would be so normal and excusable if it was normal Black people, or something.
(And then there’s a lot about churches and the 12 steps and praying for each other. It’s not something I would have noticed or minded if it weren’t for the general conservative vibe of the book.)
On The StoryGraph, I saw lots of people talking about how in the afterword he basically says trigger warnings are a reason why addiction doesn’t die down, or something like that. My edition, which I don’t think is the 2015 one, didn’t have an afterword. Good for me.
Anyway, read Demon Copperhead, it’s fiction and it’s better researched than this. Or watch Dopesick, an actually good miniseries based on the book and on reliable sources too. My next book on the topic will be Chasing the scream, which my friend Yann gave me in early 2024 and I still haven’t gotten around to reading, shame on me.