Analysis Of Sam Quinones's Dreamland

There is a battle going on in America, hidden from sight yet claiming multiple lives every day. What many ordinary Americans fail to realize is that deaths from opiates have been steadily increasing under the noses of authorities who have few ways to curb this crisis. Sam Quinones’s Dreamland takes us to the very heart of the opiate epidemic, from the rural hills of Mexico to the City of Angels. This is not just a collection of narratives, but a warning to all that must be heeded before it’s too late. Through various accounts from people involved in every aspect of the opioid crisis, we are given a clear picture of how the opiate crisis began, and how we got to where we are now. Quinones does not place the blame on a single group of people,

We are introduced to the story of Matt Schoonover, a young man who had recently obtained his masters degree from Yale. He had grown up “attending a Christian private school, and a prominent church” (2). Matt had begun abusing pills, though he was originally prescribed them by a doctor. Even after undergoing detoxification and then rehab, Matt could not curb his addiction. “Unable to afford street Oxycontin, Matt switched to black tar heroin, brought in from Mexico” (3). We are told how this is unfortunately quite common. People who are prescribed pills often end up abusing them; and once they can no longer afford the high prices of OxyContin they switch to black tar heroin. This transition is often what leads to overdoses, as black tar heroin is extremely deadly and overdoses like Matt’s are common. This is just one story out of tens of thousands of similar stories that all have the same ending. The opiate crisis is a problem that few recognize because it crept up on a majority of Americans. Young people throughout the nation were not using drugs in public, but privately in their own

Doctors work under intense pressure, and if a pill could fix a patient’s problems than many saw nothing wrong with that. What exacerbated the problem was that many hospitals also changed their modus operandi with regards to treatment. In some hospitals, “doctors were told they could be sued if they did not treat pain aggressively, which meant with opiates (95). However once the patient became addicted and could no longer get their prescription legally refilled, the drug dealers saw their chance. What is surprising is the fact that pharmaceutical companies acted in the same manner as drug dealers. Both sides did not care about the end user, and the problems they would have to deal with after using what was given to them. Their motive was purely to profit as much as possible, and they did not care about who would get hurt as a result of their