Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

by Sam Quinones

Pastors called TV the devil with one eye.

After kicking opiates, “it takes two years for your dopamine receptors to start working naturally,” Paul said. “Nobody told us that.

“…We thought he was fixed because he was coming out of rehab. Kids aren’t fixed. It takes years of clean living to the point where they may—they may—have a chance. This is a lifelong battle.“

The U.S. medical system is good at fighting disease, Cahana believes, and awful at leading people to wellness. “They don’t know how to do it and the path they offer actually makes people worse.”

I thought it just as bizarre that all that reasoning he referred to could, in some measure, hinge on the misinterpretation of a one-paragraph letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine in January 1980 written by Dr. Hershel Jick, who intended nothing of the sort.

That paragraph is where the statistic that only 1% of people prescribed opiate painkillers become addicted came from.

“They say it takes a community to raise a child,” his parents wrote. “It takes a community to battle addiction.”

relapse is assumed to be part of recovery. Some folks I spoke with, in fact, were redefining recovery as a series of periods of sobriety, growing in duration, but interrupted by relapse.

“It’s kind of a cliché, that we can’t arrest our way out of this problem,” one prosecutor told me. “Well, we can’t treat our way out of this problem, either. We’re never going to solve the heroin epidemic on the back end—incarceration or treatment.”

I believe more strongly than ever that the antidote to heroin is community. If you want to keep kids off heroin, make sure people in your neighborhood do things together, in public, often.