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by
Sam Quinones
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January 3 - January 20, 2024
A word on terminology: I have used the term “opiate” throughout this book to describe drugs like morphine and heroin, which derive directly from the opium poppy, and others that derive indirectly, or are synthesized from drugs derived, from the poppy and resemble morphine in their effects.
In 1929, three decades into what were the great years for the blue-collar town of Portsmouth, on the Ohio River, a private swimming pool opened and they called it Dreamland.
Only the pool remained segregated.
A family’s season pass was only twenty-five dollars, and this was a prized possession often given as a Christmas present.
Its industry supported a community for
All of this recreation let a working-class family feel well-off.
Matt grew up in the best neighborhoods, attended a Christian private school and a prominent church. He’d admitted his addiction, sought help, and received the best residential drug treatment in Columbus. Why wasn’t that enough?
Drug overdoses were killing more people every year than car accidents.
this wave of opiate abuse was the worst drug scourge to ever hit the country.
For each of the thousands who died every year, many hundreds more were addicted.
Via pills, heroin had entered the mainstream.
football was almost a gateway to opia...
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And almost every one was white.
Crime was at historic lows, drug overdose deaths at record highs. A happy façade covered a disturbing reality.
“I no longer judge drug addicts,” Carol said. “I no longer judge prostitutes.”
stunned that so random an
encounter in America’s heartland could yield such personal connections to heroin.
Those who worked hard and honestly got left behind.
Only those with power and money could insist on decent treatment.
New York City was our national heroin hub.
Narcotics officers told me black tar was made in Mexico.
The difference was that it had more impurities.
Rancheros embodied Mexico’s best pioneering impulse. They fled the government’s suffocating embrace. They were dedicated to escaping poverty, usually by finding a way to be their own bosses.
Migrants wanted to display their success to those who’d humiliated them years before.
Mexican traffickers afraid of gangs and gunplay?
About the only new folks who came to Portsmouth then were merchants of the poor economy.
The patient, it held, was always right, particularly when it came to pain.
In this part of the country, anything that relieved pain was welcome.
But opiates and benzos together also led quickly to addiction.
Sackler watched medicine change radically during the postwar years.
Winn gave him a budget larger than any company had ever spent to advertise a drug.
Arthur Sackler, meanwhile, continued to transform drug marketing.
Valium was marketed above all to women, pitched as way of bearing the stress of lives as wives and mothers. Before the feminist movement, women were presumed to need that kind of help for the rest of their lives, thus there was no worry then about its addictiveness.
Valium was a name-brand drug, promoted together with the idea that a pill could solve any ailment.
Valium became the pharmaceutical industry’s first hundred-million-dollar drug, and then its first billion-dollar drug.
By the midseventies Valium was found indeed to be addictive and
showed the industry “that amazing things can be achieved with direct selling and intensive direct advertising.”
They remained the same ignorant, violent, cold men stuck in poverty, controlled by others. Escaping this fate became Enrique’s greatest concern.
Andy Coop encountered the morphine molecule—the essential element in all opiates.
the morphine molecule seemed to possess heaven and hell.
allowed for modern surgery, saving and improving too many lives to count. It stunted and ended too many lives to count with addiction and overdose.
But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior.
Everything seemed obese and excessive.
Excess contaminated the best of America.
The so-called mu-opioid receptors—designed to create pleasure sensations when they receive endorphins the body naturally produces—were especially welcoming to the morphine molecule.
receptor combines with endorphins to give us those glowing feelings at, say, the sight of an infant or the feel of a furry puppy.
From opium, humans have derived laudanum, codeine, thebaine, hydrocodone, oxymorphone, and heroin, as well as almost two hundred other drugs—all containing the morphine molecule, or variations of it.
But the morphine molecule surpassed them in euphoric intensity.
The morphine molecule resembled a spoiled lover, throwing a tantrum as it left.
Like a lover, no other molecule in nature provided such merciful pain relief, then hooked humans so completely, and punished
