Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

by Sam Quinones

the last state in the country to do so.

The area had spawned a generation of young people who had nothing to look forward to, whose families had been unemployed for years.

The poisoning deaths, it turned out, were actually drug overdoses. This was new.

Opiates were present in virtually all the deaths where the drugs were specified.

That’s when they realized that right then and there drug overdose deaths were about to surpass fatal auto crashes as Ohio’s top cause of injury death.

This was a stunning moment in the history of U.S. public health.

Oxycodone. Dispensed grams of oxycodone—the only drug in OxyContin—rose by almost 1,000 percent in Ohio during those years.

was 50 percent higher than the number of U.S. soldiers who died in the entire Iraq War.

Three times as many people died of prescription pill overdoses between 1999 and 2008 as died in the eight peak years of the crack cocaine epidemic.

• In 2005, Ohio’s overdose deaths exceeded those at the height of the state’s HIV/AIDS ...

osteopath, a discipline focusing on a holistic approach to health.

“It’s not right that our kids are having their futures and freedom taken from them because they’ve fallen prey to this horrible chemical that steals their soul.

After she got clean, my daughter had a better chance of surviving a war than she did of surviving the pill epidemic.”

Then-governor Ted Strickland used an emergency executive order to form a state opiate task force to recommend policy changes.

Every statistician knows correlation does not mean causation.

What’s more, no one tracked the effects of opiates on a patient’s pain, function, depression, sleep.

A multibillion-dollar industry was based on no measurements whatsoever.”

If a patient said his pain was less but things were going poorly, maybe there was another issue.