Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

by Sam Quinones

before, as Enrique toiled in the sugarcane fields with his father and despaired of ever finding a way out of his poverty, he suddenly received, and accepted, an offer to work in Phoenix. A cell boss needed a driver for his heroin store.

A 2003 U.S. GAO report on the company’s OxyContin marketing efforts, requested by members of Congress, found that the FDA didn’t realize that “the drug could be dissolved in water and injected.”

Overdose deaths involving opiates rose from ten a day in 1999 to one every half hour by 2012.

Either way, a government survey found that the number of people who reported using heroin in the previous year rose from 373,000 in 2007 to 620,000 in 2011. Eighty percent of them had used a prescription painkiller first.

The U.S. medical system is good at fighting disease, Cahana believes, and awful at leading people to wellness.