Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

by Sam Quinones

One way to view all that had happened was as some enormous social experiment to see how many Americans had the propensity for addiction. I ran this idea by an addiction specialist named Dr. Richard Whitney in the wealthy Columbus suburb of Dublin. “That’s an interesting way to put it: Let’s feed this to everybody in the society and see what pops up,” he said. “Let’s, as a society, watch all of our potential alcoholics become opiate addicts instead. Had these opiates not appeared, I think we’d have seen a similar number of alcoholics, but later in life. My field used to be middle-aged alcoholics. It usually took twenty years of drinking to get people in enough trouble to need treatment. But with the potency of these drugs, the average age has dropped fifteen years and people get into trouble very quickly with oxycodone, hydrocodone, and heroin.”