Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

by Sam Quinones

The county had a needle exchange program that took in a hundred thousand syringes a year; new hepatitis C cases dropped by half.

China, having lost two Opium Wars waged on it by the British Empire, cured itself of its opium addiction by relying on former addicts to mentor their dope-sick brothers and sisters.

The CDC found fatal heroin overdoses had tripled from 2010 and 2013. Announcing a new study of the extent of heroin use, the agency, along with the FDA and DEA, issued a press release that began: “Heroin use has increased across the United States among men and women, most age groups, and all income levels. The greatest increases have occurred in groups with historically lower rates of heroin use, including women and people with private insurance and higher incomes.”

Few but the wealthiest families could afford the kind of inpatient treatment that opiate addiction seemed to require: nine months to a year, minimum, addiction specialists told me.

Indeed, 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.

Most of SOLACE’s clients were on Medicaid. This was made possible by Gov. John Kasich, a Republican who had gone around his party and the legislature it controlled to expand Medicaid for all Ohioans, specifically to cover drug treatment.

By the time I began research for this book in 2012, we had, I believe, spent decades destroying community in America, mocking and clawing at the girdings of government that provide the public assets and infrastructure that we took for granted and that make communal public life possible. Meanwhile, we exalted the private sector. We beat Communism and thus came to believe the free market was some infallible God. Accepting this economic dogma, we allowed, encouraged even, jobs to go overseas. We lavishly rewarded our priests of finance for pushing those jobs offshore. We demanded perfection from government and forgave the private sector its trespasses.

(I wish someone would study the incidence of opiate addiction as teens and young adults of people who as kids were diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed drugs like Adderall.)