The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

by Sam Quinones

When addicts grew tolerant to fentanyl’s towering potency, simple heroin was too weak to prevent withdrawal. By the time I was finishing this book, heroin had all but disappeared from many areas of the United States—replaced by fentanyl from Seattle to New England. This devastated opium-poppy growing in Mexico, according to some remarkable fieldwork by three journalists—Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, Nathaniel Morris, and Benjamin Smith—in their 2019 study “No More Opium for the Masses” for Noria, a French research collective. Mexican poppy farmers had been enjoying a bounty supplying the US opiate addiction epidemic. As fentanyl arrived in America, raw opium prices, the authors found, fell by as much as 75 percent in the mountainous poppy-growing areas of western Mexico. Depression settled on regions where many farmers grew almost nothing else. “The gringos now have this new stuff,” a farmer told the authors. “They don’t like heroin anymore, that’s why we don’t sell.”