The Least of Us Quotes

“We live in a time when drug traffickers behave like multinational corporations and corporations behave like traffickers.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“The world Gary Henderson predicted when he coined the term “designer drugs” in 1988 is now with us. Counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl and made in Mexico now dominate the market and have replaced the sloppy Magic Bullet blender in a dealer’s kitchen and the powder fentanyl coming from China. In Los Angeles, DEA agents seized 120,000 of these pills crossing the border in 2017, and 1.2 million of them in 2020.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“America has devolved,” Lustig once wrote, “from the aspirational, achievement-oriented ‘city on a hill’ we once were, into the addicted and depressed society that we’ve now become. Because we abdicated happiness for pleasure. Because pleasure got cheap.” The supply of it was everywhere. Like street dope.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Pleasure, Lustig said, is fleeting; happiness is long-lived. Pleasure comes from taking or getting; happiness comes from giving. Pleasure is achieved alone; happiness with others. Pleasure comes from substances or things; happiness does not. Pleasure releases dopamine in our brains, the constant search for more; happiness releases serotonin, producing feelings of contentment, an end to consumption. All of which means, Lustig said, that pleasure can prod our reward pathways into addiction; happiness cannot.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“In an addicted brain, Me has won the battle over Us”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Our brain on drugs resembles the regime that imprisions its great writers, artists, and scientists”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“An addicted brain is one where a raging primitive reward system has silenced the prefrontal cortex's wise counsel”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“the more pleasure you seek, the more unhappy you get”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Drugs impair some memories but enhance others.. they shift the balance so the drug memories are stronger, especially memories of rewarding effects and cravings”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Drugs of abuse control memory, giving us a selection of what we can remember that is biased in favor of our continuing to use them”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“(addiction) is like a parasite... it wants to survive and needs a host”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Opioids provided physicans with what gave them their deepest sense of professional fulfillment: a pleased patient, the feeling of having helped someone”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Insurance companies, seeing narcotics as cheap and quick, cut back on reimbursing for other pain therapies that didn't involve pain pills”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Doctors and Big Pharma prepared the battlefield...creating a market for the cartels, who then jumped at the opportunity to own the supply and feed the demand.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“I came to see that addicts, gripped by drug-induced self-centeredness and isolation, are just extreme examples of each of us and our time.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“McKinsey also estimated how many customers might develop addiction to, or die from, OxyContin. At one point the consultant suggested Purdue pay its drugstore distributors rebates of $14,000 for every addiction and fatal overdose OxyContin caused, to ensure that chains like CVS and others would keep distributing the pill.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“The sugar-dependent rats, however, turned hyperactive. This suggested that when these animals grew dependent on sugar, it “primed” them to use another drug.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“YouTube video of a speech in which Dr. Robert Lustig contrasts pleasure and happiness. Pleasure, Lustig said, is fleeting; happiness is long-lived. Pleasure comes from taking or getting; happiness comes from giving. Pleasure is achieved alone; happiness with others. Pleasure comes from substances or things; happiness does not. Pleasure releases dopamine in our brains, the constant search for more; happiness releases serotonin, producing feelings of contentment, an end to consumption. All of which means, Lustig said, that pleasure can prod our reward pathways into addiction; happiness cannot. “America has devolved,” Lustig once wrote, “from the aspirational, achievement-oriented ‘city on a hill’ we once were, into the addicted and depressed society that we’ve now become. Because we abdicated happiness for pleasure. Because pleasure got cheap.” The supply of it was everywhere. Like street dope.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“The dope is different now. Today, rock bottom is death.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Meanwhile, alcohol and cigarettes kill more than any other drug by far, because they are legal and widely available. Alcohol also drives arrests and incarceration more than any other single drug. Our brains are no match for the consumer and marketing culture to emerge in the last few decades. They are certainly no match for the highly potent illegal street drugs now circulating.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Geography no longer matters. We’ve reached the end of the era when drugs can only be made in countries with the right mix of soil, weather, and corruption. A commodity that’s profitable can be made anywhere in the world.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“The relentless quantities of meth flowing into American towns are a measurement of Mexico’s inept criminal justice system. Mexico must stand up and deal with the corruption that cripples well-meaning people and the rule of law. We have aided these traffickers in their work. They sell to our drug demand. What’s more, they have armed themselves for decades with guns purchased easily in the United States and smuggled south.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“I think we’re all feeling our way through this problem. It’s like walking into a dark room; you feel your way until you find a light. But once you know you’re not mouthing words, that you’re actually living them, it feels good, even if it’s only for a night or two.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Police-involved fatal shootings reflected all that. For years, fatal police shootings numbered about two or three annually in Albuquerque. That figure doubled as the P2P meth took over. Between 2011 and 2020, 60 percent of the people shot to death by Albuquerque police officers—thirty-six of sixty people—had meth in their bloodstream, up from zero in 2009, according to coroner reports.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Left unchecked, the brain's reward system for moral indignation leads to the Spanish Inquisition, to witch trials--and to what goes on daily on Facebook and Twitter. Outrage keeps us engaged better than almost anything. This engagement allows social media apps to sell more ads, fueling their bottom line. IN priming our natural outrage, an impulse that evolved to keep us alive, social media apps have us tearing each other apart. Like dope dealers--just peddling outrage.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“So, in a sense, capitalism is a monopoly. Without competition, capitalism has bent towards the agglomeration of profit and power in the hands of relatively few families, corporations, industries and governments. The coercion of twentieth century dictatorships as methods of individual persuasion and control has been replaced by marketing, far more benign and effective. Meanwhile vasts rafts of people--entire regions even--sit becalmed in seas of poverty and resentment”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Good scientists do not need to be supervised,”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“American families kept quiet as their loved ones grew addicted to the pills that funded those art-collecting adventures. They said nothing as their loved ones were ground into degradation in a marathon of torment that extinguished family savings, hope, and trust, until they wound up dead in a manner and place that no relative dared disclose in an obituary.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“They said nothing as their loved ones were ground into degradation in a marathon of torment that extinguished family savings, hope, and trust, until they wound up dead in a manner and place that no relative dared disclose in an obituary.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Today, much of our culture grows from the opposite of what motivated the Marshall Plan. It grows from the self-centered nucleus accumbens. That urge to always think we don’t have enough. Dopamine convinces us that happiness lies around the corner, just a little bit more, and this prevents us from enjoying serotonin’s contentment with what we already possess. I see connections to our national drug-addiction epidemic in the fact that every year dozens of Fortune 500 corporations pay no federal income taxes, while many American families worry about rent and food. I see the epidemic connected to the massive amount of US wealth diverted from the bottom and the middle to the top in the last forty years. Jobs that went overseas were just the free market at work—nothing to be done. I don’t think we should wonder why so many of our towns and neighborhoods are threadbare and drug addiction so widespread.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth