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Review | 'Dreamland': Book lays blame for Portsmouth's drug woes
By Karen Goodwin
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How do big pharmaceutical companies, Mexican drug dealers, Wal-Mart and heroin intersect in small-town America? That’s the fascinating premise of "Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic."
Journalist Sam Quinones' well-researched, relentlessly honest book illuminates that intersection so well and so entertainingly that you forget you’re reading nonfiction, not an epic novel.
What is most amazing about this story is how smug, rich executives at Purdue Pharma in Stamford, Connecticut, and desperate farmers-turned-drug-dealers from Mexico converged in Ohio to create an epidemic.
According to Quinones, “The number of Ohioans dead from drug overdoses between 2003 and 2008 was 50 percent higher than the number of U.S. soldiers who died in the entire Iraq War.”
Quinones draws the reader in by painting a picture of Portsmouth, Ohio, that is both bittersweet and terrifying. He takes the reader from a prosperous post-World War II small town to the present day, where he describes Main Street as a ghost town.
Portsmouth's Dreamland was not a country club or an amusement park. It was a city park where adults congregated while children splashed in a pool. Fast-forward to today, with the loss of community.
“After Dreamland closed, the town went indoors. Police took the place of the communal adult supervision that the pool had provided. Wal-Mart became the spot to socialize.”
Quinones' nonfiction tale uses Portsmouth to connect the dots of American joblessness, Third World poverty, corporate greed and political malfeasance.
He explains in startling detail how Purdue Pharma — maker of the prescription painkiller OxyContin and whose top executives were convicted in federal court of misleading regulators, doctors and patients about their drug’s addiction risks — targeted Portsmouth because they understood that people devastated by the free-trade laws that decimated American manufacturing were in pain, physically and mentally.
Quinones' conversation with Portsmouth City Health Department nurse Lisa Roberts spotlights the convergence: “We always assumed that Purdue Pharma knew that so many people (in the area) had Medicaid cards. And that’s why they marketed OxyContin so hard around here.”
After reading "Dreamland," you will have no problem understanding how the sons of farmers growing poppy plants in Mexico travel to middle America to sell black-tar heroin to millions of Midwesterners whose supply of OxyContin has been cut off by tougher laws against pill mills.
Purdue Pharma created the need, and Mexican drug cartels capitalized on it.
“And so it went. OxyContin first, introduced by reps from Purdue Pharma over steak and dessert in air-conditioned doctor's offices. Within a few years, black-tar heroin followed in tiny, uninflated balloons held in the mouths of sugarcane farm boys from Xalisco driving old Nissan Sentras to meet-ups in McDonald’s parking lots.”
"Dreamland" will inform you. "Dreamland" will scare the pants off of you. Quinones' well-written story of America’s heartland in decline should be a resounding wake-up call to everyone, but especially to those of us in central Ohio who are truly in the epicenter of this drug crisis.
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