Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

Sam Quinones (1958-) is a freelance American journalist and author who has focused his career on writing about Mexico, Mexicans in America, and the opiate epidemic. In Dreamland Quinones draws on his experience as a crime reporter in Stockton, California; his background covering the Mexican drug wars for the Los Angeles Times, where he was working when he first identified the trends and characters that led to him write Dreamland; and his experience living in Mexico for a decade, where he wrote two books of nonfiction stories on the country. This latter experience gave Quinones a special insight into the roots of black tar heroin trafficking in the United States, an insight he relays in describing an encounter with a DEA agent who thought traffickers were coming from Tepic, the capital city of Nayarit. With his knowledge of Mexico and specifically rancheros—small towns or villages where residents often focus entirely on one trade, such as making popsicles or pimping young women—Quinones knew the heroin trafficking operations were likely based in one of those communities, an insight that eventually led him to Xalisco. In describing his reporting credentials in this way, Quinones demonstrates that he is uniquely qualified to tell this story and that he has a deep understanding of the factors on both sides of the border (including five years of research specifically for this story).