Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsburg Press, 2015) is a nonfiction book by American journalist and writer Sam Quinones. It won the NBCC Award for General Nonfiction and was on Amazon’s list of best books of the year in 2015 as well as Slate’s list of the 50 best books of the past 25 years. In the book Quinones charts the parallel rise of prescription opiates and black tar heroin, and describes how they came together to constitute the most fatal drug crisis in US history. Told in a series of short sections profiling families, drug addicts, doctors, and dealers, Quinones explores how well-intentioned attempts to treat pain and changing demographics in America combined with greed to create the opiate crisis.

The book opens with a description of ground zero for the opiate crisis: Portsmouth, Ohio, which was once a prosperous, middle-class community with thriving community institutions like the pool that gives the book its title, but the town collapsed after factories closed and jobs moved overseas. In the wake of these departures, many people turned to federal disability support as a source of income, and with the diagnoses that allowed for them to

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