Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1

Part 2

Parts 3-5

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Dreamland

The symbol of dreamland represents three elements in the text: the dreamland of industrial America, the dreamland of wealth and status in Xalisco for those who engaged in black tar heroin trafficking, and the fantasy state offered by opiates themselves, drugs whose “new appeal was that it kept them at the edge of a hazardous yet alluring dreamland” (195).

Quinones opens the book with a description of a private pool in Portsmouth, Ohio, called Dreamland. The site was more than just a pool; it was also a community hub. In describing this pool Quinones highlights elements that would be lost over the latter half of the 20th century, with consequences for the opiate crisis. These include a level of economic equity and opportunity for all, with both rich and poor families using Dreamland; a level of autonomy and independence among young people, who grew up going to Dreamland without the constant supervision of their parents; and, in its relation to the town beyond, a level of middle-class stability. Above all, Dreamland represented a kind of community cohesion, and as this cohesion collapsed, it exacerbated the opiate crisis in the United States.

In Xalisco the dreamland was the possibility of an easier route to wealth and status for a generation of relatively privileged young men whose fathers were sugarcane farmers. Seeking a way out of the backbreaking work of sugarcane farming, they looked to black tar heroin trafficking. As the Xalisco Boys proliferated across the United States, this dream became available to more young men who were landless and stuck in dead-end jobs. As a result, even as trafficking expanded, creating more demand for workers, there were always people to fill the jobs. Working in these jobs allowed migrants to build modern houses back home and to shower gifts on their relatives, building their own dreamlands in Mexico as they fueled the opiate crisis in America.

Finally, opiates symbolize the dream of pleasure without pain. This idea appealed to people suffering from chronic pain as well as those who sought to avoid any kind of hardship, whether through drugs or through consumption in general, prompting Quinones to ask whether it is possible to “have it all.” He writes, “After all, Americans had it all for a brief time and many of the kids who benefited most from the country’s embarrassment of riches had turned to drugs used to numb pain” (313).

Levi’s 501s

On both sides of the Mexico-US border, consumption fueled the opiate crisis. Quinones explores this through the symbol of Levi’s 501s. Levi’s 501s were expensive in Mexico in the 1990s; they were also the most high-status garment in the rancheros. This meant that working in black tar heroin was in some ways primarily a way to acquire these jeans, prompting the wife of one trafficker to tell Quinones “it was more about the jeans than anything” (103). In fact, while Levi’s 501s were important in their own right, they were also part of a culture of competitive conspicuous consumption that drove Mexican men to work in the United States, spending as little money as they could while in America so they could return home and spend lavishly to impress family and neighbors.

In this motif Quinones also explores the complex nature of addiction, alluding to the fact that drugs aren’t the only substances that can be addictive. Any stimulus that provides a rush of endorphins—including the consumption and display of material goods like Levi’s 501s—can play this role. This comparison serves as another critique of the idea that addiction is a moral failing or a matter of weakness—many people are vulnerable to the stimulation of the mu receptors, which create pleasure sensations when combined with endorphins. These receptors can receive stimulation from many sources, but opiates are particularly well suited to this task. And just as the addiction to opiates makes addicts selfish, addiction led the Xalisco Boys to do whatever necessary to fill their need for the semblance of wealth and status.

Finally, this motif allows Quinones to explore the hollowness of consumption. In the United States the drive to consume had not led to stable and fulfilled communities but had instead created an atomized and unequal society in which even the most privileged young people became addicted to drugs designed to numb pain. At the end of the book Quinones suggests that heroin trafficking and the money it generated for the Xalisco Boys had not generated community well-being in Xalisco either. Instead, it enriched some while others were forced to continually return to the United States to sell drugs, dependent on the influx of cheap cash to fill their need for material goods.

Cars

Cars—and the societies they helped create—play an important role as a driving force and site of the opiate crisis.

In the first sense, the car was central to the Xalisco Boys’ business model, in which drivers delivered tiny balloons of heroin directly to addicts. This model, with its emphasis on convenience, allowed the Xalisco Boys to expand black tar heroin trafficking cells across the United States, as their emphasis on car-centric customer service—delivering heroin by car to addicts, even when those addicts were trying to quit—allowed them to amass huge profits with which to expand into new markets. It also allowed them to expand into markets that would never have been accessible without the mobility offered by cars—namely, the suburbs where wealthy young white people lived.

In fact, cars helped create the kinds of suburban communities in which opiate addiction quietly proliferated. This wasn’t only a function of car-centric urban design but also a reflection of who lived in these communities: namely, middle- and upper-middle-class white families, wherein children often had their own cars—signs of the wealth of these communities and of a culture in which parents gave their children everything. This culture helped create the foundation for the opiate crisis, Quinones argues. Cars also provided a place for young addicts to use undetected. In this way, cars symbolize the privacy that helped create the opiate epidemic, namely the rise of private wealth and the emphasis on private, personal space.

Finally, cars also played a role in the economically depressed Rust Belt towns in which the opiate crisis started. At one point Scioto County, Ohio, was home to more pain clinics per capita than anywhere else in the United States. But for addicts to benefit from these clinics—and to get to pharmacies where the drugs were dispensed—they needed cars. Access to cars and good roads between communities helped facilitate opiate consumption, a metaphor for how American wealth fueled the crisis, causing drug overdoses to surpass fatal vehicle accidents as a cause of accidental death in 2008—an unprecedented milestone that helped drive recognition that the crisis required a response.