Author of the book
Dream Land: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic talks with
The Fix.Sam Quinones'
Dream Land marks the timely end of heroin's romanticism. Where you once imagined the netherworld of junk through '50s jazz musicians and the literati shooting up in the Bowery, you now have cheerleaders and football players who have "shape-shifted into lying, thieving slaves to an unseen molecule," writes Quinones.
In
Dream Land, a vast, ultra-modern, interdependent web of painkillers, Mexican heroin, aggressive marketing, pain, pill mills and dirty doctors, hangs in a time of cultural excess amidst economic depression, resulting in what we see today, which is a heroin revolution.
How this happened is always asked next. Some people blame doctors for overprescribing. Others blame cheap heroin infiltrating the posh suburbs where kids have time, cash, and no responsibility. But these arguments, while both valid, in isolation do not explain the obscene rise in use, abuse, and mortality prevalent in America's youth today. In
Dream Land, much like the real world, everything is connected and irreducible.
Comment: A commenter on RT pointed out that vaccines might have caused the narcolepsy among children and adolescents, however that idea doesn't explain why adults were falling asleep too. Here is the CDC report regarding the (2009) H1N1 vaccine causing narcolepsy.
The current carbon monoxide outgassing theory seems to be a better explanation. See also: Two brothers die after inhaling sewer fumes in Dublin tragedy