Dreamland

by Sam Quiñones

  • Bloomsbury
  • 2019
  • ISBN: 978-1547601318
  • 224 pages
  • WorldCat
Dreamland Young Adult book cover
About the Book

The unfettered prescribing of pain medications during the 1990s reached its peak in Purdue Pharma's campaign to market OxyContin, its new, expensive - extremely addictive - miracle painkiller. Meanwhile, a massive influx of black tar heroin - cheap, potent, and originating from one small county on Mexico's west coast, independent of any drug cartel--assaulted small town and mid-sized cities across the country, driven by a brilliant, almost unbeatable marketing and distribution system. Introducing a memorable cast of character - pharma pioneers, young Mexican entrepreneurs, narcotics investigators, survivors, and parents. ebook icon Audio book icon

Winner of the NBCC Award for General Nonfiction | Amazon's Best Books of the Year 2015 | Michael Botticelli, U.S. Drug Czar (Politico) Favorite Book of the Year | Angus Deaton, Nobel Prize Economics (Bloomberg/WSJ) Best Books of 2015
Sam Quinones photo
About the Author

A reporter for almost 30 years, Quiñones lived and worked as a freelance writer in Mexico from 1994 to 2004. He spent time with gang members and governors, taco vendors and Los Tigres del Norte. He wrote about soap operas, and he lived briefly in a drug-rehabilitation clinic in Zamora, while hanging out with a street gang. He did the same with a colony of transvestites in Mazatlan, with the merchants in the Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito, and with the relegated PRI congressmen known as the Bronx. He hung out with the promoters of Tijuana's opera scene and with the makers of plaster statues of Mickey Mouse and Spiderman in that city's Colonia Libertad. In 1998, he received an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, and Columbia University's Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2008, for a career of excellence in reporting about Latin America. He returned to the United States in 2004 to take a job with the LA Times, where for 10 years he wrote stories about immigrants, street gangs, drug trafficking, and marijuana growers in Northern California.

Official Website of Sam Quiñones

Interview

Host a Book Discussion

  • Join Us for a Discussion of Dreamland Young Adult edition

    Do you want to share this book with your reading group? The Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) has made it easy to promote and discuss.

    • Discussion Guide PDF
    • Social Media JPG
    • Poster PDF* [8.5 x 11]
    • Reading Club Bookmark PDF


    * How to edit PDF files

Terms of use: Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) staff offer these health discussion resources for educational use. The materials included do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the author, publisher, or the sponsoring agencies of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).