Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

“All of this recreation let a working-class family feel well-off. But the center of it all was that gleaming, glorious swimming pool. Memories of Dreamland, drenched in the smell of chlorine, Coppertone, and french fries, were what almost everyone who grew up in Portsmouth took with them as the town declined.” 

Quinones introduces an important location in the book—Portsmouth, Ohio, as represented through its pool and community hub—as well as a theme: the decline of small-town America, particularly in Appalachia, both in economic terms and as a result of the opioid epidemic, which affected many white middle-class families, unlike previous drug crises that largely affected economically and racially marginalized people. This quote also serves as an early example of Quinones’s literary style, which uses rich, descriptive imagery to situate the reader in the settings and alongside the characters that are central to the opiate epidemic. Finally, this quote alludes to a motif in the book: the way opiates helped consumers and dealers of drugs escape to a kind of dreamland.

“Later, I met other parents whose children were still alive, but who had shape-shifted into lying, thieving slaves to an unseen molecule. These parents feared each night the call that their child was dead in a McDonald’s bathroom. They went broke paying for rehab, and collect calls from jail. They moved to where no one knew their shame. They prayed that the child they’d known would reemerge. Some considered suicide. They were shell-shocked and unprepared for the sudden nightmare opiate abuse had wreaked and how deeply it mangled their lives.” 

Quinones lays out a key element in the book: the way the opiate epidemic affected mostly white families, often from privileged economic circumstances, in the wealthiest country in the world. Their incomprehension, captured in this quote, also hints at the insidious nature of the opiate epidemic, in that it started with substances marketed as innocuous both on an individual and on a societal level. Quinones also highlights an important element of the book—that despite claims that prescription opiates were nonaddictive, they were in fact composed of a morphine-like molecule, similar to opiates that had been acknowledged for millennia as uniquely euphoric and therefore uniquely capable of enslaving its users.