Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

Part 3 highlights one of the responses to drug use and addiction: the drug courts created to divert addicts away from jail and prison and into treatment facilities. Though these courts predate the opiate epidemic, they became a more viable alternative to incarceration after prescription opioids created a generation of White, relatively well-off addicts who were closely connected to those in power in places like Tennessee. Quinones writes, “let’s just say that firsthand exposure to opiate addiction can change a person’s mind about a lot of things” (276). This shift also reflected the fact that the opiate epidemic had increased prison populations to an unmanageable level in places like Ohio.

Changes to the criminal justice system were happening in other parts of the United States too. Portland police officers and prosecutors were refining the use of a Len Bias case—where someone who supplies drugs that cause a fatal overdose can be charged with offences that yield a 20-year prison sentence—to work up from low-level dealers to those higher-up in drug organizations, as low-level dealers flip to avoid a long sentence. This was significant because it meant men coming from Xalisco would face long sentences; the previous policy had been to simply deport dealers, leaving other cells to take their place, which favored a business model that was naturally “risk averse and imitative” (281).