Displaying a ex-resident's sense of Mexican culture and a journalist's nose for a good story, former Los Angeles Times reporter Sam Quinones (Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream) demonstrates ways paisano visions of muscle cars and Levi 501s fuel the supply side of the "black tar" heroin business, and American suburban consumers feed the demand side. Dreamland digs beneath the growing opiate addiction statistics in the United States to discover dirt-poor rancheros in small Mexican states ("lawless, wild places, full of... family feuds, stolen women, pistoleros... and, especially the tough guys--valientes--rebels") and the savvy marketing that promotes Big Pharma's cornucopia of powerful painkilling narcotics.
Quinones etches these two sides of the commercial dope coin with stories about people in cities like Portsmouth, Ohio; Charlotte, N.C. ("White kids... with jet skis and shiny SUVs, bedrooms with every digital gadget"); Olympia, Wash.; and Santa Fe, N.Mex.--and the farmers, smuggling mules and U.S. distribution cell managers from Mexico's Pacific coast. With the development of ever more potent painkilling drugs, the pharmaceutical industry has created a drug-dependent population often looking for easy-prescribing physicians, stolen pills and scrips--or a cheaper heroin fix. When FDA-controlled, marketing-driven prescriptions leave a gap in legitimate supply, entrepreneurial Mexican farmers struggling to enter the middle class fill it. Quinones's absorbing narrative is deep in research, on-site reporting, personal interviews and insight. Spanning the central U.S. and crossing the Mexican border, Dreamland adroitly unsnarls the tangled business that feeds a growing lust for chemical euphoria and relief. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.