The Least of Us

Bloomsbury Publishing
Paperback
432 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781639730476

The Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

Sam Quinones

“Quinones is perhaps our best big-picture analyst of America’s markets for addictive drugs.”

—The Washington Post

In this book, Sam Quinones discovers how addiction is exacerbated by consumer-product corporations. “In a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like traffickers,” he writes, “our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.” Weaving analysis of the drug trade into stories of humble communities, The Least of Us delivers an unexpected and awe-inspiring response to the opioid epidemic that shocked the nation.

Sam Quinones is a former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Dreamland. He lives with his family in Southern California.

Dreamland

Bloomsbury
Paperback
400 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781620402528

The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

Sam Quinones

With a New Afterword by the Author
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

“Dreamland—true crime, sociology, and exposé—illuminates a catastrophe unfolding all around us, right now.”

—Slate 

In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became the vital center of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America. How that happened is the riveting story of Dreamland. Acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two classic tales of capitalism run amok whose unintentional collision has been catastrophic. 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. Together these phenomena continue to lay waste to communities from Tennessee to Oregon, Indiana to New Mexico. Introducing a memorable cast of characters—pharma pioneers, young Mexican entrepreneurs, narcotics investigators, survivors, and parents—Quinones shows how these tales fit together. Dreamland is a revelatory account of the corrosive threat facing America and its heartland.

Sam Quinones is a journalist, author and storyteller whose two acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction about Mexico and Mexican immigration—True Tales From Another Mexico and Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream—made him, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “the most original writer on Mexico and the border.” He lives in Los Angeles.

Dreamland has been adopted for 10 First-Year Experience programs:

Catawba Valley Community College (NC); College of Southern Nevada; Good Samaritan College of Nursing and Health Science (OH); Ohio Northern University; Otterbein University (OH); Ralph Macon College’s Honors College (VA); University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus; Virginia Commonwealth University; Westfield State University (MA)