February 2, 2015
In this fascinating, often horrifying investigation, journalist Quinones (True Tales from Another Mexico) delves into the heart of America’s obsession with opiates like heroin, morphine, and OxyContin. He looks at how aggressive marketing and irresponsible business tactics led to the widespread use of addictive prescription painkillers (especially OxyContin) and how Mexican drug cartels introduced black tar heroin into small towns and
vulnerable areas around the U.S. The story of the so-called Xalisco Boys, the source of so much misery and exploitation, unfolds with grim efficiency under Quinone’s scrutiny. He doesn’t hold back as he describes how widespread addiction and pill mills devastated entire communities, such as the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio. Through extensive interviews and research, Quinone gives a very human perspective to this topic, telling the tales of addicts and pushers, researchers and cops alike. While some of the threads become repetitive, this remains a harrowing, eye-opening look at two sides of the same coin, the legal and illegal faces of addictive painkillers and their insidious power. Agent: Stephany Evans, FinePrint Literary Management.
February 1, 2015
Discouraging, unflinching dispatches from America's enduring opiate-abuse epidemic. Veteran freelance journalist Quinones (Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration, 2007, etc.) cogently captures the essence of the festering war on drugs throughout the 1990s. He focuses on the market for black tar heroin, a cheap, potent, semiprocessed drug smuggled into the United States from Nayarit, a state on the Pacific coast of Mexico. The author charts its dissemination throughout American heartland cities like Columbus and Portsmouth, Ohio, home to a huge, family-friendly swimming pool named Dreamland, which closed in 1993, after which opiates "made easy work of a landscape stripped of any communal girding." Assembling history through varying locales and personal portraits, Quinones follows a palpable trail of heartbreak, misery and the eventual demise of seemingly harmless people "shape-shifted into lying, thieving slaves to an unseen molecule." The author provides an insider's glimpse into the drug trade machine, examining the evolution of medical narcotic destigmatization, the OxyContin-heroin correlation and the machinations of manipulative pharmaceutical companies. His profiles include a West Virginia father burying his overdosed son, a diabolically resourceful drug dealer dubbed "the Man," and "Enrique," a Mexican citizen who entered the drug trade as a dealer for his uncle at 14. Perhaps most intriguing is the author's vivid dissection of the "cross-cultural heroin deal," consisting of an interconnected, hive-minded "retail system" of telephone operators, dealers (popularly known as the "Xalisco Boys") and customers; everything is efficiently and covertly marketed "like a pizza delivery service" and franchised nationwide with precision. The author's text, the result of a five-year endeavor of remote research and in-person interviews, offers a sweeping vantage point of the nation's ever expanding drug problem. Though initially disjointed, these frustrating and undeniably disheartening scenarios eventually dovetail into a disturbing tapestry of abuse, addiction and death. Thankfully, for a fortunate few, rebirth is possible. A compellingly investigated, relentlessly gloomy report on the drug distribution industry.
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November 15, 2014
In the 1990s, pain medications were on their way to hooking millions of Americans, and black-tar heroin, a cheap and powerful form of the drug produced in Mexico independent of the drug cartels, began devastating small heartland communities throughout the country. Former "Los Angeles Times" reporter Quinones pairs the two phenomena as a study in addiction, the power of overwhelmingly persuasive marketing, and a huge social problem in America today.
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from February 1, 2015
Heroin addiction has evolved from back-alley ghettos to suburban shopping malls, changing hearts and minds about how it is perceived and how it should be treated. That evolution pivots on a decision by Purdue Pharma to aggressively market OxyContin and efforts by Mexican drug traffickers to push black-tar heroin. In the 1990s, both highly addictive drugs flooded the markets in middle-class neighborhoods. OxyContin benefited from changes in philosophy on pain treatment and from worry about addiction that prevented even cancer patients from getting pain relief to the more freewheeling idea that pain relief is a human right. Unscrupulous doctors operated pill mills, prescribing OxyContin for dubious reasons and huge fees. Middle-class professionals, workers, and students found themselves easy targets for sellers of black tar, semi-processed opium produced in Mexico and sold by eager bands of drug crews. Like pizza deliverymen, the crews offered speedy delivery and good customer service. The distribution, centered in a small Mexican village and spread throughout the U.S. in midsize towns and cities, defied the typical profile of a drug cartel. Journalist Quinones weaves an extraordinary story, including the personal journeys of the addicted, the drug traffickers, law enforcement, and scores of families affected by the scourge, as he details the social, economic, and political forces that eventually destroyed communities in the American heartland and continues to have a resounding impact.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)