Dreamland: The True Tale Of America's Opiate Epidemic Quotes
"I don’t even know how to turn on a computer." - Dr. Hershel Jick, on his relationship with technology.
"I no longer judge drug addicts. I no longer judge prostitutes." - Carol Wagner, reflecting on her changed perspective.
"To be the lifeguard in that chair, you were right in the center of all the action, all the strutting, all the flirting. You were like a king on a throne." - John Lorentz, recalling his time as a Dreamland lifeguard.
"Life held one thrill: His mother’s brothers were up in Los Angeles working, which gave his family a connection that other kids envied." - Narrative about Enrique and his perception of his uncles in the U.S.
"The morphine molecule resembled a spoiled lover, throwing a tantrum as it left." - Description of the morphine molecule's impact on humans.
"My family used to picnic down by the Ohio River in a little park, where my dad would push me so high on the swings I thought I’d land in Kentucky." - A woman's nostalgic memory.
"Arthur Sackler showed the industry that amazing things can be achieved with direct selling and intensive direct advertising." - Reflection on Arthur Sackler's influence in pharmaceutical advertising.
"To that end, as they worked the toughest jobs in America, they assiduously built houses in the rancho back home that stood as monuments to their desire to return for good one day." - On Mexican immigrants' dreams of returning home.
"They had spread like a virus, quietly and unrecognized by many in law enforcement."
"Canoga Park is huge. It’s not like your rancho."
"Problemas—problems—the word seemed so nondescript."
"In time, though, methadone became a battlefield between those who thought it should be used to wean addicts off opiates, and those, like Vincent Dole, who saw it as a lifelong drug, like insulin for diabetics."
"The ARC was shut down in the 1970s, when the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee, investigating the Central Intelligence Agency, found that the ARC had done experiments with LSD on inmates at the behest of the CIA."
"His laugh issued from him as a dry chuckle, thin as cardboard."
"The relentless Xalisco retail delivery system evolved as it fed on this ever-growing base of customers addicted to OxyContin in America."
"Opiates themselves were not inherently addictive, the authors suggested; a lot depended on the people taking them."
"Pain, the APS went on, acted against the tendency of opiates to stop the lungs from breathing."
"The way you’re reimbursed in a day, if you actually take the time to treat somebody’s pain, you’d be out of business."
"As the movement to destigmatize opiates and use them for chronic pain gained energy, the seeds of discontent were already being sown."
"Determining who is a good candidate for opiate treatment is a mystery, and particularly difficult when doctors have no pain-management training."
"Purdue, in particular, funded pain researchers, many of whom saw the company as an innovator and ally."
"With the managed care movement of the 1980s and 1990s, insurance companies cut costs and reduced what services they’d pay for."
"From all this, the idea took hold that America was undertreating pain."
"Purdue thought it was just an extension of MS Contin, Gerson said."
"The guidelines prohibited giving away merchandise not related to health care."
"Purdue offered OxyContin coupons to physicians, who could in turn give them to patients for a one-time free prescription."
"Many of these methods—premiums, trips, giveaways—were time-tested strategies that grew from the revolution Arthur Sackler began."
"The U.S. General Accounting Office reported that the company helped fund more than 20,000 education programs."
"Purdue and the pharmaceutical industry were saying that addiction in OxyContin is really rare."
"The incidence of addiction was far higher than they indicated."
"Eventually, it would be prosecuted criminally."
"By 2003, more than half of the prescribers of OxyContin nationwide were primary care doctors."
"Seniors realized they could subsidize their retirement by selling their prescription Oxys."
"Addicts learned to crush it and snort it, or inject it, obtaining all twelve hours’ worth of oxycodone at once."
"It was eerie how uniform [the stories] were from town to town."
"They presumed that anyone asking to buy more than a few grams was a cop."
"The cells practiced just-in-time supplying, like a global corporation."
"You couldn’t help but feel how corporate these guys are, how standardized they are."
"Rather than one large organization, the thing appeared to agents to be an agglomeration of cells."
"He was just a wholesaler; they were retailers relentlessly focused on the bottom line."
"The evolution of Nextel push-to-talk phones...allowed bosses to monitor their drivers."
"The whole thing was like a web, and thus more flexible and resilient."
"The bust reflected the spread of Mexican immigration."
"Mexican drug networks national in scope were now possible, too."
"More kids back home clamored for the chance to replace those just arrested."
"The bust didn’t affect the area’s supply of heroin."
"‘No matter how many million-dollar busts you guys do,’ he told the officers, ‘it doesn’t show up on our radar.’"
"This drug is following the same marketing [strategy] of every other product out there."
"We want what we want when we want it and thus we are entitled to get it."
"‘We’ve had dramatic increases in the numbers of opioid-overdose deaths,’ she said."
"You’re not allowed to be working in South Carolina without their approval."
"The epidemic of illegal drugs is by far the most devastating thing I have seen in my more than forty years of public service."
"It’s taken sixteen years to convince the legislature that it is cheaper to put them [in drug treatment] than to put them in prison."
"‘This group of physicians,’ she said when we met in 2013. ‘They’ve been convinced by the drug companies that it’s okay to prescribe these medications for people with chronic pain.’"
"‘People who are poor and want to progress, you give them a hand,’ the trafficker said."
"I’ll give you good heroin at a great price. You don’t have to go to the bad neighborhoods. I’ll deliver it for you."
"I’ve yet to find one who didn’t start with OxyContin."
"‘Nobody thinks those things are of value. Talk therapy is reimbursed at fifteen dollars an hour,’ Cahana said."
"A large subset of these new young addicts had criminal records now."
"Normally, as a Xalisco regional manager, Segura-Cordero would have been insulated from the kind of day-to-day heroin sales that would expose him to arrest."
"It used to be you go into the ghettos to buy heroin from street corners. Now these organizations are coming to the neighborhoods, to suburbia. They come to you."
"Both heroin chains led to Segura-Cordero, who, as it turned out, was a kind of regional sales manager for a Xalisco heroin cell."
"In classic Xalisco style, every junkie became a salesman."
"You have to make the people from Nayarit realize: When you come up here, you may never go back, or it may be fifteen years before you go back."
"This is the first day of the rest of your life."
"I might be down in Mexico next time you come through."
"Payback’s a sonofabitch, but, what the hell, you live with it."
"Our experience is that people go from zero to sixty pretty quickly."
"The profound irony in all of this is that opiates are providing him with some level of quality of life as he expires."
"Once people get addicted they really lose the power of choice."
"It takes thirty to ninety days for the brain to heal enough to make decisions."
"We have as good or better treatment results as they do for asthma or congestive heart failure—if we have the tools to work with."
"The outsourcing mentality has cost us millions and millions of jobs."
"It’s as if we said you only get half the chemotherapy you need to treat your cancer."