When black tar heroin first reached Portland in the 1990s, you could buy it much like you would buy a pizza. Call a number, give an address and wait for a dealer to show up on your block, hiding small bags of dope in his mouth.
By the time the 2000s rolled around, this new, convenient way of selling black tar heroin was standard in midsize cities around the country — Charlotte, N.C.; Columbus, Ohio; Huntington, W.Va. — that had previously never been heroin towns. On top of that, black tar heroin overdoses were reaching epidemic proportions. The masters of this delivery system, young men from the a small rancho in Mexico, became known as the Xalisco Boys.
In his new book, “Dreamland,” seasoned journalist Sam Quinones tells the story of how the marketing ingenuity of the Xalisco Boys along with the relentless marketing and prescribing of opiate painkillers, combined into a perfect storm of drug abuse, addiction and overdose that continues to keep America captive. Quinones, a veteran Los Angeles Times crime reporter, has spent years reporting on the drug trade, gang violence and Mexican immigration. In “Dreamland,” he combines hours of interviews and painstaking research with his gift for storytelling to weave a compelling tale of how America descended into and endures a dizzying and devastating opiate epidemic. Quinones chatted with me by phone from his home in Los Angeles about the Xalisco Boys, America’s conflicted relationship with opiates, and the pain of addiction.
Ann-Derrick Gaillot: How did your journalistic work lead you to investigating this story and writing a book about it?
Sam Quinones: Years ago I was a crime reporter in Stockton, Calif., and one thing I learned about was black tar heroin because the local cops and the DEA told me that heroin in the Western United States always came from Mexico and was only black tar. I went down to Mexico after working in Stockton. When I was down there, I did a lot of study of and writing about immigration. So that was part of my background when I did the story. After living in Mexico, I went back to the United States and I was placed on a team of reporters and my job was to write about how drugs were trafficked once they came into the U.S. side of the border. As I was doing that, I found a series of stories about people dying of black tar heroin overdoses in Huntington, W.Va. So I called up the police department there, and they said well, all our dope comes out of Columbus. So I called up the Columbus DEA, and they began to tell me this interesting story about these guys driving around the town selling heroin and how they have a delivery service system. (The DEA) would arrest these guys, begin operations against them, and then three days later, a week later, two weeks later, they’d be replaced. It was this continual problem. I began to write a bunch of different guys who had been arrested. I think I must have sent out about 15 or 20 letters and nobody responded for a while until one guy called me back who had been a telephone operator in this system and had been arrested. He said they are from a small town called Xalisco. And that opened up an amazing bunch of possibilities, that there could be one town where every man in the town is actually a drug trafficker. And then it got even better because he said they don’t only go to Columbus, and he could name off dozens of cities where they were selling, all across the country. And I thought to myself, this is an amazing story. That one small town could be this major source of our heroin in the United States was mind-boggling. That was the background to how I understand what the story was when this guy in Columbus began talking about it.
A.G: It’s in line with a lot of your past work to focus on the stories of people like the Xalisco Boys, who don’t get a lot of widespread attention. Why was it important for you to include the story of the pharmaceutical companies, as well?
S.Q.: Well, as I got into writing about the Xalisco Boys, the other question that their presence or the presence of their dope in Huntington, W.Va., brought up was how is it that there’s so many heroin addicts in Huntington, W.Va.? I just always thought of heroin as being in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Baltimore, places like that. What’s it doing in West Virginia?
And I realized as time went on that I was actually writing the second half of the story. The first half of the story was how a revolution in U.S. medicine had taken place with regard to the use of opiates in the treatment of pain.
On one hand, pain specialists and pharmaceutical companies were convincing Americans that (an opiate painkiller) is how you treat pain and this is a safe thing and it’s virtually non-addictive. That was a big, big part of it. And on the other hand you have the classic street drug dealers in the form of the Xalisco Boys, who are masters of marketing — who understand the power of marketing, of customer service, of convenience. So the stories dovetailed organically into one large tale, but it was really two stories of the marketing of drugs in America.
A.G.: You write about the pain and pain treatment revolution in America. Can you explain that?
S.Q.: (The pain revolution) was really instigated mainly by pain specialists and then later by the pharmaceutical companies that made the medicine. Together, the expertise of the former combined with the megaphone and money of the latter created this new, conventional wisdom that these pills can be used for pain treatment without addiction — “virtually non-addictive” was the phrase — when used for treating pain. So the pendulum began to swing in the ’80s: that it was OK to use these pills for cancer treatment. But the pendulum kept swinging, and it went far, far the other way. By the mid-’90s it was the case where people began to believe that it was OK for the pills to be used for all manner of pain.
This created — beginning in the late ’80s but really through the ’90s and into the current millennium — just an enormous amount of prescribing for all kinds of pain: the extraction of wisdom teeth, any kind of surgery. There was this enormous rising sea level of pills that reached every corner of America because doctors were prescribing it. This was not instigated by drug mafias. Had it been only drug mafias doing it, its effect would be minuscule, comparatively. But you have millions of doctors buying into this idea. Plus, they’ve got patients in agony, more patients demanding, fix me, fix me doctor. The doctors really didn’t have very many tools for treating pain except for these pills.
And it did help some people. I think by and large, though, it did not help as many people as originally intended and the wanton, widespread prescribing of these pills for almost anything led to an enormous increase of pain pills all across America, which was largely unregulated. The doctors did not pay too much attention to people when they were using these pills, if they were using them correctly. And so people began getting addicted to them. If those people didn’t get addicted to them, maybe their children got into the pills and those kids began getting addicted. That invariably has led to heroin addiction all across the country, and that’s why you’re seeing heroin addiction in Alabama; that’s why you’re seeing heroin addiction in Tennessee, in Idaho. These are not states that anyone ever thought of as heroin hubs, but because there where pills there first, the heroin then comes, and that’s what these guys, the Xalisco Boys, have figured out.
A.D.: In doing the research for this book, you interviewed many people, including a number of addicts and their families. I’m interested to hear how your perception of addiction changed over the course of your research.
S.Q.: It changed enormously. As I got into it, I realized, you don’t get addicted; you and your family get addicted. Your parents, your brother, your grandparents, everybody gets addicted with you because they all have to deal with you as you devolve into the kind of lying, cheating addict. I came to view addiction as far less of a choice.
Of course it’s very important to understand that if you choose to use one of these drugs, that is your choice. Once you start using these drugs recreationally, addiction is very often right around the corner. I really came to view the parents’ plight as something very important to show, to illustrate, because I felt no one was listening to them. And so many parents feel all alone. They don’t say anything, they’re stigmatized, they’re horribly ashamed that their son or daughter is a junkie. You’ve got pills everywhere, and then when people get addicted to it, no one talks about it. It’s all very quiet. It’s tough to say, “My daughter was hooking on the street and she died related to her heroin addiction” or, “My son who was a football player was found dead on a McDonald’s bathroom toilet with a needle in his arm.” That’s very tough for people to say.
A.D.: After doing this book, do you have hope or optimism that America can get through this epidemic?
S.Q.: I always have hope. Human beings are not automatons. People change, respond and adapt, and there’s no reason to think this has to go on and on. I believe in Americans’ accountability. I believe that we are in fact a country that does not wait around for things to happen for us or to us. But we take initiative, and when you do that, it is the opposite of the dope addiction. Even though it’s common to say, well, we’re a country with lots of drugs, we’re a dope-addicted country. I really think it’s un-American to just sit there and let stuff happen to you. So this is a very, I believe, un-American scourge. I think there’s a basic impulse in this country that is about acting, taking accountability, seizing the initiative, self-reliance. And all of that is contrary to the slavery of addiction to dope.
“Dreamland” goes on sale April 21, 2015.
On April 28, 2015 at 7:30pm, Powell's City of Books in downtown Portland Oregon is holding an author event with Sam Quinones on his new book Dreamland: The Story of America's New Opiate Epidemic. Details at the Powell's website: http://www.powells.com/events/6521/