Dream Addiction: the Truth About America's Opioid Epidemic
About This Novel
How could a doctor's prescription be related to heroin and dead people? Why can't I quit after receiving the best drug treatment? How did dependence on painkillers allow heroin to enter mainstream society? More people die from drug overdoses than from car accidents! "Dream Addiction" tells you why things are like this. 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Nonfiction, Best Book of the Year by The Seattle Times, The Boston Globe, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Guardian. In 1996, Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin, a new painkiller. The company carried out large-scale marketing, not only advertising heavily, but also recruiting a large number of sales personnel and sponsoring medical seminars. Excessive prescriptions can lead to drug dependence in patients. OxyContin has miraculous effects and is available in different dosage forms, but the price is too high. Some addicts take advantage of differences in health insurance and state laws to obtain the drug, sell it as a supplement, or simply switch to drugs. During the same period, young Mexicans with dreams of getting rich continued to pour in with cheap and powerful black tar heroin. Based in Latino communities in California and other places, they targeted wealthy white people and established a hidden and powerful retail network, making buying drugs as convenient as ordering takeout. In this way, drugs entered mainstream American society through the route created by painkillers. This time, the addicts were almost all white. The U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration launched two operations against black tar heroin in 2000 and 2006, but the number of drug overdose deaths remained high, even exceeding the number of car accident deaths.
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