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
★Pain relief or addiction? When the American Dream Meets the "Opium War"
[About the author] Sam Quinones, born in 1958, has been working as a journalist for nearly 30 years. He lived in Mexico as a freelance writer for 10 years, where he completed two books. In 2004, he returned to the United States to work for the Los Angeles Times, conducting investigations and reports on immigration, drug trafficking, gangs, etc. I resigned in 2014 and started working as a freelancer again, working for publications such as National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Magazine.
In 2011, he began to write and publish the "Truth Series" works, "Dream Addiction" is one of them.
IntroductionTaking painkillers is a common occurrence in modern society. As for the research on non-addictive analgesics, the American Committee on Drug Dependence took it as its own responsibility as soon as it was established in 1928. However, some doctors believe that "patients rarely become addicted." This statement was published by the authoritative "New England Journal of Medicine" in the early 1980s, which excited the medical community.
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 to target doctors, giving gifts, paying for vacations, and sponsoring medical seminars. This was further fueled by the 1999 classification of pain as the fifth vital sign by medical accreditation bodies and official reports that pain was not adequately treated. As a result, prescriptions are prescribed excessively, causing patients to become drug dependent.
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.
I feel this book is very comfortable to read