GREEN: After decades in the business, freelance journalist and author Sam Quinones still loves telling stories.
“I’m not going to be rich,” he told a group of students Wednesday in the Bulldog Beat TV studio at Green High School, “but I’ve been excited every day I woke up in the last 30 years.”
The author of Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, was being interviewed by student Denton Cohen, 17, a junior, for a taping of the student-run Bulldog Buzz show. The show will be made into a video for YouTube and will be broadcast on Green station GCTV Channel 16.
Earlier in the day, Quinones spoke before a sold-out crowd of 350 people at the Akron Roundtable and was to speak at the Akron-Summit County Library later that evening. Members of the community were encouraged to read the book before his appearances.
While working for the Los Angeles Times, he said, he stumbled upon a story about heroin traffickers in Mexico, particularly in the village of Nayarit, where an endless stream of young men were coming into the United States to sell heroin “like pizzas.” The traffickers had a delivery system to get the drug to their clients. Columbus was the first place they started.
Quinones was curious as to why heroin, a drug considered “passé” at the time, was such a big business.
The bigger story, he said, was the revolution taking place in pain medication. Doctor-run pill mills would prescribe opiates like OxyContin in 30-day doses for pain that only should have lasted two days.
Pharmaceutical companies were telling doctors and patients alike that these drugs were not addictive. But they were. And for addicts, it was taking more and more pills to get high.
Enter heroin, which provided a cheaper, faster fix for Oxy addicts. The delivery networks spread from cities like economically hard-hit Portsmouth, Ohio, where the manufacturing jobs had dried up, to places that were growing like Charlotte, N.C., and beyond. This network was everywhere, spreading all the way to Hawaii, the Midwest and the East.
Quinones wanted his story to be read, so he wrote the book like a TV show, with short chapters, various stories going on at the same time and real people. He wrote of the personal toll it took on families, and wondered why none of them would talk about it when a loved one died of an overdose.
“I covered crack up in Stockton,” he said. “That was public. There were shootings, carjackings, gangs. People talked about it. No one talked about heroin despite their children dying.
“Parents were crying themselves to sleep with their arms around photo albums.”
Isolation is the common denominator, Quinones said.
“We have been isolated in many, many ways in this country, with technology, economically,” he said. “Our suburbs are monuments to isolation. People don’t do anything outside. They get in the car to buy a loaf of bread. … We’re indoors. We’re not talking to our neighbors.”
Denton asked him what communities can do about the problem.
“These drugs are the most isolating drugs,” Quinones said. “They thrive on our isolation. … The way to combat isolation is to rebuild community ties that have been lost, in wealthy communities or in poor ones.”
The way to do that, he said, is through public activities such as block parties that bring people together.
“These kinds of things used to happen organically, but that doesn’t happen in this country anymore,” he said.
Whereas heroin used to come from Asia, it’s now coming from Mexico, Quinones said, and building a wall won’t stop it.
“All our heroin now is coming through areas where there are walls,” he said. “… People are not running across the mountains or swimming across the river with packs of heroin on their backs. … They are walking it through.”
Fighting the problem requires a whole new approach to Mexico, he said, “a friendly one, a cooperative one, but also a firm one.”
Quinones said the goal of his book was to tell a story.
“I’m a storyteller, that’s all I am,” he said. “ … I’m just here to write a story and talk about the things that grew out of that. … I believe in the role of journalists, which I believe is, you tell the story, you tell people what you know and how you know it, and then it’s [the reader or listener’s] job to figure out how they feel about that information, what they’re going to do about it, that kind of thing.”
Reading Dreamland helped Green schools Superintendent Jeff Miller understand the complexities of trying to address the opiate epidemic.
“It’s not as simple as sometimes people want to make things,” he said. “There’s a lot of layers to it.
“What I’d like these kids to take away is that one person can do so much to bring attention and awareness to this terrible epidemic,” he said. “The students work really hard on their skills in terms of interviewing and writing, and to have an opportunity to meet someone like Sam gives our kids the extra motivation to continue on.”
Denton, the student who interviewed Quinones, said the experience was “surreal.”
“It was a really good experience being able to interview him,” he said. “It was enlightening for me and, I hope, everyone here. I’ve always been interested in this subject, and even more so now. … Reading his book put it all in perspective.”
Monica L. Thomas can be reached at 330-996-3827 or mthomas@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @MLThomasABJ and www.facebook.com/MLThomasABJ.