Author speaks on heroin/opiate epidemic

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

An overflow crowd came out to hear journalist Sam Quinones talk about the heroin/opiate epidemic that has inundated America in the last decade.

Quinones, who wrote a book, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, talked about the causes of America’s heroin/opiate fixation, a story from the dark side of capitalism, where Mexican drug dealers used a “pizza delivery” marketing strategy to sell drugs in the San Fernando Valley in California and, eventually, in Columbus and the surrounding area, and doctors and pharmaceutical companies lavished opioid painkillers on patients, convincing themselves the drugs were non-addictive.

“Our very search for painlessness as a people led us to it, in my opinion,” Quinones told the audience, whose members included substance abuse treatment professionals, as well as area residents wanting to learn more about how to stop the epidemic.

Quinones’ interest in the heroin/opiate problem first began while part of a group of journalists looking at the drug trafficking problem in Mexico. The journalist, who had previously spent 10 years in Mexico covering illegal immigration, had noticed then that whole villages would be tasked to making one product or service: from popsicles to pimping young girls.

In looking at the drug trade, Quinones discovered a small village whose residents were all dedicated to selling black tar heroin in the United States.

Village members would produce the drug, while young Mexicans would head for America to sell the heroin. The village first began selling its black tar heroin in California using “pizza delivery” tactics: taking orders over the phone, delivering the drugs in cars, and using marketing ploys, such as giving away free heroin to prospective addicts.

Also, unlike many drug dealers Quinones was aware of, these dealers didn’t use violence to expand their territories, but depended on customer service and marketing tools such as branding and differentiation to bring in new customers.

What Quinones didn’t know at the time, but soon found out, was that America was particularly vulnerable to heroin addiction because of its pain management “revolution” that had started decades before that.

“This is a drug trafficking story, though, that did not start with drug traffickers; it started with doctors,” Quinones said, adding that doctors started handing out tons of opiate-based prescription medications, such as Vicodin, Percocet, and OxyContin, on the unproven assumption that the meds were not addictive.

Pursuing that story was what brought Quinones to the Ohio River community of Portsmouth, Ohio, the focus of his book, with its Dreamland swimming pool/recreation complex and pill mills.

In researching a number of deaths from heroin in Huntington, West Virginia, Quinones stumbled onto Portsmouth, a community devastated by closing factories and the decline of its family-owned businesses, where the pill mill idea was first developed. By the time the journalist visited Portsmouth and saw its once-vibrant, but now weed-choked Dreamland recreational complex, the town had 11 pill mills selling opiate prescription drugs all over the country.

The pain management revolution also created a generation of Americans addicted to opiates who were willing customers for the cheaper Mexican tar heroin that began flooding the country — particularly when states began cracking down on pill mills and the availability of opiate-based pain medication.

What today’s heroin epidemic has also done, Quinones said, was turn an America where people spent much of their time outside, to a country where overprotective parents are afraid to allow their kids outdoors, where isolation is destroying communities from the inside.

“Parents hovered over their kids, afraid they were going to hurt themselves, wanting to protect them from pain, from hurt, from the consequences of failure,” Quinones told the audience. Because of that fear, people became more isolated, with cell phones allowing people to communicate with others all over the world, while often not knowing their own neighbors.

Heroin addicts were the culmination of that isolation.

“Heroin is the final expression of values that we have fostered for 35 years,” Quinones said. “Heroin turns every addict into a narcissistic, self-absorbed, solitary, hyper-consumer.

“A life that finds opiates turns away from family and community and devotes itself entirely to self-gratification by buying and consuming one product: the drug that most makes being alone not just all right, but preferable,” he added.

It also meant that a child’s bedroom, where parents believed their children to be safest, was where kids hid and used their drugs — and sometimes even died.

Noting that Americans need to come to terms with the fact there is no easy solution to the opiate problem, Quinones said he feels people need to come together as a community and work together to bring people back from heroin addiction.

“This is a story about isolation versus community, and our response to an isolating drug has to be to come together as a community and leverage the talents, the budget, the energy of everybody in the community,” he concluded.

The journalist ended with his return to Portsmouth, where community-based measures had helped the city recover from its economic blight, and also to begin its recovery from drug addiction.

Following Quinones’ talk, a panel of local officials, including pain management specialist Dr. John Buonocore, Van Wert County Sheriff Thomas Riggenbach, Van Wert County Common Pleas Court Chief Probation Officer Bruce Showalter, and Mark Spieles, executive director of Westwood Behavioral Health Center answered audience questions in a roundtable moderated by Keith Turvy, director of the Tri County Alcohol, Drug Addiction, and Mental Health Services Board.

The panel talked about some of the community-based options being used to help combat heroin addiction in the county, including the Common Pleas Court’s “recovery court,” and substance abuse counseling at Westwood.