By Samantha Cart
Every year that I have worked for West Virginia Executive, my main writing assignment for our annual winter health care issue has focused on the Mountain State’s drug epidemic in some way, whether it was “Fighting for Life in West Virginia,” which detailed the state’s comprehensive approach of criminal justice, treatment and prevention to the epidemic; “Voices from the Front Lines,” a profile on Jan Rader, Patricia Keller and Necia Freeman, the three West Virginia women featured in the Netflix documentary “Heroin(e)”; or my most recent piece, “Redefining Huntington,” a look inside the recovery, revitalization and renaissance of a city dubbed the overdose capital of the world.
It was during the early stages of writing “Redefining Huntington,” that my boss, Kensie, recommended a book she had recently finished called “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.” At first I thought I would just skim through it for the highlights, but once I started reading it, the only time I could put it down was when the reality of how deep and complex this evil that has taken the lives of so many young people really is became too much.
In “Dreamland,” Sam Quinones, a veteran journalist from Los Angeles, CA, and the author of three award-winning novels, uses his experience as a freelance writer in Mexico and his career knowledge of immigration, drug trafficking and gang activity to craft the gripping true story of how the combination of a downturned economy, the unrestrained prescribing of and misinformation on pain medications and the influx of black tar heroin into the U.S. has devastated hundreds of small rural towns.
Some of the text from the book made a powerful opening to my story, but, more importantly, it had a powerful impact on me and my compassion toward those suffering from addiction, which appears as an almost unstoppable machine. I knew it was a long shot, but after spending some time perusing Quinones’ website, I reached out to him about a potential interview. Much to my surprise and delight, he responded.
His passion for telling this story was obvious when we chatted on the phone, me from my office in Charleston and him from his car on his way to a speaking engagement hundreds of miles away. As the dust settles and West Virginians struggle to come to terms with the number of people lost, those left who need better recovery resources and a generation of children whose deficits we cannot yet understand, I believe everyone should read “Dreamland.” I believe knowing what the root of the problem is, where it began and who is to blame will help inspire compassion and education and help encourage us all to be part of the solution.
For those who haven’t read “Dreamland,” how did you first become interested in the topic of the Xalisco boys and their relation to prescription drug abuse in the U.S.?
I was a reporter in Mexico for many years. I lived down there and wrote two books about Mexico. I came back and worked for the L.A. Times in 2004. A year after that, the Mexican drug war kicked off, and I was put on a team of reporters to cover that, my job being to tell about how they crossed the border and got into the U.S. In the middle of all that, there was a lot of heroin being seized, and heroin was on the upswing. I couldn’t understand why that would be because I was a crime reporter, and I thought it was one of the drugs of the past that no one used anymore. So I looked into it, and that’s when I came across the Xalisco boys and began to realize they were part of this growing market for heroin. I began to focus on them and was fascinated by them, but I realized I couldn’t really write about their story without writing about pain pills because you couldn’t understand why the market was expanding without understanding this revolution in modern American medicine. That’s where I began.
I began to realize that there are these stories out there that are intertwined—you can’t tell one without the other. At that point, I also realized this was a national story. The pain pills were a much bigger story than the heroin at that point, and there was just so much to write about. One thing I did see was that it was all over the country. The pill explosion and the revolution in pain management had taken place all over the country because, through a variety of means, doctors had been convinced or pressured or pushed or controlled into prescribing more and more pain pills, and that had created a lot of addiction, which created a lot of people switching to heroin. That’s how I got into it. I was really more interested in heroin at first and then realized you can’t write about heroin without writing about the pills.
What are the first steps to writing a true crime novel? How did you go about making the appropriate contacts and gaining permission to conduct interviews with people in prison?
It seemed to me that there wasn’t a substantial difference between the book I was writing and the approach I would use for a magazine story. You try to figure out what the larger story is and then you try to find people who can fill you in. Then you allow them, based on what they tell you, to lead you down different paths. You don’t remain wedded to one idea—you follow the facts and what people are telling you. That’s what I did. I tried to figure out what I needed to know about pain management and narcotics investigations. This first happened in the Rust Belt, so I needed to visit a few towns over there. Then it had really taken off in the suburbs, so I needed to talk to some families. This was a public health story and a crime story, so I just began to find people who could tell me about it. It’s a simple job. It’s not complicated, but it is hard. It’s a simple job in that you find people who know more than you and drain them of information. It’s hard because a lot of times you don’t know who to talk to or they won’t talk to you or they don’t know who you are and so forth. Basically, I made a game plan like that. Of course, along the way, I asked everyone I talked to who I should talk to next. That expands the net that you are casting.
How did you come to be connected to the character you called “The Man?”
The Man was a drug trafficker. I knew it was very important to talk to police and prosecutors to find out what is going on but equally important to talk to people in jail or prison. I have been reaching out to people in jail or in prison for many years. I’ve done many jailhouse and prison interviews, so once I got onto the Xalisco boys, I began to think about who among them could I talk to or who among them I could ask to talk to. A lot of the jurisdictions and cities who arrested these guys put them in federal prison, so I began to go around and ask about indictments. I began looking those people up on the Bureau of Prison website, and I found a bunch of them. I think, overall, I wrote to between 40-60 people. “The Man” was on an indictment, but I won’t say where. I wrote to him, and he got back to me. With a lot of people, you never hear from them—it’s like a 10 percent response rate or something like that. That is enough, though, particularly if they are really good, really know what they are doing, had a critical role to play or have a lot of knowledge, and “The Man” had all of that.
How long did it take from start to finish to research, write and publish “Dreamland?”
It took about two years or so, but part of the thing that helped me was that I am very experienced in Mexico and small village life in Mexico, so I didn’t have much of a learning curve when it came to that. The learning curve really came with the pain pills, the changes in American medicine and the history of pain. All of that stuff was a big learning curve. The Mexican stuff I knew. I can also speak fluent Spanish, so it wasn’t that hard. I knew what people were talking about, and I knew how to reach out to people who spoke Spanish, so I had a leg up on most people who would have come upon the story.
How, if at all, do you continue to engage with this topic? Has what you learned from researching this topic changed your life in any way?
I’m working on another book, a follow-up to “Dreamland,” right now. It’s about fentanyl and methamphetamine in part and in part about the grassroots response to this epidemic—local people and stories of how they are fighting back. I also do a lot of speaking around the country.
Tell me what you learned about West Virginia during your research for the book. As an outsider, what impressions were you left with of the Mountain State?
Huntington, WV, is the first place I ever went for this book. I was looking for this story, and I found that there was a whole bunch of black tar heroin in Huntington. I thought, “How could this possibly be? How can black tar heroin be east of the Mississippi River? There are no Mexicans in Huntington, so why is there Mexican heroin? Why is there any appetite for heroin there?” All of that was what made me go to Huntington. I remember standing on the bank of the Ohio River after I had been there a couple of days and realizing that this was a huge story. The fact that there would be any heroin at all in West Virginia of all places really stunned me. It’s a very beautiful state. I’ve been to Charleston, Clarksburg and other places. I like West Virginia a lot, and I know it has a lot of problems. I’m hoping that it can use this epidemic as a way of overcoming a lot of those deeper problems because a lot of those deeper problems have to do with the structure of community, jobs going elsewhere, et cetera. I think this epidemic is calling on us to come together in this country and find ways to work together and pay attention to areas that may feel abandoned or left out in globalization or free trade or what have you.
How do you think the drug epidemic has changed since “Dreamland” was published in 2015?
In two large ways. One is the arrival of fentanyl. It is very deadly, far more deadly than anything else we have ever seen. Two, the involvement of Mexican drug trafficking organizations and Chinese chemical companies and all that. It ends up that people who die in a small town of West Virginia are really connected up to these global economic forces.
Sincethe book came out—and I believe the book had a lot to do with it—there is this enormous new awareness of the problem that did not exist when I was writing the book. I began to see all this new awareness and many different expressions. Obituaries now more often tell the truth. You have all these lawsuits against the pharmaceutical companies. You have Facebook groups and a lot more public groups coming together to fight this. You have political interest, budget and policy that we never had before. All of this has happened since “Dreamland” came out. That is extraordinarily positive and exciting to watch. I really love seeing that. I think also what you are seeing at the county level is very interesting. I think this is going on in many parts of West Virginia. You are seeing these small groups form, trying to bring together a wide variety of people to fight, and that is very important in my opinion. We need a lot of new people adding their energy and expertise. You need a college president and a PTA and the chamber of commerce and the clergy. You need all these different groups coming together, building community and working on this. In my way of thinking, that is very exciting and very positive.
With your unique perspective, do you think the major players in this epidemic, such as the Xalisco boys or “The Man,” experience any feelings of regret? Do you think their time in prison will impact the way they live when they are released?
Yes, I know they do, but I think a lot of them don’t understand what they are doing. They are country boys. They don’t really know much about heroin when they come. They are not drug traffickers at heart; they are more like sugarcane farmers and that kind of thing. As time went on, more and more people knew, of course, but money helps make that okay. Once they understood what it involved, they stopped wanting to do it, but many people kept on. I think for many of them, the money overcame any moral qualms they had.
About the Author
Samantha Cart is an editor for Executive Ink, LLC and its publications. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism from West Virginia University. She can be reached at sdc@wvexecutive.com.
