48 Quotes by Sam Quinones

But they are not entitled to pain relief.

The opiate scourge might never have spread as quickly had these rural areas where it all started possessed a diversity of small retailers, whose owners had invested their lives in their stores, knew the addicts personally, and stood ready to defend against them. Walmart allowed junkie shoplifters to play Santa to the pill economy, filling dealers’ orders for toys and presents in exchange for dope.

If a child was sick, maybe her mother was tense. Valium was marketed above all to women, pitched as way of bearing the stress of lives as wives and mothers. Before the feminist movement, women were presumed to need that kind of help for the rest of their lives, thus there was no worry then about its addictiveness.

In heroin addicts, I had seen the debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior.

Kentucky state legislator Katie Stine, a Republican, introduced a bill as I was writing this book that made it easier to charge a heroin dealer with the death of someone who died from an overdose.

After kicking opiates, “it takes two years for your dopamine receptors to start working naturally,” Paul.

Broward County had four pain clinics in 2007 and 115 two years later.

After Dreamland closed, the town went indoors. Police took the place of the communal adult supervision that the pool had provided. Walmart became the spot to socialize.

The Xalisco traffickers’ innovation was literally a delivery mechanism as well. Guys from Xalisco had figured out that what white people – especially middle-class white kids – want most is service, convenience. They didn’t want to go to skid row or some seedy dope house to buy their drugs. Now they didn’t need to. The guys from Xalisco would deliver it to them.