Sam Quinones QUOTES

1 " Why then do we wonder that heroin is everywhere?

In our isolation, heroin thrives; that's its natural habitat. And our very search for painlessness led us to it.

Heroin is, I believe, the final expression of values we have fostered for thirty-five years. It turns every addict into narcissistic, self-absorbed, solitary hyper-consumers. A life that finds opiates urns away from family and community and devotes itself entirely to self-gratification by buying and consuming one product - the drug that makes being alone not just all right, but preferable. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

2 " When your kid’s dying from a brain tumor or leukemia, the whole community shows up. They bring casseroles. They pray for you. They send you cards. When your kid’s on heroin, you don’t hear from anybody, until they die. Then everybody comes and they don’t know what to say. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

3 " 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 "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

4 " Opiate use in medicine had been destigmatized by crusading doctors. But destigmatizing the new opiate addiction had no prestigious crusaders. That task fell to parents of dead kids and a few individuals with a flair for guerrilla political action... "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

5 " The front of the brain has to develop through mistakes. But the first reaction of the addicted person is to head back to the family: ‘Will you rescue me?’ Whatever the person’s rescued from, there’s no learning. There’s no experiences, no frontal brain development. They’re doing well and then some idea comes into their head and they’re off a cliff. It may not be a decision to use. Most relapse comes not from the craving for the drug. It comes from this whole other level of unmanageability, putting myself in compromising situations, or being dishonest, being lazy—being a fifteen-year-old. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

6 " Through all this, patients were getting used to demanding drugs for treatment. They did not, however, have to accept the idea that they might, say, eat better and exercise more, and that this might help them lose weight and feel better. Doctors, of course, couldn’t insist. As the defenestration of the physician’s authority and clinical experience was under way, patients didn’t have to take accountability for their own behavior. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

7 " After more than a decade in which chronic pain was treated with highly addictive medicine, there still was no attempt to bring the studies of pain and addiction together. Specialists in pain and in addiction operated in different worlds. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

8 " 2008: Drug overdoses, mostly from opiates, surpass auto fatalities as leading cause of accidental death in the United States. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

9 " The U.S. medical system is good at fighting disease, Cahana believes, and awful at leading people to wellness. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

10 " 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. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

11 " Yes the fact was that, coincidentally or not, this change of heart was happening among conservatives just as opiate addiction was spreading among both rural and middle-class white kids across the country, though perhaps most notably in the deepest red counties and states. Drug enslavement and death, so close at hand, were touching the lives, and softening the hearts, of many Republican lawmakers and constituents. I’ll count this as a national moment of Christian forgiveness. But I also know that it was a forgiveness that many of these lawmakers didn’t warm to when urban crack users were the defendants. Let’s just say that firsthand exposure to opiate addiction can change a person’s mind about a lot of things. Many of their constituents were no longer so enamored with that “tough on crime” talk now that it was their kids who were involved. So a new euphemism emerged—“smart on crime”—to allow these politicians to support the kind of rehabilitation programs that many of them had used to attack others not so long ago. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

12 " OxyContin is a simple pill. It contains only one drug: oxycodone, a painkiller that Germans synthesized in 1916 from thebaine, an opium derivative. Molecularly, oxycodone is similar to heroin. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

13 " The morphine molecule exerts an analogous brainwashing on humans, pushing them to act contrary to their self-interest in pursuit of the molecule. Addicts betray loved ones, steal, live under freeways in harsh weather, and run similarly horrific risks to use the molecule. It became the poster molecule for an age of excess. No amount of it was ever enough. The molecule created ever-higher tolerance. Plus, it had a way of railing on when the body gathered the courage to throw it out. This wasn’t only during withdrawals. Most drugs are easily reduced to water-soluble glucose in the human body, which then expels them. Alone in nature, the morphine molecule rebelled. It resisted being turned into glucose and it stayed in the body. “We still can’t explain why this happens. It just doesn’t follow the rules. Every other drug in the world—thousands of them—follows this rule. Morphine doesn’t,” Coop said. “It really is almost like someone designed it that way—diabolically so. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

14 " 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. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

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

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

16 " With the managed care movement of the 1980s and 1990s, insurance companies cut costs and reduced what services they’d pay for. They required that patients give up their longtime physicians for those on a list of approved providers. They negotiated lower fees with doctors. To make up the difference, primary care docs had to fit more patients into a day. (A Newsweek story claimed that to do a good job a primary care doctor ought to have a roster of eighteen hundred patients. The average load today is twenty-three hundred, with some seeing up to three thousand.) "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

17 " Like no other particle on earth, the morphine molecule seemed to possess heaven and hell. It allowed for modern surgery, saving and improving too many lives to count. It stunted and ended too many lives to count with addiction and overdose. Discussing it, you could invoke some of humankind’s greatest cultural creations and deepest questions: Faust, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, discussions on the fundamental nature of man and human behavior, of free will and slavery, of God and evolution. Studying the molecule you naturally wandered into questions like, Can mankind achieve happiness without pain? Would that happiness even be worth it? Can we have it all? "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

18 " The Press Ganey patient surveys, it turned out, had an unintended effect in this context. It was to subtly pressure doctors to write unnecessary scripts for opiates. A doctor reluctant to write them was more likely to get a poor patient evaluation. Too many bad scores and a hospital began asking questions. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

19 " War spread the morphine molecule through the nineteenth century. "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

20 " Meanwhile, though supplies of heroin were unrelenting and addicts were everywhere, Jaime saw no outrage in Charlotte. He spoke to the parents of one junkie after another. As soon as he said the word “heroin,” their minds crashed to a halt. They couldn’t conceive of their children on heroin. For every symptom, the parents had an answer. Did they see burned aluminum foil around the house? We thought he was burning incense. Was he slurring his speech? He was getting over the flu. Were his grades falling? He was going through a phase. Jaime spoke to the city’s Drug Free Coalition, which was focused on alcohol and marijuana. “No,” he told them. “Heroin is the real problem.” He "

― Sam Quinones , Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic