"Sam Quinones is a journalist, storyteller, former LA Times reporter, and author of three acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction, including New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic. ""The most original writer on Mexico and the border"" (San Francisco Chronicle), he lives with his family in Southern California."
Over the last 15 years, he has filed the best dispatches about Mexican migration and its effects on the United States and Mexico, bar none. --Los Angeles Times Book Review, on DREAMLAND [A] compelling examination . . . a driven and important narrative. --Wall Street Journal, on DREAMLAND Quinones' research ensures that there is something legitimately interesting (and frequently horrifying) on every page. --Entertainment Weekly, on DREAMLAND Dreamland is at once a heartbreaking narrative about the individuals in the grips of addiction, and a thorough history of how that addiction was made possible by a variety of key players . . . a must-read for anyone grappling with the story of heroin addiction in the United States. --Bustle, on DREAMLAND Quinones recounts individual tales - from junkies in Portland, Ore., to pill mills in Appalachia to entrepreneurial heroin traffickers from small-town Mexico - to describe a catastrophic synergy in which over-prescription of opioid painkillers begets addicts, many of whom then turn to heroin, which is cheaper and just as ubiquitous. --Boston Globe, DREAMLAND included in Best Books of 2015 You won't find this story told better anywhere else, from the economic hollowing-out of the middle class to the greedy and reckless marketing of pharmaceutical opiates to the remarkable entrepreneurial industry of the residents of the obscure Mexican state of Nayarit . . . Dreamland--true crime, sociology, and expose--illuminates a catastrophe unfolding all around us, right now. --Slate, on DREAMLAND The most original writer on Mexico and the border out there. --San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, on DREAMLAND Former Los Angeles Times reporter Sam Quinones deftly recounts how a flood of prescription pain meds, along with black tar heroin from Nayarit, Mexico, transformed the once-vital blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, and other American communities into heartlands of addiction. With prose direct yet empathic, he interweaves the stories of Mexican entrepreneurs, narcotics agents, and small-town folks whose lives were upended by the deluge of drugs, leaving them shaking their heads, wondering how they could possibly have resisted --Mother Jones, on DREAMLAND