The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
Sam Quinones
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
Sam Quinones
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Quinones has done a marvelous job of cobbling together individual stories to give us a sense of how the systemic failures fall—hard—on individuals..
Sprawling and episodic.
Quinones once again dives deep into America’s drug culture, but this time he takes his investigation a step further to shine light on the ways that communities are coming together to fight addiction.
Quinones’s greatest accomplishment is to understand these newly dangerous drug markets as just one more consequence of a disastrously under-regulated corporate capitalism in the 2000s.
The book is organized into five sections, which Quinones skillfully uses to tell the stories of ordinary people whose lives were derailed by fentanyl, meth, and other illicit drugs.
... lacks the cohesion of Dreamland, a problem one senses early on. This, he tells us, is a book about fentanyl and methamphetamine and also about community efforts to combat addiction. Then why, one wonders, are we reading so much — five chapters — about OxyContin and the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, produced it, material that would have been at home in his last book?.
Quinones chronicles the devastation wrought by these newer synthetic drugs, while also showing how corporate marketing and Americans’ desire for a quick fix combined with our addictive nature tie into the problem. But he also writes of hope.
A sweeping portrait.
Overstuffed.