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The Least of Us and the Pandemic of Drugs in America
April 14, 2022
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51:48
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Title: The Least of Us and the Pandemic of Drugs in America
Description: Today Steve is joined by author Sam Quinones to discuss his books on the drug pandemic in the United States. Sam takes us through the evolution of the use and abuse of prescription and illegal drugs over the past 30 years.
Learn More About our Guest:
Sam Quinones, author of The Least of Us and Dreamland
https://samquinones.com/
You can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen and subscribe at all these great places:
www.atozhistorypage.com
www.beyondthebigscreen.com
Click here to support Beyond the Big Screen!
https://www.subscribestar.com/beyondthebigscreen
https://www.patreon.com/beyondthebigscreen
Click to Subscribe:
https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feed
email: steve@atozhistorypage.com
www.beyondthebigscreen.com
https://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacy
Parthenon Podcast Network Home:
parthenonpodcast.com
On Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage
https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcast
https://twitter.com/atozhistory
Music Provided by:
"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Image Credits:
Begin Transcript:
Thank you again for listening to Beyond the Big Screen podcast. We are a member of the Parthenon Podcast network. Of course, a big thanks goes out to Sam Quinones Author of the books Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic and The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. Links to learn more about Sam Quinones and his books can be found at samquinones.com or in the Show Notes.
You can now support beyond the big screen on Patreon. By joining on Patreon and Subscribe star, you help keep Beyond the Big Screen going and get many great benefits. Go to patreon.com/beyondthebig screen to learn more. By supporting Beyond the Big Screen on Patreon, you are going a long way to continuing to make this podcast sustainable and available in the future!
A special thanks goes out to our supporters on Patreon and Subscribestar. Thank you to our Executive Producer Alex!
Another way to support Beyond the big screen is to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. These reviews really help me know what you think of the show and help other people learn about Beyond the Big screen. More about the Parthenon Podcast Network can be found at Parthenonpodcast.com. You can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen, great movies and stories so great they should be movies on various social media platforms by searching for A to z history. Links to all this and more can be found at beyond the big screen dot com. I thank you for joining me again, Beyond the big Screen.
Least of Us
[00:00:00] Thank you so much for joining us again on beyond the big screen, I am really excited to be joined by Sam Ken Yonas. Sam is an independent journalist and is author of a number of really great books, including the books that we will focus on today. His latest book, the least of us, true tales of America and hope and the time of fentanyl and the.
Sam is also the author of dreamland. The true story of America's opiate epidemic. Uh, Sam, can you maybe just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in investigating these, uh, drug epidemics in the U S sure. Um, Steven, great to be with you. I, I, um, uh, I really had no interest. I have to tell you.
I had no interest in, in addiction or pain management or any of that stuff. I had lived in Mexico for 10 years as a journalist. I've been a reporter 35 years. I've been a crime reporter a lot of those years. [00:01:00] And that's kind of how I see myself in, in general. And, um, I, uh, I lived in Mexico for 10 years, came back to LA, which is my, kind of roughly my home region and, um, got a job at the LA times when they put me on a story.
Um, that really, they put me on a team of reporters talking about writing about the, the, the drug war that had just kicked off in Mexico. When I lived in Mexico's 94, 2004, I mean, there was nothing like what's happened since it was a, it was an easy country to move around. Uh, there was very little danger.
It seemed to me, I, I was a freelancer, very Vagabonding all over the place. It was not a, um, a dangerous thing. And then all of a sudden it became, uh, deadly. Uh, and, um, and so my job was to write about drugs as they trafficked, uh, after they crossed the border were how they got to the rest of the country.
And as part of that, I got onto the story [00:02:00] in dreamland of the town of Holly SCO in the state of. Mexico, small state on the Pacific coast of Mexico in which people had divine. Uh, a system of, of delivering a heroin very much like pizza delivery. So you call a number and the operator takes sure your order and they send a driver to you to deliver your heroin.
And not only that, though, the real importance to the, this, this group, um, w in my opinion, was that. Um, they were extensively expansionary, so they began to move all over the country. They were everywhere. They were in Phoenix and Reno. They were then they moved across the Mississippi and they were in Columbus and Charlotte and various places.
But 20, 25 states eventually, I think I counted them in anyway, as I was doing that, I began to realize there was a much, much bigger story. Behind me that I was unaware of because I had been in Mexico when it really evolved. And that was the revolution in pain management [00:03:00] with regard to the very, very aggressive use of opioid painkillers, narcotic painkillers, Vicodin, Percocet, Oxycontin, very well known.
Um, and so I, that was how you explained why these guys had this. Heroine market. I didn't, I could not explain why they had grown. I thought, you know, who would ever go back to using heroin? I mean, I thought the seventies were the time when we forgot about heroin. Um, we learned it was a bad drug and, and moved on.
And, and so it was that revolution in pain management that I realized was much bigger than anything I was dealing with with, with these guys from, from Mexico. And so I began to see the two stories as connected. And that's when I began to really figure all that out. I really had a lot of background in Mexico.
By that point, I had written two books about Mexico and Lou knew a lot about small town, Mexican life and immigration and all that. I didn't know a thing about addiction. Didn't really know what an Oxycontin [00:04:00] was when it's, when I started all this, but it kind of, it was backing into the story with the heroin.
Coming to this realization that I was really focusing on the smaller story, the much bigger story affecting the entire country was the opioid pain revolution. It's so interesting. You mentioned that, um, the change in Mexico in that time you were living there, I'm originally from upstate New York and we go to Canada, just going to Canada is like nothing.
It's like going to the next town over and we moved to Texas and I asked somebody, okay. You know, pop over to Juarez or Laredo, Laredo, and they were like, that's probably not the best idea. And you're saying that changed to very recently. I would say that that changed in in 2000 began to change in 2005 and six.
Um, that's when you begin to see the first cartel. A lot of this has to do with Chapo Guzman, Chapo Guzman was the head of the Sinaloa cartel. He was in prison for a lot of years. He [00:05:00] escaped in a variety of kind of very corrupt ways in which, you know, anyway, it's a long story that, but he gets out and when he gets out, he begins to kind of throw his weight around the country a little bit and disrupt a lot of the.
Ways of controls that had been in place for drug trafficking, uh, at the different border air. So he begins to attack, Porres begins to attack Tijuana. Um, and, and he also, um, begins to attack, um, the Texas. Side. So he's got all these things going on and that's why, um, these, these cartel wars began to pop off beginning and about those years.
And that's why, um, uh, Laredo, but particularly, um, uh, Reynosa Macallan, those areas that were extraordinarily. Uh, Tijuana Juarez a few years later, you begin to see a murder rates through the roof. Uh, 3000 murders a year in acquires becomes the most dangerous place in the, [00:06:00] in the, on the planet, as what I understood, um, all of that because of these very, um, these, these attempts to control and, and battling back, um, by Chapo Guzman and.
Description: Today Steve is joined by author Sam Quinones to discuss his books on the drug pandemic in the United States. Sam takes us through the evolution of the use and abuse of prescription and illegal drugs over the past 30 years.
Learn More About our Guest:
Sam Quinones, author of The Least of Us and Dreamland
https://samquinones.com/
You can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen and subscribe at all these great places:
www.atozhistorypage.com
www.beyondthebigscreen.com
Click here to support Beyond the Big Screen!
https://www.subscribestar.com/beyondthebigscreen
https://www.patreon.com/beyondthebigscreen
Click to Subscribe:
https://www.spreaker.com/show/4926576/episodes/feed
email: steve@atozhistorypage.com
www.beyondthebigscreen.com
https://www.patreon.com/historyofthepapacy
Parthenon Podcast Network Home:
parthenonpodcast.com
On Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage
https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOfThePapacyPodcast
https://twitter.com/atozhistory
Music Provided by:
"Crossing the Chasm" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Image Credits:
Begin Transcript:
Thank you again for listening to Beyond the Big Screen podcast. We are a member of the Parthenon Podcast network. Of course, a big thanks goes out to Sam Quinones Author of the books Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic and The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. Links to learn more about Sam Quinones and his books can be found at samquinones.com or in the Show Notes.
You can now support beyond the big screen on Patreon. By joining on Patreon and Subscribe star, you help keep Beyond the Big Screen going and get many great benefits. Go to patreon.com/beyondthebig screen to learn more. By supporting Beyond the Big Screen on Patreon, you are going a long way to continuing to make this podcast sustainable and available in the future!
A special thanks goes out to our supporters on Patreon and Subscribestar. Thank you to our Executive Producer Alex!
Another way to support Beyond the big screen is to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. These reviews really help me know what you think of the show and help other people learn about Beyond the Big screen. More about the Parthenon Podcast Network can be found at Parthenonpodcast.com. You can learn more about Beyond the Big Screen, great movies and stories so great they should be movies on various social media platforms by searching for A to z history. Links to all this and more can be found at beyond the big screen dot com. I thank you for joining me again, Beyond the big Screen.
Least of Us
[00:00:00] Thank you so much for joining us again on beyond the big screen, I am really excited to be joined by Sam Ken Yonas. Sam is an independent journalist and is author of a number of really great books, including the books that we will focus on today. His latest book, the least of us, true tales of America and hope and the time of fentanyl and the.
Sam is also the author of dreamland. The true story of America's opiate epidemic. Uh, Sam, can you maybe just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in investigating these, uh, drug epidemics in the U S sure. Um, Steven, great to be with you. I, I, um, uh, I really had no interest. I have to tell you.
I had no interest in, in addiction or pain management or any of that stuff. I had lived in Mexico for 10 years as a journalist. I've been a reporter 35 years. I've been a crime reporter a lot of those years. [00:01:00] And that's kind of how I see myself in, in general. And, um, I, uh, I lived in Mexico for 10 years, came back to LA, which is my, kind of roughly my home region and, um, got a job at the LA times when they put me on a story.
Um, that really, they put me on a team of reporters talking about writing about the, the, the drug war that had just kicked off in Mexico. When I lived in Mexico's 94, 2004, I mean, there was nothing like what's happened since it was a, it was an easy country to move around. Uh, there was very little danger.
It seemed to me, I, I was a freelancer, very Vagabonding all over the place. It was not a, um, a dangerous thing. And then all of a sudden it became, uh, deadly. Uh, and, um, and so my job was to write about drugs as they trafficked, uh, after they crossed the border were how they got to the rest of the country.
And as part of that, I got onto the story [00:02:00] in dreamland of the town of Holly SCO in the state of. Mexico, small state on the Pacific coast of Mexico in which people had divine. Uh, a system of, of delivering a heroin very much like pizza delivery. So you call a number and the operator takes sure your order and they send a driver to you to deliver your heroin.
And not only that, though, the real importance to the, this, this group, um, w in my opinion, was that. Um, they were extensively expansionary, so they began to move all over the country. They were everywhere. They were in Phoenix and Reno. They were then they moved across the Mississippi and they were in Columbus and Charlotte and various places.
But 20, 25 states eventually, I think I counted them in anyway, as I was doing that, I began to realize there was a much, much bigger story. Behind me that I was unaware of because I had been in Mexico when it really evolved. And that was the revolution in pain management [00:03:00] with regard to the very, very aggressive use of opioid painkillers, narcotic painkillers, Vicodin, Percocet, Oxycontin, very well known.
Um, and so I, that was how you explained why these guys had this. Heroine market. I didn't, I could not explain why they had grown. I thought, you know, who would ever go back to using heroin? I mean, I thought the seventies were the time when we forgot about heroin. Um, we learned it was a bad drug and, and moved on.
And, and so it was that revolution in pain management that I realized was much bigger than anything I was dealing with with, with these guys from, from Mexico. And so I began to see the two stories as connected. And that's when I began to really figure all that out. I really had a lot of background in Mexico.
By that point, I had written two books about Mexico and Lou knew a lot about small town, Mexican life and immigration and all that. I didn't know a thing about addiction. Didn't really know what an Oxycontin [00:04:00] was when it's, when I started all this, but it kind of, it was backing into the story with the heroin.
Coming to this realization that I was really focusing on the smaller story, the much bigger story affecting the entire country was the opioid pain revolution. It's so interesting. You mentioned that, um, the change in Mexico in that time you were living there, I'm originally from upstate New York and we go to Canada, just going to Canada is like nothing.
It's like going to the next town over and we moved to Texas and I asked somebody, okay. You know, pop over to Juarez or Laredo, Laredo, and they were like, that's probably not the best idea. And you're saying that changed to very recently. I would say that that changed in in 2000 began to change in 2005 and six.
Um, that's when you begin to see the first cartel. A lot of this has to do with Chapo Guzman, Chapo Guzman was the head of the Sinaloa cartel. He was in prison for a lot of years. He [00:05:00] escaped in a variety of kind of very corrupt ways in which, you know, anyway, it's a long story that, but he gets out and when he gets out, he begins to kind of throw his weight around the country a little bit and disrupt a lot of the.
Ways of controls that had been in place for drug trafficking, uh, at the different border air. So he begins to attack, Porres begins to attack Tijuana. Um, and, and he also, um, begins to attack, um, the Texas. Side. So he's got all these things going on and that's why, um, these, these cartel wars began to pop off beginning and about those years.
And that's why, um, uh, Laredo, but particularly, um, uh, Reynosa Macallan, those areas that were extraordinarily. Uh, Tijuana Juarez a few years later, you begin to see a murder rates through the roof. Uh, 3000 murders a year in acquires becomes the most dangerous place in the, [00:06:00] in the, on the planet, as what I understood, um, all of that because of these very, um, these, these attempts to control and, and battling back, um, by Chapo Guzman and.
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Meet Your Host
Steve Guerra is a historian and podcaster who hosts three different shows. He started with the History of the Papacy Podcast in 2013. In 2017, Steve began Beyond the Big Screen, a podcast that delves into the fascinating stories behind films through lively interviews. His newest show, Organized Crime and Punishment, takes a deep dive into the roots, evolution, and impact of organized crime across different cultures and countries.
