“Heroine does not discriminate based on age, gender, or class. It kills indiscriminately," said Northern Kentucky University’s President Geoffrey Mearns at the talk held on April 18.
In the theater that night, nearly 700 people gathered to listen to Sam Quinones speak about his newest piece entitled “Dreamland.” Morgan Kolb, a junior at NKU, expressed her excitement for the talk, explaining that she didn’t understand at first how powerful heroin was or how many lives it effected each year. Another student, Rebecca Dodge, chimed in, stating that addiction is an illness and that punishing addicts for their illness didn’t quite seem right.
When those people entered the theater, there was nothing binding them to one another. They were different ages, with different backgrounds, and belonged to different classes. But when the moderator took the stage and asked how many of them had been touched by heroin in their lifetime, they were united. Nearly two thirds of their hands stood high above the crowd, a testimony to the power such an inexpensive drug can have.
When Quinones took the stage, the audience listened and watched. Few people were carrying on conversation or on their phones. The weight of the topic had their attention. Quinones opened by telling the story of a forgotten place. One where people had once gathered to live their lives alongside one another as equals. A place that existed in a time where girls walked home alone in the dark and front doors were nearly always unlocked. That place was Dreamland.
Owned by a local, Dreamland was a pool in the center of a small town called Portsmouth, Ohio, and it represented everything good about the town. Until suddenly, it didn’t. Quinones, a long time journalist with an established interest in covering drugs and gangs, ended up in Portsmouth at the end of a long quest, and found the one time epitome of American small-town life, without a pulse.
The quest that brought Quinones across the country started with a single question. He wanted to know how Mexican-made black tar heroin had ended up in Huntington, West Virginia, in large enough quantities to kill dozens. His journey for the truth began in Columbus, with an angry DEA agent. Quinones remarked offhandedly, “That’s a great state to find a DEA agent in, they’ll tell you anything!”
During his conversation with the agent, Quinones developed a theory that the agent was wrong.The heroin, he thought, had to be coming from a single town. Quinones paused to explain that in Mexican culture, there is a tradition of sameness in many small towns. Everyone there does the same job, passed down by family and friends because there is nothing else they can do. This, he said, was why it didn’t matter how many of the dealers they arrested, because there was an endless supply of labor back home that they could call on to fill the need.
The next leg of his journey led Quinones to write letters to 15 convicted drug traffickers in the United States, asking them to explain what he called their “pizza delivery system.” Quinones only received one response.The man explained in his letter that the delivery system in question was the established trade from his town in Nayarit. The town was called Xalisco. Quinones was right.
Driven forward by his original question, Quinones set out to understand. As he began to recount this bit of the story, he laughed, remembering that his inability to drive in the snow was what changed everything. Going in to this project, Quinones was openly skeptical about how many people the heroin epidemic in the area could really be affecting. But that night when he pulled in to a small diner and found out that his waitress had lost someone to heroin, it put the whole issue in perspective for him. This was the moment that “Dreamland” became a reality.
Quinones concluded his portion of the talk by going back to Portsmouth and back to Dreamland. He explained that there, where everything began and where he found the epicenter of the epidemic, he also found hope, because the town was healing. It had been freed from its shackles and it was trying to move forward, to grow and learnt from its years of desolation.He concluded simply: “Though they were adrift, they too, could begin to find their way back to the place called Dreamland.”
