RCLA speaker delivers stark view of opiate abuse

When it comes to America’s opiate epidemic, Sam Quinones says there is “no solution.”

Solutions, on the other hand, are out there.

“Each is part of the mosaic,” Quinones said. “It’s a mosaic of a community of solutions and each is small. I’m happy to say that none of them is sexy, and just one won’t do the trick alone. [It] seems to me that we need to rediscover one of greatest qualities as a country — as a people — and that is self reliance.”

Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and former Los Angeles Times reporter who has dedicated his career to studying and reporting on drug trafficking, gangs and immigration. In 2015 he wrote the book “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.”

On March 2, he was the fourth speaker in the 2020 Ringling College Town Hall lecture series, where he spoke on the roots of the opiate epidemic.

From 1999-2017, there have been more than 702,000 drug overdoses in the U.S., with 70,000 alone in 2017. According to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 68% of the 2017 deaths were caused by prescription or illicit opioids.

The cause for these addictions? Quinones said the majority stem from Americans’ need to reduce physical pain and emotional pain.

During the beginning stages of his research for “Dreamland,” Quinones said he was told to go to Appalachia to start his research on opiate addiction, but as he continued on, he found that the problem reached further.

At first, his research centered on the rise of Oxycontin in the 1990s, but over time he realized there was more to the story.

The ability to mask pain with prescription pills, such as Oxycontin, is one that was made easier by the 1990s’ rise of college-age pharmaceutical sales representatives who “didn’t know what they were selling but who knew how to sell them,” Quinones said.

In 1995 there were 30,000 pharmaceutical sales reps in the U.S., but by 2005 the number tripled to 102,000. Quinones said that doctors went from dealing with a sales pitch a few times a week to a few times a day.

Before the sales reps began to push Oxycontin onto doctors, Quinones said there wasn’t a bridge between prescription pills and heroin. 

People still abused pills, such as Vicodin and Percocet, but the acetaminophen in the pills could cause serious damage to their bodies.

In 1996 the introduction of Oxycontin, which contains no acetaminophen, allowed for larger dosages that opened a gateway to heroin after doctors cut patients off, he said.

“Doctors were prescribing like crazy because all the promotion they’re getting, and pretty soon people were up to 150 to 300 milligrams per day, and then their doctor cuts them off,” Quinones said. “There’s a bunch of reasons for why that might happen, and eventually, they all go to the streets, which created a massive black market.

“Let’s stop believing that there is an easy way out. That’s a narcotic too, isn’t it? That the old rules don’t apply to us because we’re Americans — that’s another narcotic. It requires us to depend on each other and see that this problem is no longer hidden.”