Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and author of three books of narrative nonfiction. He will sign books after he speaks.
Dreamland recounts twin stories of drug marketing in the 21st Century. One story details how a pharmaceutical corporation flogs its legal new opiate prescription painkiller as non-addictive. Meanwhile, immigrants from a small town in Nayarit, Mexico devise a method for retailing black-tar heroin (similar to marketing pizza in the U.S.).
These immigrants take their system nationwide, riding the wave of addiction to prescription painkillers from coast to coast, including parts of Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky and many others. The collision of those two forces has led to America’s deadliest drug scourge in modern times.
“The most important issue facing our community at this time is the opiate epidemic, and Sam Quinones explains why this happened better than anyone else,” said Marshall history professor Dr. Chris White.
Quinones worked for 10 years (2004-2014) for the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx (University of New Mexico Press), a collection of nonfiction stories about contemporary Mexico, which was released in 2001.
In 2007, Quinones published his second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration.
Quinones is a veteran reporter on immigration, gangs, drug trafficking and the border. Before coming to the L.A. Times, he worked in Mexico for 10 years (1994-2004).
Quinones’ visit to Marshall, which is free to the public, is sponsored by the Marshall history department, the Marshall social work department, Marshall’s Office of Military and Veterans Affairs, MU’s student health programs, Create Huntington, the Adam Johnson Memorial Scholarship, HIMG and Healing Huntington.