Sam Quinones Finds Hope in 'The Least of Us'

Journalist, former L.A. Times reporter, and New York Times best-selling author, Sam Quinones, visits us to discuss his latest book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. A follow-up to 2015’s Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, The Least of Us tells of the drug epidemic currently raging across our country, with a focus on the devastatingly destructive drugs, fentanyl and methamphetamine. “Well it started really with…I lived in Mexico for 10 years. I wrote my first two books, actually, narrative nonfiction, about Mexico and came back to work for the L.A. Times, and then this drug war in Mexico just erupted and I was just, kind of, taken aback by that because I lived ten years in Mexico. It was very peaceful, very pleasant time to be a journalist there… So the paper put me on the task of working on stories about this drug war… and I began to write about heroin, which at the time was being imported in the United States in much larger amounts than we’d ever seen before and I couldn’t understand that and so that really got me into my first book on this topic, Dreamland…that was really about the story of how a national move towards heavy prescribing of prescription opioid pain killers, kind of, created a lot of addiction among people nationwide, and then a lot of folks then switched to heroin because heroin is an opioid, very much like oxycodone or these other drugs that were being prescribed by doctors… and so you began to see the beginnings of all that…and that lead me to this larger story…”

For The Least of Us, why did Quinones decide to put a spotlight on both fentanyl and methamphetamine? He explained that never before had anyone seen one source, in this case Mexico, provide one illegal drug nationwide, let alone two. “These drugs were the most potent and powerful and deadly, in the case of fentanyl, that we’d ever, ever seen.” To make matters worse, the drug crises was intensified when Covid-19 hit in early 2020. By that time, both fentanyl and methamphetamine were already widespread and prevalent in the United States. “People in recovery from drug addiction all of a sudden, you know, one of the big things they always tell you in drug treatment is ‘do not isolate’… very dangerous thing to do when you are trying to recover from drug addiction and all of a sudden everybody has to isolate and all the 12-step meetings go from being hands-on and in-person to Zoom and that just doesn’t really work as well and then, of course, a lot of people lose their jobs because a lot of the jobs that were lost were jobs that recovering addicts after years outside of the labor force, they were doing those jobs, working in restaurants, dishwasher, what have you, that kind of thing, so now all of a sudden maybe a lot of those folks are out of work… and what you begin to find is people having very stressful times, everybody is in stress, nobody around to help them through it or talk you through it, and then at the same time when they do end up relapsing, the drugs are not even cocaine and heroin anymore. It’s fentanyl, which is so deadly… and methamphetamine, which is driving people to mental illness very quickly all across the country… and so what you begin to find was all these people going from this extraordinary pandemic, unprecedented pandemic, into another unprecedented situation, which is two drugs, everywhere, pretty much in the United States, and that would be the drug that you would most likely relapse on and so people began dying and that’s why you begin to see these enormous leaps in overdose deaths all across the country. It’s really because, I think, of that and just the spread of these drugs that are so damaging to the human brain.”