Dreamland (55 page)

Early on, Professor Marcia Meldrum at UCLA instructed me on the historical background and context to the current opiate epidemic. Dr. Nathaniel Katz and Dr. Marsha Stanton provided me with wide and deep perspectives on the history of pain, and on the pain revolution. Drs. Andrew Kolodny, Jane Ballantyne, Art Van Zee, and Mike McNeer, now firmly opposed to the liberal prescribing of opiate painkillers, shared with me the evolution of their thinking. Finally, I thank Dr. Hershel Jick, who told me the essential story of his 1980 letter to the editor.

Professors Andrew Coop, Martin Adler, and Herbert Kleber helped greatly with understanding addiction and the brain, methadone, and the College for the Problems of Drug Dependence.

Though some of them didn’t appear in this book’s final draft, several recovering addicts helped me understand the heroin street scene, past and present. Among them are Robert Berardinelli in Santa Fe, Dean Williams in Indiana, Bobby Melrose in Columbus, Pickles, Bob Wickham, the ex-RAPsters in Portland, several guys in rehab at the Counseling Center in Portsmouth, the three kids in Denver, and that waitress I met at a speech at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque who drove for the Xalisco Boys for nine months.

While I was at the
Los Angeles Times
, I came upon the story of the Xalisco Boys and from that this book grew. My editors, Davan Maharaj, Marc Duvoisin, and Geoff Mohan, encouraged my research and shepherded the story along, and I’m grateful to them.

At Bloomsbury Press, editor George Gibson provided very welcome, energetic, and cheerful support for this project throughout. I’m indebted to Pete Beatty for buying my book proposal for the Press, and then editing the manuscript with calm and professionalism. My agent, Stephany Evans, at FinePrint Literary, saw the value of this project when other agents did not, and this was long before the storm of opiates and heroin was being widely covered in the media, as it is now. Stephany helped me hone my book proposal and then went into battle for it. For that, too, I’m very grateful to her.

I’m indebted to several editors who have corrected my prose throughout my career. Sam Enriquez, probably the best editor I’ve had, who hired me at the
Los Angeles Times
and is now at the
Wall Street Journal
, was kind enough to read and correct sections of this book.

I thank my father, Ricardo, and his wife, Roberta Johnson, for their support and interest in this book. When I was three and we were moving to California, my father, a now-retired literature professor from Claremont McKenna College, recounted to me the stories of Odysseus that were every bit as consuming as a television serial. My own love of storytelling was born from that, and from the care that he and my mother, who died in 1979, placed on the values of education and experience. I thank my brothers, Ben and Josh, and their families, and remember, again, our brother, Nate, and our mother. I thank also my in-laws, the Tullys, the Lotkas, and the Pennys, for their generosity and good-natured tolerance of my endless stories of opiate addiction and heroin trafficking in America.

More than anyone, though, my wife, Sheila, and my daughter, Caroline, lived with this book and helped give it life, tolerating my reporting trips and collecting me at airports with hugs and kisses that I badly needed. I could not have done this without them and I love them so.

Source Notes

This book was written based primarily on interviews I did over a five-year period, but especially in 2009 as a reporter for a story for the
Los Angeles Times
, and from 2012 to 2014.

I interviewed parents of addicts in several states, and many addicts themselves, public health nurses and epidemiologists, defense attorneys, doctors, local cops, drug rehabilitation counselors and administrators, pain specialists, chemists, a pain historian, state and federal prosecutors, DEA and FBI agents, as well as more than a dozen Xalisco Boys, most of whom were in prison at the time. The fellow I call the Man I interviewed eight or ten times, in person and over the telephone.

I traveled widely to get those interviews. Several times I visited Columbus and Portsmouth, Ohio, and went to Marion twice, and Cincinnati once. As the research proceeded I found myself three times in both Portland, Oregon, and Denver. I went to Indianapolis and Nashville; to northern and eastern Kentucky; to Charlotte, North Carolina; Boise, Idaho; Phoenix, Arizona; Huntington, West Virginia; and Albuquerque and Chimayo, New Mexico.

Part of my research involved a trip to Xalisco for four days during the Feria del Elote while I was employed at the
Los Angeles Times
, and from which I wrote a three-part series on the town and its pizza-delivery model for retailing heroin. That trip remains the only time in my career when I’ve lied when asked what I did for a living. I told people who asked that a photographer colleague and I were tourists, Spanish teachers in California. At this point in Mexico, beheadings and mass slaughter were the order of the day. Bodies were hung from overpasses and left in piles on street corners. Many reporters were murdered. Against that context, I hope the journalism gods will forgive my trespass in Xalisco. We left the town when, in an encounter that seemed far too coincidental, I was introduced to a man I was told was the Nayarit state police supervisor of the antikidnapping squad, who watched me far too closely while I watched a basketball game during the fair.

A trial transcript is a great friend to a crime reporter. But because Xalisco Boys almost always plead guilty to their cases, I had very few trial transcripts available in piecing together their story. One important and early one, though, was a large case against Luis Padilla-Peña in Omaha, Nebraska. That case came just as the Boys were beginning their expansion out of the San Fernando Valley. I’m indebted to prosecutor William Mickle for his help in procuring that very long transcript.

Indictments against the Xalisco Boys, on the other hand, are plentiful, and helpful for two reasons, mainly. Though they were not intimately detailed, the indictments did tell the same story over and over. They resembled each other so much that reading indictments from Charlotte to Portland to Phoenix and points in between gave me confidence early on in my research that this system was being faithfully duplicated across America. Also, indictments gave me names—of prosecutors and sometimes investigators with whom I later spoke, and of Xalisco defendants, by then in prison, to whom I wrote requesting interviews.

Another invaluable transcript, by the way, was from the trial against Michael Leman, owner of the Urgent Care clinics in Slidell, Louisiana, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. Along with interviews, they provided a fascinating view of how the pill problem exploded in one eastern Kentucky county—Floyd. I added to that with interviews with local prosecutor Brent Turner, and his father, Arnold Turner, a former prosecutor, and with Randy Hunter, a recently retired state police detective, and with a prison interview with Timmy Wayne Hall, one of the biggest pill dealers in Floyd County.

Most of my research into Portsmouth, Ohio, came from interviews with residents on visits I made to the town, as well as a Facebook page devoted to the town’s diaspora and how Portsmouth used to be. Much of my information about Dreamland came from people on that page. There were occasional news and historical journal articles as well that filled in parts of the story of the town’s decline and the history of that fabulous pool.

Information on David Procter and his physician progeny I obtained from, first, interviews with people in Portsmouth. I also relied on reports from Kentucky’s Board of Medical Licensure for Procter as well as several of the doctors who had worked for him. Newspaper articles about those doctors and other pill mill owners who came later were also invaluable.

Several books informed my sections on opium, morphine, heroin, the Harrison Act, and the Narcotic Farm. Martin Booth’s
Opium: A History
is the classic history of the poppy and the goo it produces that has been so much a part of human history. Other books that I turned to were:

The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control
, David F. Musto (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 1999)

One Hundred Years of Heroin
, ed. David F. Musto (Praeger, 2002)

Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control
, Caroline Jean Acker (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)

Dark Paradise
:
A History of Opiate Addiction in America
, David Courtwright (Harvard University Press; enlarged edition, 2001)

Smack: Heroin and the American City
, Eric C. Schneider (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America’s First Prison for Drug Addicts
,
Nancy Campbell, J. P. Olsen, and Luke Walden (Abrams, 2008)

Junky: The Definitive Text of “Junk”
(50th Anniversary edition), William S. Burroughs (Grove Press, 2003)

Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine, Volume 21: Innovation in Pain Management
, ed. L. A. Reynolds and E. M. Tansey (QMUL History C20 Medicine, 2004)

Opioids and Pain Relief: A Historical Perspective
, ed. Marcia L. Meldrum (IASP Press, 2003)

For the sections on the revolution in pain treatment, I relied on recollections from doctors who were practicing or in residency in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Innovation in Pain Management
provided essential details on the early approaches to pain management, into Cicely Saunders and Robert Twycross at St. Christopher’s in England, and into Jan Stjernsward’s development of the WHO Ladder. I also relied on oral histories that Professor Marcia Meldrum did with Kathleen Foley and Russell Portenoy, which are available at the John C. Liebeskind History of Pain Collection at UCLA.

To chronicle the spread of the abuse of opiates I relied on studies by several government agencies, primarily SAMHSA and the Centers for Disease Control. The GAO, now renamed the U.S. Government Accountability Office, produced two important reports. One was a report analyzing the state of methadone clinics in America. The other was a 2003 analysis of Purdue Pharma’s promotion campaign for the first half-dozen years after releasing OxyContin.

To describe Purdue’s campaign, I also used interviews with doctors, including the late Phillip Prior, news articles, advertisements from medical journals, parts of Barry Meier’s book
Pain Killer
, and an interview with former U.S. attorney John Brownlee.

Through this odyssey, I relied also on my experience over twenty-seven years as a journalist. I learned reporting covering crime for four years in the great town of Stockton, California. In my decade living in and traveling across Mexico, I had a chance to tell much longer stories. I reveled in the sagas of
ranchos
,
valientes
,
corridos
,
pistoleros
, and in the novel that each immigrant life comprises. You can read more about that in my two previous books:
True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx
and
Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration
.

Finally, I invite you to visit my website,
www.samquinones.com
. There I’ve listed, and linked to, many more resources—including recorded audio and video interviews and several relevant music videos on YouTube—that I used to tell this true tale.

A Note on the Author

Sam Quinones is a freelance journalist, author, and storyteller whose first two acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction about Mexico and Mexican immigration made him, according to the
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
, “the most original writer on Mexico and the border.” He lives in Southern California. Contact him through his website,
www.samquinones.com
.

By the Same Author

Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration

True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx

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First published 2015

This electronic edition published in April 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

© Sam Quinones 2015

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