Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Dreamland, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Pain Management and the Normalization of Narcotics
The Drug Business
Stigma, Shame, and the Opiate Epidemic
Community as a Remedy to Addiction
Summary
Analysis
It’s 2013, and Quinones drives through the hills of Kentucky to his destination: the Federal Medical Center, which houses 1,700 prisoners. The building was opened in 1935 and was known then as the Narcotic Farm; it was “deemed […] a ‘New Deal for the Drug Addict’” by FDR’s administration. The Harrison Act of 1914 meant that addicts could be incarcerated as criminals, so the US government built the Narcotic Farm—a prison and treatment center—to house them all. Notably, William Burroughs checked into the facility.
The Harrison Act of 1914 regulated and taxed opiates and drugs derived from the cocoa leaf. The act represents an institutional move toward the stigmatization of narcotic drugs. William Burroughs was an American writer of the beat generation, a movement of artists who rejected and rebelled against the conventions of institutions. Burroughs’s most well-known works are Naked Lunch and Junky.
Themes
In 1928, organized and funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Committee on Problems of Drug Dependence (CPDD) was formed to find an answer to the problem of drug abuse. The CPDD brought together government officials, academics, and scientists to find a nonaddictive substitute for morphine, referred to by researchers as the “Holy Grail,” and the Farm opened in 1935. The Addiction Research Center (ARC), which operated within the Farm, tested on inmates morphine substitutes discovered by CPDD-funded scientists. Of all the drug substitutes, researchers concluded that methadone was the most effective, as it was long-lasting and didn’t come with “the severe highs and lows of heroin.”
The idea of a nonaddictive substitute for morphine was considered a “Holy Grail” drug because it would allow for the heaven of pain relief without the hell of addiction. The lack of “severe highs and lows” that made methadone so appealing would be used by Purdue as a selling point for OxyContin in the 1990s: OxyContin’s “continuous release” formula dispensed morphine at a controlled rate, though the drug’s protective coating was easily dissolved, thus negating its continuous release properties.
Themes
For a while, the Farm experiments are “the only serious study of addiction.” Further, the ARC establishes a definition of addiction as “a chronic brain disorder,” rather than a moral or character flaw, which is a revolutionary position. When it is discovered that the Farm had experimented with LSD on inmates, however, the entire operation is shut down. Today, the facility is only a hospital and prison. Still, the Farm’s research and experiments are critical in America’s search for the Holy Grail, keeping alive the hope that such a drug could be found. This ushers forth a new generation of “revolutionaries” who strive to discover better, more effective pain treatments.
ARC’s definition of addiction as “a chronic brain disorder” is important because it dispels the notion that addicts are flawed people who choose to derail their lives with drugs. This new attitude toward addiction proposes that addicts and addiction should not be stigmatized subjects. The research conducted at the Farm paved the way for researchers like Russell Portenoy and Kathleen Foley, for whom the quest for better ways of treating pain would become their lives’ work.
Themes
