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
Jim Kuykendall, a DEA agent, works out of Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1998, around the time that the Xalisco Boys set up shop in the small town of Chimayo, New Mexico. Chimayo boasts the highest rate of heroin addiction in the country. For years, Chimayo addicts fed their habit with weak powder heroin. However, by 1997, Mexican dealers started distributing cheaper and more potent black tar heroin. Users who’d grown accustomed to Chimayo’s weak powder heroin begin to die of overdoses. In Chimayo, heroin is sold by three clans: the Barela clan, the Gallegos clan, and the Martinez clan.
Heroin addicts began to die because the Xalisco Boys’ product was far superior to the product of previous trafficking businesses.
Themes
In the late 1990s, as more addicts die, family members organize “protest processions.” Kuykendall is moved by this, but he still feels that Chimayo’s heroin problem is a local one, and thus outside of the DEA’s jurisdiction. However, when Kuykendall attends a meeting organized by the Chimayo Crime Prevention Organization, he is surprised to find that political figures, such as congressmen and the head of the New Mexico State Police, are in attendance. People are upset at local and federal law enforcement’s inaction on heroin. Kuykendall takes on the Chimayo case the next day.
Community is an essential component of addiction recovery, but it can also be a big part of getting government agencies to acknowledge and respond to the toll addiction takes on community life. Chimayo’s community organized “protest processions” and meetings that inspired Kuykendall and the DEA to intervene and launch an investigation into heroin in Chimayo.
Themes
