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
By June 12, 2000, Operation Tar Pit is underway, with a bust scheduled for June 15 by the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington. A SWAT team seizes Xalisco Trafficker Oscar Hernandez-Garcia’s apartment, which is full of drugs, in Panorama City, California. Similar seizures happen across the U.S. Portland officers strategize how they will execute their own busts. In Albuquerque, Jim Kuykendall busts Enrique and his drivers. Kuykendall recalls how Enrique presented himself as nothing but a poor kid from Mexico “trying to make a buck. […] He was a farm boy…and a midlevel trafficker.” Enrique will be incarcerated in federal prison for the next thirteen years. In total, Operation Tar Pit leads to the arrests of 182 traffickers in a dozen cities. To this day, Operation Tar Pit “remains the largest case—geographically and in terms of manpower used—the DEA and FBI have ever mounted jointly.”
Kuykendall’s comments complicate Enrique’s narrative. For much of Dreamland, Quinones depicts Enrique as a young man who worked hard, succeeded in his business, and escaped from the poverty of his youth. Enrique thinks of himself in the same way, as a poor kid simply “trying to make a buck.” Kuykendall’s comment that Enrique was “a farm boy…and a midlevel trafficker” suggests that, somewhere along the way, Enrique became corrupted by an addiction to excess and displays of material wealth, in a transformation like those of pill mill doctors like David Procter. Operation Tar Pit is evidence of how widespread and connected the Xalisco business had become by 2000.
Themes
Tar Pit reflects not only the drug trade’s trajectory, but also of the spread of Mexican immigration. In the contemporary U.S., Mexican immigrants populate big cities as well as heartland America, and “the only locally owned new businesses in many rural towns are those that Mexicans started.” After Tar Pit, Xalisco grows desolate, and the celebration and wealth that characterized the past decade was nowhere to be seen. For as successful as Tar Pit was, on the eastern side of the U.S., there is still an epidemic of opiate abuse raging on, uncontrolled.
Tar Pit revealed that the development of the Xalisco heroin trade paralleled the spread of “the only locally owned new businesses in many rural towns,” showing how the Xalisco system targeted and exploited towns hit hard by deindustrialization and the opiate epidemic.
Themes
