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
Humankind has been fascinated by opium since the beginning of civilization. Thebes, in ancient Egypt, “was the first great center of opium-poppy production.” Indians, Greeks, Venetians, and the Arab empire expanded opium’s reach in pre-modern times; they “saw opium as an antidote to the burdens of life.”
Ancient civilizations’ obsession with the opium-poppy shows that America’s desire for “an antidote to the burdens of life” and a simple solution to pain is not unique to modern life.
Themes
Friedrich Sertürner derived morphine from opium in the 1800s. Morphine was stronger than opium and a better painkiller. War further spread the drug, as countries had to learn to make their own morphine to help wounded soldiers. Scottish doctor Alexander Wood invented the hypodermic needle in 1853, which allowed for more accurate dosing. Wood also incorrectly believed that injecting morphine would prevent the patient from craving the drug, which had previously been eaten. Chinese immigrants brought opium and opium addicts to the U.S. Opium dens were outlawed, and morphine replaced opium as the U.S.’s major underground drug. Heroin was invented in 1874 by Dr. Adler Wright, who’d been searching for a nonaddictive morphine alternative. His discovery, diacetylmorphine, was rebranded as heroin (from heroisch in German) by Heinrich Dreser, a Bayer Laboratory chemist. Originally, heroin was considered nonaddictive and it was used for many ailments, which led to an increase in addictions.
Heroin, though now a highly stigmatized drug, was initially introduced by legitimate professionals like doctors and chemists. Ironically, humanity’s quest for a drug that would soothe pain without the drawback of addiction resulted in increased rates of addiction when heroin was used to treat an increasing number of ailments, even comparatively commonplace afflictions like coughs and menstrual cramps. Patients used and grew addicted to heroin because they were prescribed it by trusted medical professionals, just as increasing numbers of patients became addicted to OxyContin in the 1990s and early-2000s.
Themes
The U.S. passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, which taxed opiates and medicines derived from the coca-leaf. This inspired a wave of anti-opiate sentiment among U.S. doctors and the public. Doctors stopped prescribing opiates, and the black market took over the drug trade. Heroin, which was cheaper and easier to make, replaced morphine as a street drug. Heroin doesn’t come in different “varietals,” so the only way it differs is in how pure or weak it is. Heroin pushers “learned to market aggressively” to get addicts to want their product above other street options. Ironically, although heroin was loathed by square America and became the favorite drug of America’s outcasts, the drug was actually “about the squarest of American things: business—dull, cold commerce.” Because addicts were slaves to their addictions, traffickers could run their businesses “almost according to principles taught in business schools.”
The reader should compare street heroin dealers who “learned to market aggressively” to legitimate “drug dealers” like Arthur Sackler and the pharmaceutical salespeople who were recruited to push drugs like Valium and OxyContin to physicians. Ultimately, all drug businesses—regardless of whether they are legitimate or illegitimate—are just that: businesses. In this instance, underground heroin dealers operated “almost according to principles taught in business schools,” selling their heroin to a market of consumers whose addiction made them demand a product, regardless of price or quality. In this way, heroin dealers operated according to the economic principle of supply and demand, just like any legitimate business.
Themes
