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
East of the Mississippi River, it wasn’t doctors who first caught on to the opiate epidemic, but cops. After Operation Tar Pit, when the Xalisco Boys arrived in Murfreesboro, a suburb of Tennessee, law enforcement was familiar with the drug distributors and their practices. They were surprised to see how far they’d spread. Immediately, the Xalisco Boys’ business flourished. From the Nashville area, they started up a cell in Indianapolis. Eventually, they sent for even more workers.
The Xalisco distribution system is successful wherever there is an existing market of opiate addicts, though they weren’t initially aware of the influence the opiate epidemic had on the success of their business.
Themes
By the 2000s, the Sánchezes (the Xalisco family in charge of the region’s heroin operations) have become conscious of OxyContin’s role in their success. One trafficker recalls, “It was part of the marketing strategy […]. Chiva is the same as OxyContin; just OxyContin is legal.”
Chiva, the Spanish word for goat, is a slang term for heroin. The trafficker’s comparison reinforces the similarities between OxyContin and black tar heroin: the main difference is that OxyContin is “legal” and heroin is not. He also reinforces the business sensibilities that guided the Xalisco group by attributing their success to their “marketing strategy.”
Themes
Back in Xalisco, the effects of the heroin trade on the town’s economy are apparent: the streets are filled with new shops and businesses, and the annual Feria del Elote is a festive, elaborate event. Though most rancheros feel that heroin is “disgusting,” they also acknowledge that “’Dirty money removes hunger, too.’” The heroin trade recruits a swiftly growing number of Xalisco’s young men. These men go into the business with the goal of saving up to open their own legitimate businesses, though this rarely happens. The Xalisco Boys might have made enough to buy goods like the prized Levi’s 501s, but in the end, their savings are burned on sprees of pleasure: “beer, strip clubs, and cocaine.”
Xalisco’s relationship to heroin is complicated. One the one hand, rancheros attach a stigma to the drug, calling it “disgusting.” On the other hand, however, heroin has revitalized their community and provided them with an improved quality of life. The Xalisco Boys’ tendency to burn through their money on “beer, strips clubs, and cocaine” instead of saving up to start their own businesses as they had initially planned reinforces the idea that excess and greed can corrupt even the most honorable plans and ideologies.
Themes
Back in Nashville, Operation Black Gold Rush results in the arrests of over 100 members of the Sánchez clan, as well as local addicts. Still, as was the case in the earlier Operation Tar Pit, “heroin cells quickly reconstituted” to serve the region’s market of increasingly young and wealthy addicts.
The combination of a “top-down” business structure and a growing, reliable market for heroin allowed the Xalisco Boys to recover from Operation Black Gold Rush, just as they did with Operation Tar Pit in 2000.
Themes
Get the entire Dreamland LitChart as a printable PDF.
