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
Charlotte, North Carolina saw great benefits from the economic expansion of the mid-1990s. As bigger, more profitable businesses moved into the Charlotte metro area in the first decade of the 20th century, so too did rich retirees. Latino immigrants flocked to rural towns for agricultural work, and later into Charlotte. Sheena Gatehouse was chief of the drug unit in Mecklenburg County’s district attorney’s office when the Xalisco Boys began to operate in Charlotte. She would later become a defense attorney in charge of OxyContin abuse cases, and many of her clients were upper- and middle-class children. Gatehouse returns the prosecutor’s office in 2009 to prosecute heroin dealers. She raises minimum drug sentences, but this does nothing to stifle the Xalisco Boys’ business. Prices continue to drop, and business flourish.
Gatehouse’s move to raise minimum drug sentences proved ineffective in stifling the Xalisco Boys’ business because they had a steady pool of subordinate workers to pull from back home, and the prevalence of OxyContin addicts resulted in a steady, reliable demand for heroin.
Themes
During this time, a “new kind of junkie” emerges in Charlotte. Bob Martin, director of Substance Abuse Services at Carolinas Medical Center (CMC), notes that “half of CMC’s patients addicted to opiates now ha[ve] private health insurance” and live in wealthy neighborhoods.
This “new kind of junkie” was good news for Xalisco traffickers, as well: because these new addicts were well-off, they were reliable customers. The new market created by these wealthy addicts was reliable and predictable.
Themes
Quinones suggests, “it was as if these guys from Xalisco had done market research to discover new heroin markets.” An undercover cop in Charlotte named Jaime supports this claim, believing that the Xalisco Boys actively search for places where wealthy kids live, and where prescriptions for painkillers are prevalent. Despite the growing market for heroin in Charlotte, the city responds with no threats or outrage; on the contrary, the parents of this new class of affluent, adolescent addicts “couldn’t conceive of their children on heroin.”
Quinones’s remark about the Xalisco Boys gathering “market research” uses language evocative of the legitimate business world. Charlotte’s lack of outrage in response to the city’s growing heroin market came as the result of suburban parents too ashamed to admit that their children were heroin addicts.
Themes
Reflecting more on this new class of affluent users and their defining characteristics, Jaime determines that one of the Xalisco Boys’ most alluring features is the convenience they offer: “This drug is following the same marketing [strategy] of every other product out there.” To Jaime, “in a culture that demanded comfort, […] heroin was the final convenience.”
This privileged new class of heroin users valued convenience and instant gratification, so they were attracted to the convenience the Xalisco Boys’ delivery service afforded them.
Themes
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