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
In Denver, Quinones watches as a Xalisco Boy named Jose Carlos is questioned by Dennis Chavez and his narcotics team. There was nothing incriminating in Carlos’s apartment, and he refuses give away anyone higher up, so the case will advance no further. Significant about this drug bust, though, is that it illustrates a means by which law enforcement can disrupt the Xalisco Boys system the most: by “raising its cost of business.” For so long, the Xalisco Boys evaded law enforcement because most arrests made were of low-level dealers who carried only small amounts of drugs and drug money: the rest was back in Mexico.
U.S. law enforcement generally prioritizes larger scale drug busts. Because Xalisco busts involved small quantities of heroin, such cases rarely advanced through the legal system. The Xalisco Boys learned how U.S. drug busts operated and adapted their business to game the system. This case illustrates how law enforcement responded by adapting their investigative strategies to beat the Xalisco traffickers by “raising [their] cost of business.”
Themes
Over time, Denver’s Officer Jes Sandoval learned to make more arrests of low-level dealers, even if such arrests produced few drugs. In this way, law enforcement forced Xalisco higher-ups to spend more money and resources replacing drivers and reestablishing client lists. In short, Sandoval’s strategy drove up the cost of doing business.
By making more arrests of low-level dealers, Sandoval caused the Xalisco Boys’ operation to run less efficiently, ultimately affecting them where it mattered most: in the cost of doing business.
Themes
