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
Judge Seth Norman of Tennessee runs a drug court that is attached to a treatment center. In Norman’s court, addicts are sent to rehab instead of prison. It took years to convince Tennessee’s state legislature that treatment is more effective—and more cost-effective—than prison in rehabilitating addicts. What changed the legislature’s mind wasn’t rehab’s cost-effectiveness, however, but a shift in the demographic of Tennessee’s drug users: in recent years, addicts have become increasingly white, young, and affluent.
Norman’s court reinforces the idea that drug addicts need to be understood and rehabilitated, not imprisoned and looked down on. Of course, it should be noted that such sympathies and public health systems weren’t extended to crack addicts (many of whom were black and from urban communities) in the 1980s. Quinones suggests that Tennessee legislature’s sympathetic change in heart might have been racially biased, as many of Tennessee’s new drug users were white.
Themes
Increasingly, growing opiate use in the American heartland has caused even conservative Republicans to become advocates of drug courts and rehabilitation. Quinones allows that this shift might be “a national moment of Christian forgiveness,” though he also mentions “that it was a forgiveness that many of these lawmakers didn’t warm to when urban crack users were the defendants.” The opiate epidemic is hitting home for rural and affluent classes in a way it hadn’t before, since now “it was their kids who were involved.”
Again, Quinones identifies a possible racial bias in America’s response to the opiate epidemic when he notes that policymakers weren’t advocating for rehabilitation and drug courts in the 1980s “when urban crack users were the defendants.”
Themes
