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 2012, and Jeremy Wilder, 35, arrived in Portsmouth, Ohio. He was missing teeth and his arms were covered in needle marks. Wilder moved to Portsmouth to escape rural America, drug addiction, and imprisonment. Even his hometown of Aberdeen hadn’t escaped the opiate epidemic unscathed. It surprised Wilder that he turned to Portsmouth, a town that was itself full of addiction and poverty, for his fresh start—but “he was not alone” in this regard.
Jeremy Wilder is the addict who made a business of collecting phony prescriptions from pill mills around Ohio and Kentucky and selling them for a profit. Wilder’s and others’ decision to return to Portsmouth to start afresh seems to suggest that they, like Quinones, see embracing community as a way out of drug addiction.
Themes
Terry Johnson, the coroner of Scioto County (where Portsmouth is located), grew frustrated at public indifference toward the growing number of overdoses. In 2010, he was elected to the Ohio House of Representatives where he worked to write legislation that would regulate pain clinics. House Bill 93, which passed in 2011, made it illegal for convicted felons to run pill mills. In Portsmouth, the community organized marches to protest pill mills.
House Bill 93 was an important step in regulating the market for prescription painkillers. Portsmouth’s pill mill protest marches show how communities can pull together to support and enact change.
Themes
The closure of many pill mills was a step in the right direction. New businesses, such as Sole Choice, a shoelace company that resurrected the older business Mitchellace, opened in Portsmouth. All over town, there were new places for residents to “meet and converse.”
In a reversal of what happened in the 1990s, older local businesses are now replacing pill mills as the driving force of Portsmouth’s economy. More places for Portsmouth’s residents to “meet and converse” means the town will regain the sense of community it had when the Dreamland pool existed.
Themes
On Quinones’s final visit to Portsmouth he sees addicts recovering and people embracing a sense of community they’d lost over years of economic depression. The Counseling Center doubled in size during the epidemic, and has since opened the Clubhouse, a place for people to hang out in a sober environment. Mary Ann Henson, a former addict, manages the Clubhouse. Portsmouth’s gradual recovery inspires its citizens that they, too, could return “to that place called Dreamland.”
The Counseling Center’s growth shows that Portsmouth is setting aside the stigmas associated with drug use to understand and support addicts. Mary Ann Henson’s transformation from addict to manager of the Clubhouse is evidence of Quinones’s belief that a heightened sense of community can result in recovery and growth in towns hit hard by the opiate epidemic. The emergence of new gathering places like the Clubhouse hints at Portsmouth’s symbolic return “to that place called Dreamland.”
Themes
Get the entire Dreamland LitChart as a printable PDF.
