Micro Book Review: "The Least of Us" by Sam Quinones
I just finished The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth which is Sam Quinones' follow-up to the wonderful Dreamland, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2015. This is my attempt at a micro book review in 500 words or less.
"The Least of Us" is not just about drugs and addiction, but about community, homelessness, neighborhood revitalization, chemistry, international drug smuggling, supply & demand economics, and fate. It puts a face and a name to various problems that plague American communities, and suggestions about what to do about them.
A couple interesting things I learned:
Due to the professionalization of fentanyl and meth production, cartel violence plays a much smaller role in the North American drug trade than it used to. Synthetic drugs like fentanyl and crystal meth can now be made in such staggering quantities as measured by street value (a kilo of fentanyl can produce something like a million dollars' worth of drugs once it's diluted) that the actual volumes of drugs that you now have to smuggle across the border are di minimis, which means you need less enforcement of trade routes and logistics networks by violence. Cannabis legalization in the U.S. has also reduced smuggling volumes because this was historically a drug that you'd have to smuggle into the U.S. by the truckload.
I did not realize to what degree the synthetic drug trade is a supply-side phenomenon. Advanced in drug production (fentanyl and fentanyl analogues which can be made synthetically and do not require poppy cultivation; new meth production techniques that can use a variety of legal chemical precursors, they don't necessarily require ephedrine which is regulated in many countries) led to massive oversupply, which radically pushed down street prices, which induced demand for drugs that addicts never really wanted to be involved with in the first place. For example, pain pill addicts initially switched to heroin because it was far cheaper than oxycontin (most people in this situation would have never dreamed they'd eventually end up shooting heroin to cure cravings); later, many of them overdosed on heroin that had been mixed with fentanyl, which is another drug that they didn't even know they were buying, rather it was just a drug that needed to be moved by producers and therefore ended up in the drug supply.
It's startling how much of American homelessness in the last 5-10 years has to do with methamphetamine addiction. Rates of meth addiction among the unhoused have skyrocketed in recent years (edging out many other drugs), and meth has become the de facto currency in encampments powering prostitution and theft economies. Homelessness is undoubtedly a multi-factorial phenomenon but it's fascinating how infrequently drug addiction is cited relative to the cost of housing. (Illustrative rebuttal here.)
One takeaway I had is that those of us on the left could stand to be better listeners when conservatives express frustrations about borders and crime. If you, like tens of thousands of other parents, had lost a child to tainted heroin that had been illegally smuggled into the United States, you might have some strong opinions about border enforcement. The author Quinones strikes a good balance between criticizing America's historical drug policy while also not letting China and Mexico off the hook for their contributions to the problem.
Even if you don't agree with all of the author's conclusions, I highly recommend this book for a nuanced and well-researched take on one of the biggest crises shaping contemporary America.
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