Sprawling and episodic ... Quinones also offers insightful chapters on our growing understanding of addiction ... The Least of Us does a fine job of detailing the devastation wrought by the synthetics that now dominate addiction. Alas, there may be too many stories. His tales of addicts and their families have a scattershot effect, losing their power as they pile up one on another. Several longer stories offer an in-depth account of situations but are told in interspersed instalments that are hard to follow. Even so, the author provides a terrifying close-up view of addiction and its toll in disparate communities ... The Least of Us confirms his place as a leading chronicler of an American nightmare.
Quinones once again dives deep into America’s drug culture, but this time he takes his investigation a step further to shine light on the ways that communities are coming together to fight addiction ... The chapters on neuroscience delivered some of the most shocking takeaways of the book ... Quinones loves a good story, and his excitement at meeting a new character leaps off every page. But I thought some chapters would have been better suited for Dreamland...and others cut altogether. Though some chapters feel like they stray from his central narrative, The Least of Us reads like the final puzzle piece to the mystery of opioids and their hold on America. Quinones finishes what he started in Dreamland by offering not only warnings for the future phases of the epidemic, but the beginnings of a new era of hope.
Quinones’s greatest accomplishment is to understand these newly dangerous drug markets as just one more consequence of a disastrously under-regulated corporate capitalism in the 2000s ... Quinones is anything but boring. He is a fluent storyteller who delivers his argument through a palette of affecting stories about people and communities torn apart, and about the small, step-by-step reclamations earned through patient, daily, humble work. Few readers will keep dry eyes through the entire book ... This poignant appeal is also where The Least of Us goes awry, unfortunately. To amp up the emotional wallop, Quinones leans on the hoariest myths that have long marred drug journalism: that once-proud if scrappy White communities are being destroyed by foreign traffickers selling a new generation of super-drugs that turn consumers into subhuman zombies. This sensationalist story is depressingly familiar to me as a historian of drugs, and it stands in stark conflict with Quinones’s brilliant analysis of America’s malfunctioning drug markets. The 'super drug' myth is the true unkillable zombie, surviving a century of repeated debunking and wreaking its own distinctive political harm ... The new 'super drug' story, combined with an oversimplified version of addiction neuroscience, leads Quinones to a dark vision of people with addiction ... On this front The Least of Us seems divided: sometimes romanticizing an implicitly White past, and sometimes providing the foundations for a broader vision of how to protect all communities from the excesses of corporate capitalism. I hope that readers will see beyond the former to learn from the latter.
The book is organized into five sections, which Quinones skillfully uses to tell the stories of ordinary people whose lives were derailed by fentanyl, meth, and other illicit drugs ... The sheer number of people presented here — from prosecutors and police officers to traffickers (both American and Mexican) and jailers — can feel overwhelming, to the point that some readers may wish for a flowchart. But the payoff of keeping track of so many characters is worth the challenge, for their stories are compelling.
... lacks the cohesion of Dreamland, a problem one senses early on. This, he tells us, is a book about fentanyl and methamphetamine and also about community efforts to combat addiction. Then why, one wonders, are we reading so much — five chapters — about OxyContin and the Sackler family, whose company, Purdue Pharma, produced it, material that would have been at home in his last book? ... When Quinones tackles the newer problem of designer drugs, he does so with his usual depth ... Quinones depicts his subjects affectingly, but along with his rich reporting is the problem of excess. A natural storyteller, he applies those skills to such an array of characters that it is difficult to register their true significance to his larger narrative ... The least of us, Quinones is quick to emphasize, is in all of us. What he means is our searing vulnerability, simply by dint of being human. And that’s the point and the power of his work: to shine a bright light not only on the pathways by which drugs traverse this country, but also on the desperate pain that so many among us are in.
Quinones chronicles the devastation wrought by these newer synthetic drugs, while also showing how corporate marketing and Americans’ desire for a quick fix combined with our addictive nature tie into the problem. But he also writes of hope ... Quinones introduces a lot of people in a lot of places, and does a good job of keeping everyone straight. He is always engaging, though some information feels rehashed and his conclusions don’t always seem clear. Regardless, readers looking for the latest take on the drug trade and recovery as well as those who flock to well written journalism will dig into this.
A sweeping portrait ... Vivid character profiles of drug runners and abusers, their family members, and social workers and addiction treatment counselors make the scale of the tragedy clear, while providing persuasive evidence that the battle against the opioid crisis can be won ... This is a richly rewarding report from the front lines of an ongoing emergency.
Overstuffed ... Extensive but rambling ... What [Quinone's] learned is genuinely alarming but embedded in background material on topics that have been extensively covered elsewhere ... A valuable but overlong overview of an underappreciated drug crisis.
