Dreamland: Part 1: All from the Same Town Summary & Analysis

In September 2007, a plumber named Teddy Johnson visits his son Adam’s apartment in Huntington, West Virginia. Adam has just started college at Marshall University after dropping out of high school due to his prescription painkiller abuse. Adam now works for Teddy, who believes his son is turning over a new leaf and staying sober. When Teddy arrives at Adam’s apartment, he finds Adam dead of an overdose. The police determine that Adam has overdosed on black tar heroin, derived from poppy flowers that grow along Mexico’s Pacific coast. Heroin overdoses are a growing trend in Huntington, even though the town’s police only saw black tar for the first time that same year. 

Huntington is on the southern banks of the Ohio River. The rail work that once fueled the town’s economy eventually declined as machines replaced resource extraction jobs. West Virginia’s population began to shrink during this time, and many of the families who remained relied on government assistance. As Huntington’s population and economy declined, its numbers of drug users and drug fatalities increased. Despite this, police tell Quinones that Mexican drug dealers avoid West Virginia, whose lack of a Mexican immigrant community means dealers don’t have a population in which to hide. Quinones wonders how it is, then, that black tar found its way to West Virginia.

Quinones began his career in journalism as a crime reporter in Stockton, California, where he first encountered black tar heroin. Black tar heroin differed from white powder in that it contained more impurities, and it was known then as a West Coast drug. Black tar was as of yet “unknown east of the Mississippi River,” so Quinones is perplexed at the drug’s growing presence in West Virginia.

While working on a team with the Los Angeles Times to cover Mexican drug wars and trafficking in the U.S., Quinones uncovers reports of black tar in Huntington. Huntington law enforcement tells him that the town’s black tar comes from Columbus, Ohio. When he calls the Columbus DEA, Quinones learns that Columbus has many Mexican heroin dealers who drive around with balloons of heroin in their mouths and deliver drugs to addict customers. These dealers operate as part of “teams, or cells.” Law enforcement arrests dealers, but they’re immediately replaced with new dealers from Mexico. These heroin dealers evade law enforcement by hiding in Columbus’s large Mexican population. The drivers all know each other and never talk, and they don’t carry guns. The men have false names, rent apartments, and leave after six months. They are like no heroin mafia Ohio law enforcement has ever seen.

Most perplexing to the DEA is that all these traffickers are from the same town in Mexico. Quinones is interested in this, as he lived in Mexico for 10 years, spending a lot of time writing two books about Mexican ranchos (or small, rural villages). Ranchos are worked by rancheros, workers who fled urban society and government to make lives for themselves and rise up from poverty. With limited access to education, rancheros usually work in ranching, farming, or construction. Other ranchero families Quinones encountered started small business or worked as cops. 

The Columbus DEA agent informs Quinones that the heroin traffickers are all from Tepic, the capital of Nayarit, one of Mexico’s smallest states. Quinones can’t believe this, as Tepic is a large city, and his knowledge of the “family and personal connections” at the backbone of so many rancho business excursions causes him to suspect that the heroin dealers are probably from a rancho.

Quinones writes to prisoners in jail for trafficking and he hears back from a man who worked in Columbus. The man tells him that these heroin operatives work in many other cities across the country. Each of these cities boast white middle classes, are economically prosperous, and also have growing Mexican immigrant communities. Quinones is amazed that these underdog Mexican traffickers, all from the same small village, have managed to sell heroin all over the U.S., particularly east of the Mississippi River.