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Part 2: Two-Thousand-Year-Old Questions
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
Because the Xalisco Boys weren’t a “top-down” drug cartel, Operation Tar Pit didn’t completely dismantle their operation. Delivery drivers who weren’t arrested start up their own cells and take over vacancies left by the arrests. Xalisco Boys begin selling to a new, younger market of users who have graduated from painkillers to heroin. The first of these new markets appear when the Man introduces black tar heroin to Southern Ohio.
A “top-down” business is operated by an owner who gives orders to the business’s subordinate workers. Because the Xalisco cell owners operated out of Mexico, they avoided arrest and were able to form new cells after Tar Pit wiped out their previous cells of subordinate workers.
Themes
One of the first people to notice this “synergy” between pills and heroin is Dr. Peter Rogers, who specializes in adolescent medicine at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus. Rogers starts seeing more and more kids—most of whom come from the suburban upper and middle classes—coming in addicted to heroin.
The “synergy” between pills and heroin is strongest in towns where there is an existing market for prescription painkillers. Rogers’s observation that a greater number of addicted kids are from privileged backgrounds is important because heroin had previously been associated with urban counterculture—not square, suburban America.
Themes
