Dreamland: Part 2: Junkie Kingdom in Dreamland Summary & Analysis

Portsmouth’s Dreamland pool closed in 1993 after years of economic decline. Bulldozers knocked down the concrete structure and replaced it with a strip mall. With Dreamland gone, “the town went indoors.” Police replaced “communal adult supervision,” and people hung out at Walmart. Opiates soon ravaged the town, small businesses were replaced with pill mills like David Procter’s, and Portsmouth was among the first towns to witness the horrendous effects of Purdue Pharma’s aggressive campaign to normalize and push opiate painkillers. 

Kids born during and after Portsmouth’s decline, for whom the town’s declining economy offered few opportunities to support themselves, became addicts  and helped pioneer an underground market for OxyContin. Mary Ann Henson recounts how she bought an MRI that depicted a sprained lumbar, made multiple copies of the MRI, and then paid different addicts to take the MRI copies to various sketchy doctors who, in exchange for cash, would give the addicts painkillers. Henson would pay the addicts in pills, then sell the rest. Scams like this became the norm in Portsmouth.

In other instances, people applied for SSI benefits so they could get Medicaid cards. With their cards, they’d get prescriptions and sell them for profit. In this way, scams assisted pill mills in getting more painkillers on the streets. “Much like the Xalisco heroin system,” observes Quinones, “OxyContin didn’t have kingpins. Instead, the market was moved by a bunch of small-time operators.”

The emergence of more Walmarts in rural America made shoplifting a more central part of the underground OxyContin economy. With many industrial towns’ small businesses in economic decline, Walmarts became the only place to purchase goods; junkies, in turn, turned to Walmart to steal products they could trade for pills. Pill dealers would place orders for certain items they wanted, and addicts would find these items at Walmart and steal them in exchange for pills.