Dreamland: Part 2: “We Was Carrying the Epidemic” Summary & Analysis

In spring 2003 in Greenup County, Kentucky, across the Ohio River from Portsmouth, nonunion workers from Florida begin work on a new Walmart. Greenup County used to employ many in the steel industry, but by 2003 many of its residents are unemployed and addicted to pills.

Jarrett Withrow is one of these addicts. In 2003, he is part of the crew building the new Walmart. When the workers’ pill supply runs out, one man drives to Florida and returns with more pills. Florida’s regulations are lax compared to Kentucky’s, and soon Withrow’s crew makes a business out of transporting pills from Florida and selling them on the street.

Quinones likens the pill epidemic to Ebola and AIDS viruses, noting how they spread “among vulnerable populations by a casual contact, a chance meeting.” Some of the earliest spreaders of pills, thus, were newly unemployed and addicted coal miners from Kentucky, whose only sustainable income came from SSI and Medicaid cards. Despite Kentucky’s attempt to track what drugs were prescribed by whom, Kentucky’s geography (it is bordered by seven other states), and the extent to which the decline of industrialization forced mass migrations out of the state, created a network of displaced friends and relatives to whom Kentucky addicts could reach out for drugs.

Because Kentucky has so many dry counties, travelling for illegal products was not a new phenomenon for the region. Many bootleggers who used to deal in alcohol turned to pills, some driving as far as Detroit; Dayton; or even Slidell, Louisiana to procure pills to sell in Kentucky. Bootleggers expanded their operations, bringing teams of addicts with them and returning with large numbers of pills. When these operations grew large enough, bootleggers like Timmy Wayne Hall hired dealers to sell for him. Hall was eventually arrested in 2007 and would confess to selling 200,000 OxyContin and methadone pills.