Community as a Remedy to Addiction Theme Analysis

The title of Quinones’s book alludes to his position that a strengthened sense of community can correct the ills inflicted on individuals and society at large by the American opiate epidemic. Dreamland refers to the now-demolished community swimming pool in Portsmouth, Ohio, a town located on the Ohio River that the epidemic hit particularly hard. Prior to the pool’s demolition in the mid-1990s—and in happier and more prosperous times—Dreamland served as a place of gathering for the community of Portsmouth and provided the town with a center and a sense of togetherness. For Portsmouth and for other towns across America impacted by the opiate epidemic, Quinones sees community as an “antidote” to heroin and opiates in general. He identifies the opiate epidemic as both a symptom and a cause of America’s increased sense of isolation and alienation.

Quinones begins his book with a history of Portsmouth’s Dreamland swimming pool, emphasizing how it brought the town’s people together and gave them a space to commune and engage with one another. First opened in 1929, the pool was the place where “generations of the town grew up.” The pool’s importance to the community cannot be overstated. Quinones writes: “California had its beaches. Heartland America spent its summers at swimming pools.” Portsmouth’s children grew up at the pool, and when they had children of their own, they brought them there to continue in the tradition: “the cycle of life was repeated over and over at Dreamland.” In other words, Portsmouth’s “cycle of life” revolved around community. Dreamland was never quite able to eradicate racial prejudice, but it did “wash away class distinctions.” In this way (for those privileged enough to feel welcome there) Dreamland served as a place of community. People left the alienating confines of their homes and jobs and came together in Dreamland. Dreamland was symptomatic of Portsmouth’s great sense of community as a whole. Quinones writes that, “in 1979 and 1980, Portsmouth felt worthy to be selected an All-American City.” Nobody in Portsmouth was particularly wealthy—most were blue-collar workers—but “its industry supported a community for all.” Because nobody could afford backyard pools, the town came together at public parks, tennis courts, and at Dreamland.

To Quinones, the American opiate epidemic embodies the antipathy of community. It follows, thus, that Dreamland eventually closed around the same time that economic disaster, pill mills, and opiate abuse contributed to the town’s slow demise. Quinones ultimately decides that “in our isolation, heroin thrives; that’s its natural habitat.” He determines that humanity’s gradual shift from life in the public sphere to the private sphere both embodies and explains the opiate epidemic. Quinones points to the connection between what he calls the “search for painlessness” that motivated the pain revolution of the late 20th century and America’s current opiate epidemic. “Heroin is,” Quinones states, “the final expression of values we have fostered for thirty-five years.”  He extends his definition of “painlessness” to include not only the chronic pains opiates were prescribed to treat, but also to what he sees as America’s current inability to take on pains of any kind. He cites an article from the Atlantic titled “The Coddling of the American Mind,” which suggests that children raised “in the era of hyper-protection from physical pain” grew up to be college students unable to cope with “painful ideas.” To Quinones, the increase of helicopter parenting and the “neediness” of college students it produces results in a society of people stuck inside themselves and unable to engage with their community. Ironically, thus, it was in humanity’s quest for painlessness that it uncovered a pain much worse: the misery of isolation, and the numbing pain of addiction. To Quinones—and to the people who remembered Portsmouth as it was before economic hardship and drugs—Dreamland is something of a paradise lost. It hearkens back to a time when people knew their neighbors helped one another. With Dreamland and all that it represented gone, people didn’t have a place to gather, so they became withdrawn and alienated in their pain. They turned to drugs for escape when they would have before turned to other people for support.

To begin to recover from the opiate epidemic, Quinones believes, America must strengthen its sense of community and sympathy. Towns most ravaged by opiates, such Portsmouth, must care about one another’s social and psychological well-being—in other words, they must regain the sense of togetherness that Dreamland embodied. “I believe more strongly than ever that the antidote to heroin is community,” writes Quinones. Addiction cannot be fought alone, and there is no simple fix. Humanity must look beyond itself and consciously reject the alienation and isolation that addiction perpetuates. Quinones proposes that America “form [its] own Dreamland and break down those barriers that keep people isolated.” He sees addiction and its cause—the coveting of opiates as a quick, uncomplicated method to rid oneself of their pain—as actively building these “barriers” that keep people blocked off from the rest of the world. It might not be simple work to create and maintain relationships and a sense of community, but Quinones posits that this is the only lasting solution to the opiate epidemic. In more recent years, Quinones has observed Portsmouth’s gradual return to community living: new restaurants have gone up downtown, the city has introduced a monthly public event downtown, and its Counseling Center (an addiction treatment center) has expanded its outreach. In reviving their sense of community, Portsmouth has begun to regain some of the prosperity it once had in the long-ago days of Dreamland.