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what do portsmouth, ohio, los angeles, boston and columbus, common?l have in >> guest: great question. good to be with you, peter. they all have in common that they are kind of part of the large tapestry of the addiction epidemic that is now coast to coast. i would've said a few years ago the opioid addiction epidemic, but i do believe that that has changed in the last few years with the addition of methamphetamine to the mix, and both of these drugs now are fentanyl and methamphetamine which is taken a place in the old school, not that long ago, of opioid painkillers and heroin. what connects all those towns

and many others i i should sas well is that i both of these drs are now coast to coast. and this is the first time you've ever seen that in the history of our country. you have never seen one source cover the entire united states with one drug, let alone two, and that source is the mexican drug trafficking world principally on the western coast of mexico, most specific northwest, the northwest of mexico. they have such enormous production capacity for both these synthetic drugs that they can now, they have covered the country. so vermont has meth. ellie has fentanyl, didn't used to. all of the cities in between, towns, rural areas et cetera are

covered in the stuff now, and this is what ties a lot of these towns together, that we are all part of the same thing. it used to be drug use was very regional. you used to have one store here and five miles away the story would be very different. that's no longer the case. they have covered the entire country in methamphetamine and fentanyl, largely because these drugs are both synthetic. you can make them from chemicals. no plants involved. you don't need to grow them under the a sun. no farmers are needed to harvest all that sort of thing. so thehe production capacity don in mexico is just outstripped anything we've ever seen before ever and that has allowed them to coverd the country in these two drugs, and that's one of the big reasons, one of the main things that connects the towns that you mentioned, and many others. >> host: could you have chosen any five cities in america given

what you just said? >> guest: pretty much, sure. there are some towns was noticed that some fadiman really hasn't made an inroad baltimore is one that and understand, new jersey and parts of new york but by and large yeah, i think you can find the same stories with varying degrees of intensity, all across world parts of theof country, indiana, ohio, west virginia, oregon, albuquerque, l.a. skid row on and on. that is one of the things that is actually knew about what we're seeing and that is there are two drugs and they are everywhere.re and, of course, they are extraordinarily potent. fentanyl is a most deadly drug with ever seen on our streets in the united states, and meth amphetamine drives people to symptoms of schizophrenia.

but yeah, i think, i try to think of some areas that i probably couldn't. i think every part of the country has these issues. let'sa minute. that was developed in a lab in the united states in the 1950's. sam: it was developed in belgium by 19 it -- in 1959 by one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century, paul jensen. he owned jensen pharmaceutical and it's a compound in a small town. the man was one of the most fertile minds. he developed many drugs of enormous benefit to humankind and fentanyl is one of them. fentanyl revolutionized surgery. it made it so you could do all

kinds of surgery that wasn't possible because it allowed people to bring you into anesthesia and out of it very ugly. i've had fentanyl -- i had a heart attack and they gave me fentanyl. it is a standard drug that has been applied in surgery tens of millions of times all across the country. it was controlled only for the use of anesthesia and surgical settings because they knew it's potency because it was key to the surgical environment. it made it extra nearly dangerous in the hands of people who did not know what they were doing. that's effectively what has happened since 2013, 14, 15, 16, you've seen the explosion of

fentanyl in the other world -- in the underworld. when you don't have a clue what you are doing, it becomes extraordinarily deadly. the chemical cousins of fentanyl, all of these different little tweaks, molecular tweaks, this molecule will turn it into a slightly different drug. sometimes even more potent than fentanyl. paul jensen wrote about these drugs in in a chapter in a book i did not understand well without the help of chemists. but he saw the enormous potency of these drugs was something to be aware of. i would say in the last 10 years, the underworld has discovered fentanyl and its enormous potency and

profitability and the sense you no longer need if you are a heroin trafficker, you no longer need to grow poppies. according to whatever season, you can make this stuff all year round. all you need are the chemicals to be able to make this stuff. but fentanyl itself is a revolutionary drug and does wonderful things for surgery and patients like me. since the 60's. host: in your most recent book, the least of us, you right drug overdose fertility's surpass the totals of american deaths during the vietnam war. and we grown immune to this? sam: you know, maybe. i guess. it's hard to say. families who have been affected by it feel it viscerally every

day. it lingers. it does not go away, the death of a loved one. but there is this feeling that these are drug users -- i think i had argued that, that there is a feeling that this is just one more year of ever rising statistics, ever rising death tolls and i'm afraid that may be blunting a little bit our response to this problem. it feels like -- on the other hand, there are more and more families every year affected by this problem, more communities, more churches, more groups of any kind and it seems to me to be expanding. i used to think when i wrote my first book on this topic,

"dreamland" that everyone was for five degrees removed from an overdose death. anecdotally speaking, it feels more like to. you know somebody who knows somebody who has a relative who died. it absolutely feels like it has expanded all over the country and therefore cannot be ignored anymore. that is what is happening all across the country. i don't think this can be ignored. we may not have the same urgency of response we need to have, but i don't think it can be ignored anymore. host: according to the national institute on drug abuse, we are showing the chart on the air right now, you can see the rapid rise in fentanyl overdose deaths. it just takes off almost in a direct line straight up. sam: that begins once the

underworld figures out fentanyl -- that happens beginning in about 2013, 14, 15. china by then has, chinese chemical companies, i should say, are advertising on the web and on the dark web, fentanyl. so a lot of dealers in the united states by the stuff, get sent to them through the mail -- this is how the initial invasion of fentanyl began to happen in those initial years. it comes to people who view fentanyl as their lottery ticket . they've all the sudden won the lottery and the prophets are going to be through the roof. the problem is fentanyl is the first drug the profits of which are tied to you being able to mix it because fentanyl is so potent, the equivalent of a few grams of salt will make you

high, -- a few grains of salt will make you high, few more will kill you. it's not commercially possible as a street dealer. so what you need to do is mix it with a lot of inert chemicals and powders that don't do anything. the problem is nobody on the street knows how to mix this stuff. they have proven themselves to be, on the contrary, absolutely miserable at mixing fentanyl. one of the chapters in "the least of us" talks about the occurrence, how often narcotics officers would raid these mix sites and some guy would have a mix site in his basement, a guy in his underwear, that kind of thing, and they would find this guy come all over they were finding this, that people were mixing their fentanyl in magic bullet blender's.

your audience will know magic will it blunders from target and infomercials. they are great. we own a magic bullet lender in our house. it's a magnificent instrument when you want to make salsa's and smoothies. it's uniformly awful when you try to mix a powder. it's for mixing liquids. when you try to mix a powder, it does a very bad job. but folks were mixing fentanyl in magic bullet blenders and coming up with mixes that were horribly uneven and therefore some parts of what they mixed had nothing in it and other parts had enough fentanyl to kill three people. so you begin to see these clusters of overdoses. if your number in 2014, 2015, you begin to see it in cincinnati and akron, places first sit by the opioid epidemic where the dealers were very attuned to what would be next on the opioid horizon.

they began to mix the fentanyl they are getting mailed to them from chinese chemical companies, they begin to mix the stuff with magic bullet lender and that is why you see this really awful mix and you see these clusters that in a weekend, 75 overdoses in a weekend. that begins to change once the mexicans taken over in about 2016, 17. not entirely changed, but you get away from the most egregious effects from all of this. fentanyl has now been discovered by the mexican underworld and they are producing it in catastrophic quantities and smuggling it through the border they share with a country that has a free-trade agreement with mexico, so you get in norma's quantities of these drip -- in

norma's quantities coming in these trucks through border quat -- through border crossings. hence the quantities are geometrically larger than they ever were when the chinese chemical companies were sending a pound at a time through the mail. host: your first two books, "true tales from another mexico" and antonio's gun and delfino's dream, dealt with mexican cultures and went into migration and immigration as well. are your last two books natural outflows from these first two books? sam: sure. yes. i -- the way i got on to dreamland in the first place was because i was wanting to write about this one town in mexico, i

was wanting to write about mexican heroin traffickers. i had a significant background -- i lived in mexico for 10 years and i wrote a lot about mexican immigration, visited many, many villages in various places where people had migrated , so that migration story to me was a very familiar one. it is because of that i happened on the story about this one village, a small town in a small state. i'd never been there, it did not count for much because it was so small. this small little town on the pacific coast just south of sinaloa, the drug center of mexico, where these guys had developed a method for selling black tar heroin very similar to

pizza delivery. a delivery system for black tar heroin. you would set up a system in a town and you would have an operator standing by taking orders, telephone orders, and you would have several drivers driving around the town, their mouths full of little balloons with 10th of a gram doses and say go meet the person at the burger king parking lot and he wants five. you get there, meet that guy, spit out five doses and he would pay you and that was their system. this system spread throughout. i thought this was a fascinating system. i'd never seen this before. they use no guns, they were very much about trying to be nonviolent.

not try to be about vengeance and shootouts and so on. so then, from their, i went down to this village. it looks very much like every other village i've been to where people have migrated to the united states. but along the way, i began to understand the reason these guys have this new market for selling their heroin and i could see it was expanding. in fact, they had crossed the mississippi river, was because of this other story that was much bigger, huge story that i did not understand at all, which was about our revolution and pain management and expansion of the use of opioid painkillers and all kinds of ways with numerous refills.

a great, aggressive liberalization of the use of opioids which i did not understand at all at the time when i started this. i didn't really know what oxycontin was or vicodin or percocet. i was in mexico and i was oblivious to it entirely. so, when i came back, i was focused so much on the heroin guys that for a long time i did not realize the reason they had a growing and expanding market across the country was because we had exploded the amount of opioid painkillers had exploded and those painkillers contained drugs that are chemical cousins, very similar to heroin and people were getting addicted to them and switching to heroin, which is why the guys i was writing about have this burgeoning new market. it was a revelation to me and that meant i had a huge learning curve.

it was not the village in mexico, i knew that story fairly well. to me, the big story i had to cover was pain management, although things connected to pain management and addiction at that kind of thing. i could not have started on this track since 2009. with out my background in mexico. in fact, i don't understand how anybody writes about drug trafficking, drug use without understanding mexico because almost everything abused in this country comes from or through mexico. host: sam quinones has covered migration, immigration and the drug epidemic for many years and was quoted in the los angeles times as saying i've followed

the debate on illegal immigration for more than 20 years during which time i worked as a journalist in mexico and the u.s.. the issue has dominated, i come to believe, by america's desire to have it all. we want cheap stuff and low prices and we want to luxuriate in complaints about strangers in our midst who don't assimilate as fast as we imagine our grandparents did. sam: i think that is very much still the case. i've often felt in many areas, the presence of illegal mexican immigrants is tolerated, sometimes even applauded because americans on one hand, we like this stuff they provide us. they work very, very hard and become very creative and innovative.

there are many costs that come along with that. there is no free lunch, there are trade-offs in almost every part of life and this is no different. you have people who suffer and have suffered, particularly folks at the lower end of the economic spectrum of the united states economy. it struck me when i was living in mexico that we -- how do i put it -- a childish attitude that we wanted everything and wanted to be able to complain about everything. we want cheap labor, we want houses painted -- in l.a., if you want anything done to your house, it's going to be a latino immigrant that does it. we want all of that and they are cheap and they are extraordinarily talented guys. this has been an education for

all of us and at the same time, we want to complain. it's almost like a melee's of america. people want everything and then complain about it. host: thank you for joining us for book tv's monthly in-depth program on an author and his or her body of work. we are talking with sam quinones about some of the issues you've heard discussed here, the drug epidemic, illegal immigration and migration, etc.. your participation is a big part of this program. here's how you can participate. the area code is 202-748-8200 for those of you in the east and central time zone. in the mountain or pacific time zones, you can call in at 202-748-8 201. you can also send a text message.

this is for text messages only. 202-748-8903. we will also scroll through our social media content. at book tv is what you need to remember. you can make a comment or ask a question on social media and we will get to those in just a few minutes. most of your stories are about men. mostly young men in mexico are the ones working in this area. most of the stories in your books are about men. sam: yes, although i would say there are significant stories about women, angie odom -- their

daughter come abella, that was the story i began with. i think when it comes to drug dealing and drug trafficking, it's basically a man's game, as is migration. not to say women don't do it, but is often times in every village i've into, it has been the men who have led from mexico. so those stories are a big part of the topics i'm writing about. however, the stories of angie odom, starla hoskin and bella, which are the thread in "the least of us" all the way through, and some other folks in their. one develops a tattoo removal

nonprofit -- folks like that. i don't think i'm leaving women out of my stories. i think the drug trafficking world, as it stands, is largely a masculine world. that is reflected in the stories i write. host: "dreamland" when the national book critics circle award for that year. what do you mean by dreamland? sam: oh, wow. what do you mean by that i mean -- great question. first and foremost, dreamland refers to a swimming pool in the wonderful town of portsmouth, ohio. i want to shout out to all the folks in portsmouth, ohio. wonderful folks down there. it was a swimming pool that

largely galvanize the community of portsmouth for decades, back when portsmouth had a lot of jobs, steel manufacturing, all of that kind of stuff. they had a lot of stuff and could support a thriving mainstreet and a lot of downtown churches and in enormous swimming pool that became the heart and soul of the town, a place people came to socialize. it was almost the size of a football field. everybody went there. i would say all the white people went there -- let's put it clearly there. a small percentage of black people in portsmouth were segregated from that, even when the pool was integrated, they did not feel quite at home there. this was a story about this pool that developed as the town

blossomed, in a sense. you have people coming together and seeing one another, losing their virginity, romances forming and just a remarkable place of people coming together and as the town began to wither, the jobs left, the manufacturing went elsewhere. mainstreet was emptying. half the population leaves and in 1993, the tail end of all of this, the dreamland pool no longer has people enough to make a go of it, and they dig it up and turn it into a strip mall. to me, this was, i thought in a remarkable example of what i believe to be at the heart of our addiction epidemic which was our strip -- our shredding of community across this country.

it is a place where people came together and when it was dug up, they all went indoors. the only place you actually saw anybody ever again was at walmart because mainstreet was a shell. to me, this became part of the theme of the book, which was to say the roots of the opioid epidemic at that time were in our own destruction of community, the shredding of community. we saw youth sports become club sports, so it's not about folks coming together to watch kids play, it's about training kids to be professionals and getting college scholarships. we saw a lot of community banks sucked up by larger banks. if you go across the country, you see all these ways in which we believe the free market was some kind of god and whatever happened with the free market was destined to be, but let --

benevolent and so on. it was a remarkable story, a powerful, painful story for that town but also a metaphor for what we had done to the entire country, shredding the things that brought us together. we make ourselves vulnerable. as i got into it, the book i was writing, i figured out it would be called dreamland about six months before i actually finished the book. most of the time i didn't know what the book was going to be called and it seemed dreamland was the perfect title. it also fit with narcotics. you drift off into a dreamland when you are on dope. a lot of traffickers, the mexican guys i was talking about earlier, they lived their own dreamland. there dreamland was to make a bunch of money selling dope,

take that money back home and being the boss of the king, the big guy for six weeks or three months or something like that. be the guy who buys the beer for everybody. once the money is done, you don't have much choice. you are not going to go back to work in avocados or the sugarcane field. you are going to go back to sell dope in the united states. everybody has their own dreamland and maybe this is part of the theme. maybe we are all looking for this dreamland, easy answers to complicated questions. what was the complicated question? how do we solve american pain? the easy answer is how about opioid painkillers for everybody? that's a kind of dreamland as well. when's you extrapolate off the idea, you see how it fits in this topic and of course, it

starts in the great town of portsmouth, ohio. host: inhost: portsmouth. let's bring our callers in. guest: you spoke about why we accept such deaths from drugs and covid -- i'm wondering about your comments -- have you thought of working with a neurobiologist or historian? it's a deeply toxic self interest you discuss in your books, self interest versus group interests. the capitalistic, survival of the fittest ideology that tried to justify scientifically racism and white supremacy in the

1960's with the first libertarians, gault and herbert spencer. what they were trying to show is how evolution works. wrongly, it is not competition, it's actually cooperation. and the benefits -- host: we have a lot to unpack there. let's hear from our guest. sam: this is a very interesting idea and one i'm still wrestling with and thinking about and writing about, but i do believe you are right. i try the beginning of the reagan administration but we also see it with the margaret thatcher administration, this move away from the collective ideal. all government is bad, government is part of the problem, and they were

addressing real issues -- government had overstepped, but that doesn't mean the pendulum has to swing all the way to where it did and my feeling is, as it did and time went on, we lost sight because we were so prosperous certainly in this country, we felt we did not actually need one another. we didn't need that collective community approach to life. everything was done for us because we had every service you could possibly need. we began to believe we were exceptional. all of those rules don't apply to us. i think that's what began to happen, certainly with the reagan administration and as the pendulum began to swing and you begin to see all of these towns -- a good example is you want free trade, there are arguments for that but you have to do something for those towns that

have lost those factories that go to mexico, go to malaysia or china in colossal numbers and it's almost as if we felt as a country that you lose, time for you to suck it up and rebound. it's your bummer, not ours. i think that was the prevailing attitude in this country, that i think became very damaging. self-reliance is an important thing but it is dependent on other people. it's counterintuitive but you cannot be self-reliant without the help of other people. we lost that, i think to a great degree. a symptom is the enormous, very

entrenched drug addiction epidemic we are seeing coast-to-coast. you see it in other statistics like suicide, friendless and this, people are lonely, you see a lot of things like this. housing developments being built in the middle of nowhere so the next time you need to buy a loaf of bread, you have to get in your car for five miles. all of these things seem to be baked into american culture in the last 40 years and the effect has been to corrode that community that we took so for granted. it has enormous benefits to us and one is as a bulwark of defense against things like drugs. when you think about it, we evolved to be community beings. human beings evolved -- two

absolutely need it. we don't survive as a species without that movement toward each other that is essential. we got away in this country, and the last 40 years, we believed it did not really apply to us. so we are seeing a lot of things sociologists and mental health experts and on and on are noting about our culture -- the mass shooting phenomenon, all of that kind of stuff because we have shredded all that brought us together and that dreamland pool and the jobs that went away and the main street that had to buckle under to walmart. all of that is part of the same story. host: you brought up walmart which plays a role. what is that role? sam: yes. walmart is first of all a sign you have no more main street in

small-town america. it's a sign your main street is dead or dying or may have been the reason your main street is dying. but it is also a very important thing people don't understand about walmart -- it's also the place where, it's the lubricant of the drug trade in many towns. i heard this from too many addicts who convinced me of this. the reason for that is walmart does not put much money at all, certainly comparatively to other big-box stores, much money at all into preventing shoplifting. if you go to a target -- this is pretty common -- the aisles are wide, the lights are bright and you see target employees and the redshirts, 5, 6, 8 -- any time

you visit the place. go to walmart, the aisles are narrow, the lights are dim and you rarely see a walmart employee, which means it is extraordinarily easy to rip off walmart. this is widely known, i want to assure you. every addict who is on the street i've ever talked to has come up with stories of how they ripped off walmart or their boyfriend or somebody close to them ripped off walmart. it was and i think may still be, but certainly from all the years we are talking about, the late 90's into just a couple of years ago, it was ridiculously easy to rip off walmart. what does that mean? it means all of those things stolen from walmart are traded for dope. t-bone steaks, x boxes, perfume, children's shoes, dealers in

portsmouth, i wrote about how dealers would make lists -- go steal me this and i will give you half the list price. so if it is an $80 chainsaw, i will give you $40 worth of pills. some people, certainly in the town of portsmouth had shops made up of stuff, a certain kind of item they would rip off from walmart. one woman had a department for of baby stuff, another person had hardware. but what you find is it's ridiculously easy to rip off walmart and that is what is stolen feeds the drug dealers. and adds to it, lubricates the ripping off of walmart, because they are so common, because in many areas, it's almost only the reit -- almost the only retail

option because it sells everything. it has become a place where people know i can rip off easily and take that stuff to my dealer and my dealer will give me dope for it. it becomes -- may well -- many walmarts have documented this. it's become a huge drain on police department time in whatever town you happen to be. i was talking to folks in paducah, kentucky. they found the two walmarts in the town accounted for 15% of total officer time and when year. because handling shoplifting complaints because walmart has built into its stores almost an ease with which people can rip it off. all of that stuff ends up somewhere. some people are stealing so they have enough to eat, a lot of people are stealing for their dope. i think a lot of people, a lot

of the loss comes from people who work at walmart. they are the ones, i'm not going to disparage folks who work there, but they are not paid enough to care. they don't care too much when they see people walking through the doors, they are not going to confront some guy and say i will let him go. but walmart became a crucial element in why particularly in certain areas, appalachia, rust

belt areas, why you saw the spread of the opioid epidemic so quickly, because it was lubricated so quickly by all the shoplifting that goes on. walmart has not done enough, maybe be doing more now, but has not done enough to put a lid on. -- guest: i'm a retired law professor. before i was a lawyer -- i will be 70 in a few months. i did a couple of studies on heroin users and a couple of articles, i just wanted to say for you and for folks and get your comment on what do we do now type of thing? i have a study that i wrote with david musto at yale. it's a follow-up study from a

clinic from 1920 and it was published in the new england journal of medicine, april 30, 1981. soon after that, the new york times did an editorial on it called an old way to help addicts about the morphine maintenance clinics. they were all over the country. this was a way where addicts were not stigmatized. they were allowed to buy their morphine, so naturally, the police and police stations, this has existed up into the present day in places like vancouver. host: i think we got enough there. let's get a response from sam quinones. sam: that is an approach that

continues to this day and part of it is under the heading of what they call medically assisted treatment which involves certain medications, occasionally opioids of a lower potency to calm cravings or blunt overdoses. it's very important. it needs to be out there and needs to be in far wider use, it seems to me because particularly you have fentanyl out there doing enormous damage. you do have experiments now beginning in vancouver and new york city with what are called safe consumption, the addict will go into this place and use

your drug in the presence or nearby a nurse who can then revive you if you then overdose on whatever it is you are using. supposedly, and i think a lot could be going on. i have not visited one yet. this is a place where you are introduced, nudged, perhaps urged to consider drug addiction treatment. i would say this approach is an interesting one. i don't think we are in a situation where we should say no to anything but i also think we should say this. there's a saying on the street that fentanyl changes everything . from my vantage point, that could not be more true.

fentanyl means people are dying very, very quickly. there is no long-term user of sentinel on the street. heroin, you could last 20, 30 -- i've met people who have lasted 40 years. not a great life, but they are not dead. that's not happening with sentinel. the idea being we will just revive them with this drug called narcan or naloxone, it revives you once you are having an opioid overdose, very good, it keeps people alive. the problem is with this is i think what may come to pass is you have people who are using, they are going into overdose, and every time you overdose, that's not a neutral event. you are overdosing -- the

definition of an overdoses when you are deprived of oxygen. your brain shuts down in your gradually deprived of oxygen. any time you do that, you are going to risk brain impairment. every time someone is revived, that person risks brain impairment. you're fining people getting revived on the street nowadays, half dozen a dozen times, sometimes within the same day. it's not an uncommon thing. many paramedics have told me this. we have to find a way of making sure the second part of that safe consumption, the idea that this is to get people into treatment is what this is all about. there is an idea that we should meet them where they are and they are not at a point where

they want to be getting off of dope, we just say ok. the problem with that is we know where those people are. they are at death's door. they are using fentanyl and they are going to die. that's not a debatable point. i can't imagine a one who would debate it. you are going to die on fennel the longer you use it. the idea behind safe consumption sites, when ever -- just keep using it and we will take care of it for you. those folks are not going to live long enough for that to happen. what may have been a perfectly fine option in the 80's with morphine, with fentanyl is a very different beast because fentanyl is a very different beast. even when people live and are revived, they still have this gradual, perceptible or

imperceptible sometimes brain impairment. a fellow wrote me the other day and said our clients that come in with an eighth grade reading level. if those who have had six overdoses, their reading level drops to about second grade. those who have had to overdoses, they drop a reading level. something like that. this is not harm free. we need to be in the process of pushing people, nudging people, getting people aware they are not going to live with fentanyl on the street. it just won't happen. host: you are talking about the

potency of drugs today -- these so-called designer drugs, they are a lot more potent and addictive than 20, 40 years ago? sam: without a doubt. and crucially prevalent. it's about supply. this is about how easy it is to come up with the stuff or how easy it is to find wherever it is you live. marijuana is a separate issue, but when it comes to things like math and fentanyl, which have -- crack is like a footnote so -- they are synthetic, they can be made with chemicals what what was important is the control of land.

you can grow your marijuana, opium poppies, all that kind of stuff. you don't need any of that anymore with synthetic drugs. farmers, harvesting, none of that. you only need a laboratory away from the prying eyes of helicopters. what you need is shipping ports. there are two very large shipping ports close to this region that is central. there's one and there's another and these two ports, from these two ports, traffickers control a lot of the flow in those ports and can get access to any chemicals they want that are made in china or india or anyplace else.

in almost unlimited quantities. that means they are now able to make these drugs in quantities -- as i said at the outset, they are covering from l.a. to skidrow, you've got those drugs everywhere and that's largely because they control this ports for this chemicals come in, you can make simply staggering quantities of these drugs, enough again to do the unprecedented thing of covering the country with both of them. at the same time, we don't have much history with fentanyl and the price of meth as they cover the entire country has dropped

by 70%, 80%. in nashville, it was $19,000 a pound, now it's $3000 a pound. it is a remarkable thing and very scary. because it's everywhere. that is the problem. when i lived in mexico, i never wrote much about the drug world. i was a freelancer and let other reporters -- let some big media corporation, i'm a freelancer, loner, i don't have any background, so i covered immigration because it -- because that was a more important topic at the time. but if you asked me about drugs and drug trafficking, i agree with the typical mexican idea that all drugs begin with demand and supply follows demand. i would say the last 12 or 13. writing these books on the topic

have totally changed my opinion on that. i believe now supply is paramount and supply is the reason, supply is the story when you talk about the opioid epidemic. we did not have this enormous population of the consumer before the expansion of the opioid dealer and all manner of pain and stuff promoted by pharmaceutical companies and prescribed by doctors. it's a catastrophic supply of the stuff and you see the mexican underworld taking over and we will supply basically almost the entire united states with this stuff. it's all about supply. you can' >> it effects everything, it affects how many people get addicted, how many people die, law enforcement on and on and 0 like that. to me, that's an idea that occurred to me after i left mexico and as i was writing

about these topics. >> and sam quinones, in the least of us, looks at the organization. how the drugs arrive in the united states, how they're distributed, et cetera. chris is in california. chris, please go ahead with your question or comments. >> on a country that spends more on drug sniffing dogs, addiction research has come up with what may be the silver bullet. it came out in the october '21 edition of pharmaceuticals university of california attar irvine. from ancient china, with tolerance to abate addiction.

did you hear about that? >> i'm afraid i have not heard of it. i'm easy to find me online, if you want to send me a link. i apologize for not having seen that study. feel free to will being me up and shoot me a link to that. >> concern kneel-- cornelius. >> sam quinones, i've been listening, how america has changed. i was a big ross perot patriot and he said that would be the giant sucking sound because the democrats and republicans wanted to connect canada, u.s. and mexico. so do you think this was a downfall of america? thank you, sam. >> thanks for the question. it's a great one and you could spend books discussing it and

it's a valid, very valid question. and i would say that free trade, you know, like everything in life, is about trade-offs. it's about tradeoffs and how you respond to those tradeoffs i think is crucial. so we lost many jobs because of that. we also gained many jobs because of that, i think. we have a lot of people working in different industries now that never would have been there before, i think. you have communities that did very well, particularly in the west. certain parts of the atlantic coast as well, i would say, various places you could find these, austin, texas, places like that. and you also find places that were hammered, were just hammered by this and the problem that i think took place was that we didn't see it as

important to deal with that. my feeling was, i think -- i think this is largely true, that the jobs that left to mexico might well have left elsewhere as well. i don't think, however, we ever did enough to make sure what we could do as a culture, as a country to prevent the jobs relating even in the middle of free trade. i just don't see that we were kind of, you know, taken by this kind of free market religion, which i think it kind of amounted to, and therefore, anything that happens with this is going to be okay. there is no doubt, as you travel through places like ohio, kentucky, indiana, et cetera, various places like that, you can see the remnants of what was pre-nafta, pre-free

trade, perhaps pre-globalization. how to deal with that, a solution where other parts of the country can get our attention and we never made that step. i testified in one of the more surreal moments of my life. i testified before the u.s. senate. friends of mine will think how on earth did this guy ever testify before the u.s. senate, but i did, thanks to lamar alexander and his health committee there in the senate a couple of years back and which i said, i think it's appropriate to think in terms of a marshall plan for those parts of the country that have not been able to, you know, rebound the way we thought they would, or they could, from what they lost due to this kind of industrialization of free trade and what have you. and i think that that, it's not a surprise in a lot of areas, that's where you also find the

gypping of the opioid epidemic as well. we all pay the price. it's the idea that that doesn't concern me, i'm over here in phoenix, i'm here in the silicon valley, that's in virginia, that's in ohio, that doesn't matter to me. no, it does, it absolutely does. we can in the, you know, we are our brother's keeper. no, it's our problem. >> text message for you, mr. quinones, you brieftly refer to the hidde costs of immigration, would that include, murder, sex trafficking, gangs, et cetera, and what would you do with the illegal aliens in our country. >> that's part of the mix, you're right. i was also thinking frankly of schools and education, these,

again, illegal immigration has been an enormously, i would say, frankly, a vibrant injection of vibrancy into our economy, i don't think it's a good idea. the people who are here illegally are easily exploited and they are here providing unfair competition to american workers. i think frequently. but i think they're there because there is, again, we believe in the free market, right? the free market is saying, we value these workers. they do essential work for us. there's always these other issues that the he texter, i guess, brings us, which are huge and which affect american lives very clearly. it depends what, i think, frequently what it depends on is the absolute position that one holds in the economy. if you were in the middle or

upper or middle classes you zoo he immigration one way, if you're toward the lower end, the bottom end, you're going to see it differently. i was in-- in san bernardino, largely mexico-american inhabited by people who came oem in the 1920's, and now their children and great-grandchildren there and that's one of the staunchness anti-immigration area i've been in balls because of two mothers telling their perspective. these guys are coming up here, these mexican guys were invading. these were mexican-american families telling these folks are invading. they shouldn't be here. they're stealing the jobs. these are the words of people we're using, stealing the jobs that our kids need to have in the car washes and restaurants primarily, those jobs and so there was this deep, deep

resentment. we're americans, we speak english, we don't speak spanish much anymore, that kind of thing. there was a definitely feeling of we are not these folks, even though we have similar last names and we may go to the same catholic church and what have you, we are definitely different and from what point of view you-- from which point in the economy you view immigration, color's everything. people in african-american community, in years ago when this issue was hotter than i think it really is today, were extraordinarily articulate, let's say, on this very issue, that folks were coming here, they were unfair competition, living five, six, guys to an apartment. we can't afford to do that, we have mortgages and rent and we have all of this stuff and they're taking jobs that we can't compete with at wages or at, you know, for hours and hours a day that we can't do.

so all of that is part of this very, very complicated mix. what to do about it, oh, my god, i don't know. to me though everything that has to happen, has to happen bi-nationally. it didn't do one country doing one thing and the other is to go nothing. it's all about what mexico needs to do and what the united states needs to do. same with drugs. >> robert from philadelphia, you're on book tv with author and journalist sam quinones. >> mr. quinones, thank you for taking my call. your assessment of the hollowing out of america due to reaganomics is a breath of fresh air.

do you with hollowing out of the industrial base, the job market, and the racism, ronald reagan use and republicans use as a catalyst to get people, particularly white people to vote against their best interests? >> in my books are very narrowly focused on the -- on the drug issues, so that doesn't come up, nor really does reaganomics per se i would say. although i clearly see the connection. and also, this kind of treatment of the free market is almost like when quasi religious ways, like it's just god's will almost, that kind of thing. i studied economics in the 1970's and '80s and found it to be a very rigid discipline, either was-- marxism was a religion, and i

regret studying it back then and i think it would be more interesting today than in 1980, '81, '82. i would, however, say that there is a lot to what you're talking about. there's a remarkable ability for-- of political marketers, seems to me, to push buttons that they keenly understand will move people to do certain things, even if if doesn't make sense that they're doing it because they're benefitting very wealthy people when these folks are working class and these kind of things and you can see it still, i would say, even more pronounced way today. you can name several issues that would be put--

kind of push button issues, abortion, guns, homosexuality and critical race theory and some other stuff, you know, and just push those and people will respond. it doesn't matter what you actually mean by that or what the people who agree with you, what their policies or on that. it's just, it's a way of pushing people's outrage and the narrow science of outrage is a fascinating thing. we all evolved to have outrage because it's what policed communities early on and a way of saying, calling people out. you can't do that, because your behavior is hurting our community, but in order to do that, you know, you had to step out into the public. you had to publicly accuse somebody. there had to be this cost that you had to bear. i think that outrage now is not

born by the people who feel it. they just feel it and it feels good. particularly see this on all the entire political spectrum of cable tv news, these people are bad, you're right, they're bad. you're right, they're bad. and so, it gets into very complicated topics. what you're asking, it's a real interesting thing. it originates in that time period i believe your he referring to. i would say now it's like taken to a whole new level, almost. it seems to me, where people are just being prodded and pushed. social media, cable tv news, two of the most toxic influences in our society and i'm referring to fox news and cnn bolt. this is not journalism, this is media personalities prodding us with outrage. who become like the mice in the cage that hit the cocaine water

over and over and over because it alarms our brain and we can't get enough of it. and i have turned-- we don't have cable tv news in our family at all. we turned off cable tv because of that. i couldn't stand it anymore. anyway, it's kind of a long-winded answer to what you're asking, but i do believe that this is part of where we are now. this prodding to outrage and what that does, it frequently makes people vote or support ideas that are kind of coulden trar i-- contrary to their own. >> i would say that c-span is founded and funded by the cable industry and we appreciate that very much. >> there you go. >> okay. >> rick is calling in for irwin, tennessee. rick, you're on with sam quinones. rick, are you with us? okay, we've given rick two tries, i think that's enough. this is a text message,

mr. quinones from peggy in lancaster, pennsylvania. >> since fentanyl is used medically, at what point is fentanyl illegal as it crosses the border, how is it packaged and how is it caught? >> it's illegal first and foremost it's made illicitly, it's not made in a pharmaceutical factory with inspectors and following f.d.a. guidelines, et cetera, et cetera, the normal way that the pharmaceutical industry abides by, you can bet it's not being made that way and then it's packaged, you name it, and that's one of the big stories i would say of today is that the amount of supply they've been able to produce down in mexico has forced them to innovate in terms of how it's packaged. so, now what you're finding, the last few years, you're finding counterfeit pills coming over and by the tens of

millions i dare say now. it starts out in the thousands and i think it's up pretty clearly to tens of millions, where you're finding pills, counterfeit pills that look like percocets or xanax, blue pills, this he press them and they make them look like the real thing except the pills have nothing, but fentanyl. looking for pays-- they make so much fentanyl looking for ways now of providing an administration vehicle and these administration vehicles are these little pills that look exactly like the legitimate versions in-- that you see in pharmacies. and so, it's coming across like that, it's coming across by the kilo pack, and most of it through border crossings, very,

very heavily monitored border crossings, but we just simply don't have the staff, i think this is clear, to search more than a small percentage of all the trucks that come across the border in a single day. it's just huge numbers of trucks because there's free trade, right? so-- >> steve lincoln, nebraska sends in a text and follows up on peggy's. it seems obvious that the complicity of the mexican government is essential to the operatings of the mexican cartels. are there any conceivable scenarios where in government complicity and corruption would change? >> i would say that that is true when you say elements of the mexican government are complicit in this. i would say the mexican government as a total, i'm not sure that that's true, but enough to make this a major

problem, okay? i do believe, having lived in mexico 10 years, i don't vow mexico with any kind of rose colored glasses. i love mexico, it's been great years down there and i'm also clearly aware of issues that the country has with regard to corruption that the texter mentions. i would say that we need a sustained, collaborative, corrective kind of approach between both countries. because both countries bring something to this very wobble ly table, okay? one, the mexican side is this-- a criminal justice system that's not only corrupt, it has been underfunded, corroded, it does not have the same stability and morale and training that we enjoy here in our law enforcement in the united states.

it's extraordinarily important and you can see the difference if you just go to el pass poe suarez. a place i've been do more than that. el paso has i think 15 to 20 homicides a year, i don't know the last, juarez, 3,000, 5,000, 3,000. even though they're yards across the river from each other. you can see the grave difference, grave disparities what-- in mexico they've investigated in local government, very, very important we enjo aremarkably resilient and flexible and innovative local government. where in mexico, i can tell you i have he covered many place ins in mexico, it's backward even though it's come a long way since i was there it's still far, far to go. at the same time i think it's important to understand that

the reasons why that impunity, and that corruption, one of the reasons that exists is because they have armed themselves with guns that were bought legally and easily in this country, primarily assault weapons, which become the weapon of choice for the mexican drug cartels. bought easily and cheaply here in the united states and smuggled south to mexico. those wars are being fought with guns that are-- the statistics either 60 to 70% purchased in the united states. the assault weapons that we have been talking about lately because of the mass shootings, because they're now legal, you can buy them anywhere, they're very cheap, very easy, they have been the plain fuel down there in mexico's drug wars for a long time right now. so we need to do something

about the guns that is fueling that impunity, that allows for massive supplies of meth, massive supplies of fentanyl to be produced down in mexico and then funneled up here to the united states. again, it's all about supply. it's about supply of guns. it's about supply of dope and there's the sim biotic relationship when it comes to the cartels, anyway, between the two, it seems to me. >> two very popular series, ozark on netflix and then queen of the south as well, deal with the mexican cartels and drug use here in the united states. have you watched those? >> i watched -- i watched ozark for a couple of years and then they killed off the characters that i liked so i stopped watching it, oh, jimmy is dead, i'm not going to watch that no more. and so-- >> was there reality in what we were seeing there? >> i would say that the reality

of-- when you begin to see torture and very public murder in the united states, that that does not correspond to reality because for a very good reason. and what i was just talking about. the mexican drug trafficking world, you know, which is cartels and a bunch of small time operators and family networks and village-based networks and so on, all selling drugs, so many of them very organized, some of them less so, but they're all very, very clear that you don't commit these heinous crimes in mexico that you're doing down in mexico up in the united states because you will go to prison. there is a still rule of law when it comes to that and i think that's extraordinarily

important, the rule of law is a precious, precious thing and you lose that, and i saw when you lived in mexico, the rule of law was ten uous in at law was a big one. and you've got these depictions of people who are up in the united states committing kind of like horrible, torture and-- i'm not saying it never happens, but there are good business reasons that really is not the norm. it just doesn't happen. you have, in fact, in contrary. and certain areas i have a ben reporting in the past. in colorado, different cartel groups and different traffic organization that is may be at each other's throats down in mexico are co-existing, and even clob collaborating up in

colorado and that's why you don't have the special heinous crimes. not that nobody is ever murdered mind this stuff, but don't see the stuff in mexico, piles of bodies and hanging from the overpass, and beheading. i lived in mexico, and i traveled by bus everywhere, and went places 12, 15 times. tijuana, the border, no problem ever -- well, one time and now, you know, it's very difficult, but a lot that have is because they have easy, easy access to the weapons that are being-- that are now in the news because of these mass shootings and because people can buy them here easily and smuggle them south. >> derrick, you're on with journalist and author, sam

quinones. derrick is in albuquerque. >> i was going to ask you if you've been through here. >> many times. >>, but this subject is close to me, wrap is up. i'm a recovering addict and i recovered in 2012 through medicated assisted treatment, but the fentanyl problem and the meth problem in albuquerque has overtaken our city. my uncle died due to an overdose fentanyl in our town and tied it in, how you said the drugs come here and the guns and money go back there ab and that's why they have a mass problem and wanted to see if you think there's any solution to this besides massive rehabs and you know, people are dying every day massive numbers. >> hey, derrick, before we get an answer from mr. quinones, you say you got sober in 2012.

what was your drug and using. >> i started off using pills, the blue m-30 pills he was talk about, and the precipitation and click i cans made them harder to get, i switched to heroin and used treatment of methadone to get off the heroin. >> thank you, sir. >> congratulations, keep going. a massive achievement and i know how hard it can be. and feel free to get in touch with me on e-mail, i'd love to talk about later, but what you probably know to be true if you had been using now, you might not well have survived, right, because there's fentanyl in everything. that's the point, that's the point, that fentanyl. fentanyl changes everything and everybody dies. if you're on the street you're

going to die. the only option is you must get off the street. get treatment. we have to provide that for people, to seems to me and i would say you're absolutely right you live in albuquerque, and a town i love. both of my first two books were published by the university prep, and been in albuquerque a number of times as well as new mexico. and i think, yeah, the dope that comes in is paid for and the money goes south along with the guns, it's very important for americans to understand how many of the guns that we buy and sell and, so easy to do and all of this kind-- anybody can do it, how many of the guns are ensuring, ensuring down in mexico that they can produce these catastrophic amounts of dope, drugs,

fentanyl and methamphetamine. it's the symbiosis. >> you can't produce this amount of dope without vast weaponry that is unceasing, keeps on coming. and that's what they do, the assault rifles. the cartel wars that we're experiencing now, and for the last good number of years, really began to escalate the year after in the united states we allowed the assault weapon ban to expire. okay? now, that may be a coincidence, i don't know, but what i can say as i said before, that the guns that are being purchased here and smuggled south are making it certain that those guys can use their corruption, can use a variety of other tools at their disposal to produce enough methamphetamine

so that the price drops from 19,000 to $3,000 a pound in the city of nashville. that is the price of those guns going south. that's fentanyl that's killing everybody, that's the price of those easy to buy guns, particularly assault weapons, going south. assault weapons are prized because they are in a war. these are guys in wars, you know, with each other, mostly, sometimes with the military. so keep this in mind. >> something you write about, mr. quinones and this is a text message to you. what would happen if drugs were legalized in the u.s., perhaps treated like alcohol? >> well, yeah, that's an excellent question. i have a few things to say about that and i have gone back and forth on this topic, many a lime r time and it's always worth bringing up and batting around, i think, because it's

so important. illegal drugs fuel mafia and we saw that with prohibition. clearly, too, legal drugs result in far more use than those drugs when they were illegal. very clear, okay? so, you can see that with alcohol, i think, you can see it with a lot of different things, you know, it just-- when you make stuff legal and go from there, then it becomes easier and more socially acceptable to do it and therefore, you have to plan for the inevitable after effects or side effects from that increased use. and that can, you know, we will always need jail because jail is -- what is the drug that lands most people in jail? it's alcohol. it's alcohol. so we will never -- we'll

always need jails because of that. we'll always need some way of dealing with the after effects, the side effects of legalization. i would like to see, i guess, personally let me say, i would like to see us legalize one drug well and right now, we are mangling the job with marijuana in my opinion. you know, what is one of the-- think about it, what is one of the great lessons of the opioid epidemic, right? i believe this is one. be careful, be careful what very potent drug you make legal and widely available with outlandish claims about its risk-free nature. that's the whole story of opioids in our country, now? you can say maybe we should make all of these drugs legal, well, yeah, but the opioid ep dem elk starts with legal drugs, right?

it's not an illegal drug that starts the stuff, it's doctors and pharmaceutical companies promoting the hell out of it. and this brings me to the topic i wrote in "the least of us" that is to say that i am not sure-- i don't believe, in fact, that we have the kind of culture in america that will tolerate, has much appetite for the kind of government regulation that would be required to successfully legalize a drug in america. other countries may be able to do it, i don't know that we are there as a culture. i think we have too much -- we bridle too much against government intrusion and regulation and this kind of stuff. look, we're in the middle of climate change, which is extension threat to this planet, and yet, we're in california and other places

we've made it literally legal to sell marijuana that's been grown indoors. this is a weed that grows outdoors perfectly. we're growing is indoors with an enormous carbon footprint. you have economic interests and pushing it because it benefits them, it doesn't benefit anybody else. we don't have the appetite for the kind of serious regulation that would be necessary to legalize drugs successfully. marijuana is a disaster, it seems to me. it loses track of all of the lessons we should have learned in prohibition. after prohibition is over, we didn't legalize all of this bathtub hooch and all of this stuff that made people blind and that kind of stuff. the pot world is filled with

versions of marijuana like that, 30, 40% thc, and the active ingredient in marijuana. seems to me like we need to step back, go very slowly, very cautiously, take our time and be aware that we really, really bad at this. we don't know what we're doing. instead we're opening up the doors. i would say to me it feels right now in some states, it feels very much or maybe just generally in america, it feels much like alcohol pre prohibition, it is fine you want 90% thc vape, fine. that kind of thing. and so i think it feels to me like before we start talking about legalizing heroin and methamphetamine, i would say how about let's do marijuana cautiously, humbly, slowly, really slowly, and do it right instead of just rushing in

because certain economic interests, it's in their interest to want us to do that and finally, one thing, a great book called blitzed. the one country that legalized methamphetamines. this book is about that country, the third reich, nazi germany. they had legalized methamphetamines and seems to me there's lessons about societal control when you start doing this as well. anyway, there are arguments on this and i think that when i view it from the perspective of, i've been viewing it in the last few years, it gets me -- people say shouldn't we legalize drugs because of the opioid epidemic and i say, well, that started with legal drugs so maybe not. i don't know. >> all four of sam quinones' books are about people and the end of "the least of us", he does opine on what he was just talking about the legalization

of drugs. i want to read a few selected sentence toss add to what he said. business combines are now everywhere, we call them big pharma, big tech and big oil and now emerging is big dope. i don't trust american capitalism to do drug legalization responsibly and goes on to write. decriminalizing drugs removes the one lever we have to push men and women towards so bright. sobriety, and the drugs on the street are as cheap, prevalent and deadly as they are today. this is a text message, mr. quinones. hi, sam, i'm 73 years old and have to use opioids for pain management for an arthritis that can be disabling. because of abuse of opioids, i

had to sign a contract with a practitioner, he's the only prescriber and i take the prescribed amount and no more, my insurance company monitors. people like me who need them are under strict rules and why aren't abusers monitored, too? . i would say that, yes, i would say that we've changed a lot. i mean, i remember writing dreamland, when i was writing dreamland, none of that was true, right? it was fairly wide open. you could get refills for almost anything, and sometimes pushed on you. i had my appendix out a year or so before i was involved in this, and they give me two vicodin a day in the hospital and cut me loose a third day and they gave me an enormous bottle of vicodin, take as needed. and i didn't know what vicodin was at this point and i don't

like to take bills so i took two and the rest remained in the back of my medicine cabinet. strict regulation of those pills is a good thing, but we need to understand there are people like the gentleman who wrote to you who are clearly nonabusers. clearly these drugs are a benefit to their lives and this is the case all across the country. there are many people like that. and so, cracking down on them to the degree-- it sounds like he's able to get his medication and it's a good thing and happy he is, but there are oftentiles people who cannot get their medication because of this abuse, because, you know, the pendulum was here and now it's swung back over here now. and i think that that is really something-- that also needs to change and

we need to modify that and take into account the person and this has always been the story. before, you know, before the opioid epidemic, rarely did anybody get these pills or these pain meds, even in hospital, you had to have doctors, three different doctors sign off on the use and no one was getting any refills and no one was taking drugs home and any of that kind of stuff and then you have this period of just freeing up entirely of the prescribing practices and so on and then everybody's got a refill and everybody's take it go and all you have to do, i've got a pain here and i've got another refill and that kind of thing and it seems to me that we treat everybody the same. it's like all or nothing, you know? i should say nothing or all. and it feels like we need to think more deeply about this and also provide within our

medical structure, time with doctors. patients who are suffering from chronic pain they need a wide variety of treatment. they can't just be one thing, but when that one thing works pretty well they can't then be told, no, you're a drug abuser or you can become addicted and this person, the history shown that the person can handle it. and i don't think that we have this happy medium, which is where we ought to be and i'm not quite sure all the reasons why not, but honestly, it doesn't seem to me that folks like your caller there, would actually-- were taken enough into account. certainly some who have lost their entire access to these pills, really, i think, need to be-- that needs to -- these issues need to be addressed and i'm not sure they are. >> mike is calling in from san

bernardino, california. you're on with sam quinones. >> thank you, mr. quinones. >> yeah. >> my question is fentanyl. i know there's a lot of money being made sales, but do you think there's a more sinister motive for introducing it to our country? and also, how widespread is it? i mean, is it world-wide in other countries? ments mike, do you think there's a more sinister motive? >> well, it did come from china. >> yeah, i mean -- i would say that i have not done reporting on the question you're asking, mike, but it's absolutely a valid one, absolutely a valid one and i may try to do some reporting on that, if i can. and maybe, but after the paper back version comes out in

november because i think it's an important issue. i do believe from anecdotally, from speaking with people on the border that there are signs up in the cartel world in mexico that say we make fentanyl for the gringos and anybody selling fentanyl to the mexicans will be killed and that kind of thing. i'm not sure how widespread that is either. but you have to kind of view fentanyl and of course, carfentanyl 100,000 times worse as almost weapons of mass destruction now. in fact, i frequently view what we're going through right now not-- it's a drug problem and drug issue and preying on people already drug addicted. it feels to me as much like a poisoning than simply a drug issue when the drugs were far

more accommodating, for giving, let' say and speaking of heroin, amaze to go speak about heroin like this. heroin was more for giving. you could live for 40 years on heroin and you cannot on fennel nil, illicit fentanyl, i mean. i haven't done any reporting on this, i have inklings that i can't talk about right now that some of what you say may be true, it's hard to know because china-- they cut back on fentanyl. there's only a few companies allowed to make it now, but they haven't cut back on the amount of pre-cursers that companies in china are allowed to make and so that's where a lot of the trafficking world gets their chemicals to make fentanyl is from china. it's a good question and i'll-- may try to get back at that topic once some of the hubbub

dies down regarding my latest book. >> overdose deaths hit record last year, this was a recent headline in the wall street journal and papers, over 100,000 died of overdose deaths last year, as will quinones rights, more people die of overdose than died during the vietnam war. phil, portland, oregon, go ahead, please. >> oh, thank you, c-span. thank you, sam. just wanted to cover and ask an opinion. under the constitution of the usa, we're the only government, country, of assimilation for the rule of law, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, given that, your opinion, given your decade of exposure to mexico, usa cultures, can a movement of merging america and mexico occur with the five points used

illicit drugs as a motivational enemy, 30 years mexico joins usa, two tier wages, gnp become the largest market and economy and this would per sue to abolish, triads and mafia? >> phil, what made you think about this? >> because we are so entwined already and both are corrupt to either one extent or the other, that we could join forces and work together to become one and we would be bigger than china or russia. >> that's phil in portland, oregon. mr. quinones, anything you want to address. >> i'm not sure i have an opinion on that. sometimes when you're a reporter you say, i don't know. >> alan, in georgia, texting to you, mr. quinones, do you see a

resolution to the war on drugs, particularly in mexico. if so, how long until it's over? >> you know, it's got a lot of roots and it's got a lot of -- but i do believe that the mexican government needs to do, step up and do a whole lot more than it has been doing recently and for most of its history been doing. i mean, really, it's not much of a partner. that's not to say that we don't have our issues that i've spoken at great length about those, the weapons bought here and smuggled south into mexico already on this show, but i have to say that the country that really needs to address this problem most deeply is mexico, it seems to me. because it gets to bigger issues much kind of gross

economic inequality. unfairness, it gets to issues of investing in infrastructure. local governments. all of that kind of stuff is part of this story. it's the long tale to unwind, but you can clearly see it if you know mexico very well. and, but it also gets down to the point, too, where we need to-- we need to deal with sometimes just the most basic stuff. i think the traffickers, it's my impression, my feeling, hunch, cut instinct, let's say, that the trafficking world has actually making huge amounts of profits, seemingly unpenetratable, has actually painted itself in a very difficult corner. first of all, there's no drug in the united states that's now safe to use. okay, no street drug that's now safe to use. every line of cocaine is likely

to have fentanyl and marijuana you're finding it as well of the what's called heroin doesn't have heroin it's mostly fentanyl. and what's more, so you're finding an entire situation where it's really -- there's no -- you cannot exaggerate the dangers of the drugs on the street anymore, it's impossible. they're all deadly, it's russian roulette every single time. and the other thing, they have used -- they prospered because they had for so many years all of these different places where they could make their drugs, grow their drugs, marijuana, heroin, poppies, et cetera. now they've really funneled all of their production, narrowed their production capability through a few ports. so if you do something about those ports and you will those chemicals coming in clearly designed to make methamphetamine and the qualities are coming in and clearly designed to make

fentanyl. it would not be hard for the mexican government to dig deeply into what's coming into the port. there's om a few of them, maybe a dozen, part of the issue. would they go elsewhere? of course they would. who cares, they go somewhere else, they're not going to be able to get the stuff in as easily into the united states as they are making the stuff in sinaloa and going north a few hundred miles and going through those borders. it seems to me that they have painted themselves into a very sticky place that we need, we ought to take advantage of. first of all, in our schools. there is simply nothing exaggerated. you cannot exago rate the dangers of these drugs anymore and that needs to be taught to kids and they can see that all around them most the time, anyway. and, too, some kind of collaboration between the united states and mexico on

these issues, although the current government in mexico doesn't seem interested at all. collaboration on issues dealing with chemicals coming through these ports would do enormous amounts. would it be 100% solution? it would not. we don't need 100% solutions, we need 20,%, 30% solutions and that's the way forward seems to me. >> there's a website you reference in "the least of us" judge for yourselves.info, it's there on the screen. and i'm going to read from "the washington post" editorial page, how did the opioid epidemic overtake america? the prevailing narrative offered a too easy scapegoat. if not purdue, who drove the

epidemic? >> all that have is true, there's not one villain in the story, far from it, it's a complicated tale, which is the tale i tell in "dreamland", it's not about one family only. although certainly, one family and one company, purdue samly and the sackler family bear an outsized responsibility for what went on. i mean, there's a lot of -- there are a lot of roots to this story, right? there's americans wanting easy, quick fix toss what really a lot of times is rooted in our unwillingness to get in shape and to eat better food and to stop smoking and to stop drinking and on and on and on. doctors would tell us we don't need these pills, just do this. wellness, our own personal responsibility for wellness, we as a culture push back on that and there's a lot of corporate economic interest that you see in the drug companies, every company that makes these pills was part of this mix.

johnson & johnson was, too, and so was numerous of these companies. i would say this about oxycontin though, its role is outsized because, first of all, that's a tiny company. that's tiny company and their importance to this story, they were a part of this massive push to pharmaceutical sales in the mid 90's and 2000's. the only company -- every company was part of this, hiring huge numbers of salesmen and go out and badger doctors until they buy your stuff, but the only company whose drug was solely a narcotic in which they promoted entirely as risk-free, almost like an over-the-counter medicine. oxycontin's role in what happened was it took people-- because it had no other abuse deterrent in it, it took people up to very high doses, daily

doses. so you would go from, you know, maybe zoo milligrams to 200 to 300 milligrams daily of this stuff. and in an attempt to control your pain and every time your tolerance leveled out you'd have to take more and this kind of thing and then frequently what happened, people would lose their insurance or the doctor would cut them off afraid what he created, i've got to do this and those folks would then have no choice, but to switch to-- go into treatment which was hard to find at the time, or switch to heroin. you saw this-- oxycontin building up the tolerance of our addicted population across this country, to the point where nothing else would do except for heroin. they went to the streets. they tried to buy oxycontin on the streets, a dollar a milligram. you can't afford 300, and

switched to heroin. oxycontin created the tolerance level nationwide that the other opioids wouldn't be able to create to that extent and when they do that, they do that-- when they do that, they end up creating heroin addicts in waiting. and so it's true that some small percentage maybe of all the pills that were prescribed were oxycontin, but the role was outside i would say, because they took people up to those high tolerances and eventually, frequently the folks couldn't afford it and a lot of reasons why it happens and eventually they're on the streets and they have to switch to heroin. and i would also say that it's clear to me that the sackler family and purdue pharma

innovated, let's say, promotional techniques and strategies for selling an addictive narcotic. that's what they're doing. they are not selling antihistamine or something. they're selling addictive narcotic, and relentless. their salesmen were paid the biggest bonuses in the industry. there was an outsized role for purdue pharma, oxycontin and the sackler family, i believe in this story. it's true, there's not one person or thing or family even that-- i think i say this in the book as well, that there's not one root to all of this, it's rooted in american culture and commerce. >> let's try to get brad from international falls, minnesota in here, go ahead, brad. >> boy, this is a great conversation and i've been enjoying listening to it, but we are-- you were talking earlier about

the-- going into mexico and we talk about collaborating with the mexican government and now, you look at some of the things that our government has tried doing with the mexican involvement and the first one that we started was, well, i mean, there's been a lot, but the one that i'm going to speak about operation wide receiver which was to having understanding the guns and where the guns were going into the, you know, bad areas of mexico. >> yeah. >> hey, brad, we've kind of covered that area and running short on time and i apologize would you. you're up there on the border with canada. are you seeing any similarities up there, any drug flow, et cetera? >> well, here is the thing, my father started under operation wetback, 1955, so i understand as much or more than most people about how the trafficking or whether it be,

you know, it's not so much the goods and services, but my father was on immigration side, ins on the people side. >> brad, i apologize. >> okay. >> we're running a little short on time. one of the things we didn't get to and we always want to make sure to get to this is we always ask our authors what their favorite books are and what they're currently reading and here were sam quiquinones's the corpse had a familiar face, power, never let me go, smiley's people, currently reading frederick douglas, profit of freedom by david blight, families, the reformmation of history, and the king james bible and i need to bring up the last one. mr. quinones, you write that

you're not a christian, but so many of the stories that you tell in the people have been helped by christians and churches and people who are following the book of matthew, et cetera. >> right. i would say that this book was hard to write because i didn't have a map, a road map which i have for dreamland, i wrote out a big kind of book proposal. for this one, i didn't have that and so when i began to do is read widely on a lot of things and i had read the gospels before even though i'm plot a christian and i found the bible to be an essential book so i was reading it and just read the gospel of matthew at a time when i was also thinking about these topics of what does this addiction epidemic mean? what does the shredding of

community mean? well tmeans that we've turned our back on the lease among us, the least of our brethren as jesus would say. it seems like the way noord is focusing in the most local way to try to make your communities easier to live in and easier for vulnerable people. ... me -- we've been talking mostly on the show about fennel and methamphetamine. it's the paramount issue across the country and were not for covid, it would have been the paramount issue of the last five years. the book i ended up putting together was, the heart and soul of that book was the stories of the stories of americans working to repair community.

that was my focus really. the drug story evolved as i was doing that.y i felt thatt this was crucial because it showed us we have turned our back on this most potent and powerful idea that we need community and that is the way we dol best with our probles we face together as a country, and that, that telling stories of americans who were involved in again the smallest little ways trying to repair that was actually a radical thing. what if they do is radical telling their stories was actually a revolutionary thing when it's every man for himself and does it matter if we look after each other or not. i think jesus clearly showed that he was, he knew the importance of community. he knew, he understood that we cannot live without it.

we have tried in this country the last 40 years and i think the symptoms of that are again friendless nets, loneliness, depression, suicide and most importantly from my perspective the f addiction epidemic that hs ravaged all parts of the country the last 25 years or so. >> host: sam quinones first two books, "true tales from another mexico" followed by antonio gun. unfortunately we didn't get to them as much as we should have. his next two books, "dreamland" which won the national book critics circle award in 2015 and his most recent, "the least of us," true tales of america and hope in thehe time of fentanyl d math. mr. quinones we appreciate you joining us for the last two hours you're on booktv. >> it's been great. really appreciate you taking the time.

thank you very, very much. thanks to c-span. i love you guys. >> at least six presidents recorded conversations while in office. hear many of those conversations during season two of c-span's podcast presidential recordings. >> the nixon tapes, , part prive conversations, part deliberations and 100% unfiltered. >> let me say the main thing is that it will pass. my heart goes out to those people who, with the best of intentions, were overzealous. but as i'm sure you know, i'll tell you if i could have only spent a little more time being a politician last year and less time being president i wouldn't kick their butts out but i did know what they wouldn't. >> find presidential recordings season two on the c-span no mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. >> c-span is your unfiltered view of government.

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