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boston and columbus, ohio. >> good to be with you. they all have in common that they are part of the tapestry of the addiction epidemic now coast to coast. i would have said a few years ago opioid epidemic addiction but i believe that's changed the last few years with methamphetamine addict to the mixed in both of these now taken place in the old school of opioid painkillers and heroin, what connects all of those and many others is both of these

drugs are now coast to coast and this is the first time you've ever seen that in the history of our country. never seen one sort cover the entire united states with one let alone to nesta western coast of mexico and pacific and northwest. they have such enormous production capacity for these drugs they have covered the country, l.a., all of these cities and between towns and rural areas covered in this and this iss what ties a lot of thee

pounds together. he used to be drug use, it was very regional. used to have one store here in 500 miles away it would be very different and that's no longer the case. it covered thehe entire country and methamphetamine and frontal largely because these drugs are both synthetic and have no plans involved. you have to rub themem under the sun. no farmers are needed to harvest and all that. the production capacity is out doing anything with ever seen. and that has allowed them to cover the country and these drugs. one of the main things. >> could you have chosen any city in america given what you

just said ask. >> pretty much, sure. there are some towns i've seen methamphetamine really hasn't that i understand, new jersey maybe not so much, new york but by and large, i think you can find the same story with varying degrees of intensity across rural parts of the country's. ... o, west virginia, oregon, albuquerque, skid, on and on. that's one of the things that is absolutely new about what we are seeing. that is that there are two drugs and they are everywhere. of course, they are extraordinarily it -- extra nearly potent. fentanyl is the most dangerous drug we've seen on her street all wille incentivize people, i

think i'm trying to think of except for the ones that i mentioned in every part of the country has these issues. >> let's go to fentanyl for a minute that was the labab in the united states in the 1950s. >> it was developed in belgium in 1959 by one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century paul janssen he owes janssen pharmaceutica and belgium and it was a compound in a small town in belgium and then one of the most fertile minds when it came to developing drugs he developed many drugs that were enormous benefit to humankind. fentanyl is one of them. fentanyl revolutionized surgery, it made it so you could do all

kinds of surgeries that were not possible because itt allowed you to bring people into anesthesia and out of it very quickly. and that was a revelation. i've had fentanyl i had a heart attack five years ago and they gave me fentanyl is the standard drug then applied in surgery. tens of millions of kind all acrossal the country. it was initially controlled only for the use of anesthesiologist in surgical settings because they knew the potency which was the key to success in a surgical environment made it extraordinarily dangerous in the hands of people that didn't know what they were doing. that is effectively what happened since 2013 but 14, 15, 16 you have seen explosion of fentanyl in the underworld in

the underworld where people don't know what they're doing and becomeson extraordinarily deadly as to the analog the chemical cousins upset no, purple that no floral fentanyl. all the different little tweaks molecular tweaks you can make of the molecule that will turn into a drug much more potent, paul janssen predicted these drugs as well he wrote about them in a chapter in a book all about the help ofer chemist. he saw the enormous potency of the drugs was something to be aware of. i would say in the last ten years the underworld has simply discovered fentanyl and the norm is potency and profitability in

the sense that you no longer needre if you're here when trafficker, you no longer need to grow poppies and whatever seizing, you can make the stuff all year round all you need now are the chemicals to be able to make the stuff that fentanyl itself is a revolutionary drug and did wonderful things for surgery in patients like me since the 60s. >> in the most recent book since the least of us the drug overdose pathologies each year surpassed the total ofus americn deaths during the vietnam war. are we immune to this? >> maybe, i guess it is hard to say i know families have been affected by it or not they feel this every day, it lingers and

does not go away the death of a loved one due to this. but i would say there is a feeling, these are drug users, hookers. there is a feeling like this is one more year we've come to the rising statistic of ever rising death tolls. i'm afraid that may be blunting a little bit of a response to this problem it feels to me sometimes on the other hand there are more and more families every year affected by this problem more communities, more businesses, more churches, more groups of every kind. it seems to be expanding when i wrote my first book on

dreamland, everybody was about four or 5 degrees removed from an overdoseon death. antigenically speaking it feels like to if you know somebody you know some of you has a relative that died. it's absolutely feeling to me like it expanded all over the country and therefore cannot be a nordic anymore, that is actually was happening all across the country. i don't think this can be ignored we may not have the same urgency of response that i think we need to have but i don't think it can be ignored anymore. >> according to the national institute on drug abuse if you look at this chart were showing a chart on the air. you can see the rapid rise in fentanyl overdose deaths. it takes off almost in a direct line straight up. >> sure, that exactly begins once the underworld figures out

fentanyl and that happens beginning in about 2013, 14, 15 china has been, chinese chemical company i should say our advertising on the web in the dark web fentanyl has a lot of dealers in the united states, by it, get it sent to the male, this is how the initial invasion of fentanyl began to happen in the years that i mentioned. it comes to people who view that no other lottery ticket they all of a sudden won the lottery, the profits 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

grains of salt will make you high and a couple more will kill you you cannot sell a few grains of salt is notwi logistically possible as a street dealer. what you need to do is mix it with chemicals and powders that don't do anything the problem is nobody on the street knows howre to mixix the 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 their current how often narcotics officer would read these mix sites someone would have an in his basement guy in his underwear and they would find all over they were finding that people were mixing fentanyl and magic

bullet blunders. you know those from target and infomercials, their great we own a magic bullet, it's magnificent when you want to make salsa an' smoothie in alaska. uniformly awful when you try to mix the powder is for mixing liquids when you try to mix powdered as a bad job but folks were mixing fentanyl and magic bullet blunders horribly and even in some parts of what they nothing in it and other parts had enough fentanyl to kill three people so you began to see these clusters of overdoses. you remember 2014 and 15 he saw in cincinnati, huntington west virginia, those were the areas first hit by the op of epidemic into the being what was next in the opioid horizon they begin to

mix the fentanyl getting mailed from chinese chemical companies with magic blunders and that's when you see a really awful mix and you begin to see the clusters 50 and we can, 75 overdoses in a weekend. matt begins to change once the mexicans taken over in about 2016 and 17 not entirely but you get away from the egregious of all of those. fentanyl has now been discovered by the mexican underworld and they are producing and catastrophic quantities and they are smuggling it through the

border where they show a country with a free-trade agreement with mexico so you get a enormous quantities coming through mostly in trucks through border crossings in the quantities are geometrically larger than they ever were when the chinese chemical corporation diversity to pound at a time through the mail. suzie: your first two books true tales from another mexico in antonio's gun dealt a little bit more with the quirkiness of mexican cultures and morphed into migration and immigration as well. are your last two books natural outflows from the first two books? >> osher, the way i got onto

dreamland in the first place was because i wanted to write about this one town in mexico. i really wanted to write about mexico heroin traffickers and i had significant background and lived in mexico for ten years i wrote a whole lot about mexican immigration and visiteded many villages, various places where people had migrated so the migration story to me was very familiar and it is because of that that i have but not this one village a small town, ten years in mexico i had never been there it did not account for much because it was so small in the small little town on the pacific coast of mexico just south of the drug central of mexico were these guys had developed a method for selling black tar heroin very similar to

pizza delivery system for black tar heroin, he would set up the system in a town and he would have an operator standing by taking telephone orders and then you would have several drivers driving around the town there now filled with little balloons with ten saying meet the person at the burger king parking lot at this address or street corner and he wants five, you meet the guy spit w w out five in fibross and he pays you and that was her system, the system spread throughout. i thought this was a fascinating system i had never seen this before they use no guns they were very much about trying to be nonviolent and not try to be

about vengeance and shoot them into one. then from there i went down to this village it was very much like other villages that i had been to where people he migrated to the united states but along the way was understanding the reason this guy has this enormous new market for selling heroin it was expanding and they had crossed the miccosukee river in the midwest where they had never been before was because of the other story that was much bigger story that i did not understand at all which was about the revolution and pain management and the expansion of the use ofan opioid painkillers and all kinds of pain and numerous refills.

a very aggressive liberalization of the use of opioids which i did not understand at all the time i did not know what oxycontin was or vicodin or percocet. i was in mexico and oblivious entirely. when i came back i was focused on the heroin guys that for a long time i did not realize behind them the reason had a growing expanding market overall in the country was because we had exploded the amount of opioid painkillers had exploded in those painkillers contained drugs that are chemical and very similar to heroin and people getting addicted and switching to heroin which why the guys i was writing about had a emerging new market. as a revelation to 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 we wanted everything, we want cheap labor. if you want anything denture house this is been an education

for all of them mostly men. if the same time we want to complain people want everything into complain about it too. >> thank you for joining us for bookkeeping monthly in-depth program one author and his or her body of work. this month author and journalist about some of the issues you heard discussed the drug epidemic illegal immigration migration et cetera. 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 who live in the eastern central time zone if you live in mountain or pacific: add 22748821 you can also send text messages, include your first name and city, this is for

text messages only 22748893. we will also scroll through the social media context booktv is what you need to remember when it comes to facebook or twitter, et cetera you can also 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 were the ones working in this area. but most of your stories in your books are about men. >> right. >> although i would say there are probably significant stories about women angie and their daughter bella as first and

foremost that was a story i begin to the book. i think when it comes to drug dealing and drug trafficking at the man's game as is migration honestly not to say women don't do it but it's often times in every village i've been to is among them who have led from mexico is what i am referring to. those stories are a big part of the topics that i am writing about. however, the stories of angie and bella which of the thread to the least of us all the way through all the way through joe martin develops the removalro

nonprofit, folks like that. i don't think i'm leaving womenv out of my stories i think the drug trafficking world as it stands is largely a masculine world. that is reflective sometimes on the stories that i've read. >> sam's book 2015 dreamland one the national book circle award forth that year. what do you mean by dreamland. >> great question. , first and foremost dreamland refers to a swimming pool and the wonderful town in ohio. a shadow to all the folks there wonderful folks down there. it was a swimming pool largely galvanize the community for

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

mexican terms where you have people coming together and seeing one another and losing their virginity and romance was forming, a remarkable place of people coming together and as the town began to wither the jobs left. the manufacturing went elsewhere, the main street was empty and, half of the population leaves and in 1993 the tail end of all of this the dreamland pool can no longer keep people enough to go there and they get up and turn it into a strip mall to me this was a remarkable example of what i believe to be at the heart of our addiction epidemic which was shredding community all across thisco country. it's a place people came

together when they didn't have it and it was dug up they all went indoors, the only place that you actually saw anybody at walmart because mainstreet was , shelf. to me this became part of the theme to say the roots of the opioid addiction epidemic at that time were really in our own destruction shredding use all sports become club sports and is not about folks coming together to watchch kids play is about training professionals and 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 the free market was some kind of god and whatever happened with the free market was destined to be

below bonanza and someone. it seemed to me it was a remarkable story, powerful painful story for that town but also metaphorical what we have done to the entire country by shredding the things that brought us together we make ourselves enormously vulnerable. as i got into it the book i was writing i figured out it would be called dreamland about six months before i finish the book read most of the time i did not know what the book was going toe be called it seemed dreamland was the perfect title for. also fit, it was about narcotics so you drift off into adobe dreamland, i would say a lot of the mexican guys i was talking about earlier they live their own dreamland. it was to make a bunch of money selling dope in america, take the money back home and be the

boss, that came the big guy for six weeks or three months or something like that, be the best friend of everybody and the guy that buys the beer for everybody. in the enormous narcotic and once the money has done well you don't have much choice you now can you go work to avocados or the sugarcane you will god. selt dope in the united states. everybody has their own dreamland and maybe this isei ao part of the theme. maybe we are all looking for this kind of dreamland easy answers to complicated questions. what was the complicated question how do we solve american pain how do we solve human pain. the easy answer how about opioid painkillers for everybody, that is a dreamland as well. once you extrapolate off of the idea you begin to see how it fits in this topic in many ways

but asserts in the great town of ohio. >> let's bring our callers into this conversation as we continue. michael is in miami. you are on what the author and journalist. >> while, solving human pain you spoke earlier it was discussed why high deaths from drugs, suicide and covid read a million deaths from covid. i was wondering about yourr clients on this history has moved in and have you ever thought about working with the neurobiologist or historian, the toxic self interest that you talk about in your books versusn group interest, capitalistic and a western society survival of fittest ideology to try to justify scientifically racism in the 1860s with the first

libertarians, what they were trying to show today is how evolution works and both sides would roundly think it is a competition in the magic it is not a sexual cooperation and they wrongly view the benefits. >> michael we have a lot to unpack, let's hear from her guest. >> thank you michael this is a very interesting idea and one that i'm still writing about but i do believe you are right there was a period and i try to be the beginning of the reagan administration you see this move away from the collective ideal government as part of the problem and they were addressing real issues, government had overstepped there was

significant overstepping but that does not mean the pendulumh has to swing all the way to where did. my feeling as time went on we lost sight because we were so prosperous, certainly in this country, we were so prosperous we did not feel that we actually needed one another. we did not needco the collaborative collective community approach everything was done with for us we had every service you could possibly need we began to believe we were exceptional. all those rules don't apply tose us. i think that's what happened certainly with the reagan administration in the pendulum began to swing and you see all of these towns a good example you want free trade, there is arguments for that. but you have to do something for

those towns that have lost those factories that go to mexico, malaysia, china and it was almost as if we felt like a country you lose time for you to suck it up and rebound, you're a bummer it is not ours. i think that was an prevailing attitude inn this country that became very damaging and in important thing. the thing about self-reliance it is dependent on other people it's kind of intuitive but you cannot be self-reliant without the help of other people and we lost that to a great degree. a symptom but there are others a symptom is an enormous entrenched drug addiction epidemic that we are seeing

coast to coast. you also see another statistics, suicide, depression friend listen is, people don't have any friends loneliness you see a lot tof things you see big housing developments been built in the middle of nowhere so next time you need to get your car for 5 miles, that kind of thing. all of these things are baked into american culture in the last 40 years and i think the effect has been to corrode that community a feel that we took for granted and has enormous benefits and one of those a bulwark of defense against drugs. when you think about it we evolved to be community beings, human beings evolved to need not to think too many is a good

thing to absolutely need it. wouldn't survive as a species without that movement toward each other that is essential. in this country in the last 40 years we believe it did not apply to us so you see a lot of the things that sociologists and mental health experts and on and on journalist are noting about our culture the mashing phenomenon is another one i think because we shredded all that brought us together in the dreamland pool and the jobs that went away in the main street buckle underck to walmart all of that is part of the same story. >> you brought up walmart which plays a role in your writing what is the role? >> walmart -- first of all a sign that you have no more main

street in small-town america it is a sign that instead or dying or may have been the reason thaa your ministry is dying. it is also a very important thing that people don't understand about walmart is also the place is the lubricant of the drug trade in many towns ime heard this too many addicts that convinced me of this. the reasont for that walmart dos not put much money at all comparatively to big-box stores, much money at all into gpreventing shoplifting. if you go to a target aisles are wide, the lights are bright and you see employees five, six,

every time you visit the place. go to walmart the aisles are narrow, dim and you really see a walmart employee it means is extraordinarily easy to rip off walmart and this is widely known remarkably known every addict who is on the street that i've ever talked to has ever come up with stories how they ripped off walmart or the voice under somebody. all the years the late '90s into a couple. pseudo- it was easy to revolve walmart that means all those things she better stolen from walmart are treated for dope all. children choose, on and on dealers i wrote about how

dealers would makede a list youo steal me this and i will give you half of the list price and pills. if it's $80 chainsaw i will give you $40 worth of pills that i am selling. some people had shops that were made up weber certain kind of item one woman had an apartment full of baby stuff and only guy that had hardware and you find it is ridiculously easy to rip off walmart and that's what is stolen fees the drug dealers and adds to it lubricates the ripping off of walmart because they are so common in many areas it's almost the only retail

option because the cells everything food to xbox and everything in between, automotive, whatever is become a place where people know i rip off easily and i take that stuff to my dealer in my dealer will give me dope. mama is very well documented as well because of this to become a huge drain on the police department and whatever time you happen to d be. i was talking to folks in kentucky they found that to walmart in the town i counted to 15% of officer time in one year because of handling shoplifting because walmart has built into the stores and ease where people can rip it off and all of that stuff. some people tell me they're stealing so they have enough to eat. a lot of people are stealing for their dope and a lot of the loss frankly comes from people who

work at walmart they are the ones also ripping people off and not only for the folks that work there but they were not paid enough to care nor care when they see people walking through the doors with walmart stuff they will not confront the guy into a let him go whatever. walmart became a crucial element in why particularly in certain areas, appalachia, midwest, why you sell the spread of the opioid epidemic so quickly because it was lubricated by all of the shoplifting that goes on at walmart that walmart really has not done enough. maybe doing more now certainly but is not done enough to put a lid on it. >> sam is joining us from

nashville and rick is calling in from erwin tennessee. go ahead rick. rick hung up. sorry about that. manning from the wall yetet california, you are on booktv. >> i am a retired law professor in la joya california. i went to yell before he was a lawyer. i'll be 70 in a few months. i did to follow-up stories on heroin and i did a couple of articles i want to stay for you and folks to get your comments, what do weyo do now i have a sty that i wrote with david at yale. a follow-up study of the new haven clinic of 1920 and it was

published in the new england journal of medicine april 302, 1981 and soon after that the new york times did an editorial on it and called an old way to help addicts not just new haven but all over the country this was a way where addicts weren't stigmatized they were allowed to buy their morphing from the police and the police stations, this is existed up to the present day in places like vancouver in some places in europe. >> we have enough there to work with let's get a response. >> i would say that is an

approach continues to this day and part of it under the heading of medicallyat assisted treatmet which involves certain medications occasionally opioids of a lower potency to calm cravings or blunt overdoses, is very important it needs to be out there in a far wider use because particularly yet fentanyl after doing enormous damage do have experiments vancouver, new york city with safe consumption the attic goes into the place and usually drug in the presence or nearby nurse

who can then revive you if you then overdose on whatever you are using. supposedly a lot to be going on i have not visited one yet introduced or urged treatment. this is interesting i don't think were in a situation that we should say no to anything. i would say this there is a saying on the street that that no changes everything that could not be more true.

fentanyl means people are dying quickly. there is. no long-term user of fentanyl. people die very quickly heroin 20, 40 years i doubt if they last 40 years using heroin, not a great life but they're not dead. that's not happening with that now. the idea that will revive them with the drug narcan known by narcan that revives you what you having an opioid overdose, very good and helpful and keeps people alive. the problem is with this bill that may come to pass you have people who are using and going into overdose and every time that you overdose that is not a neutral event and that you are

deprived of oxygen in your brain shut down and gradually deprived of oxygen. anytime you do that you get a risk brain impairment. every time someone is revived and that person risks brain impairment people getting revived on the street half dozen or a dozen times sometimes within the same day it frequently is not an uncommon thing many paramedics told me this. we have to find a way of making sure of the safe consumption site the idea to get people in the treatment is really what this is all about there's an idea we should leave them where they are they're not in the moment where they want to be

getting off dope we should say okay the problem we know where those people are there at death's door they're using fentanyl, they're goings to die that is not a debatable point it seems to me i cannot imagine anyone who would debate. you are going to die on fentanyl the longer you use it. the idea behind safeie consumptn just keep using and whenever extraction is a good idea we will have treatment available for you. those folks will not live a long time for that to happen. what may have been a perfectly fine option in the 80s with morphing. fentanyl is a different beast. even when people live in revive over a period of time have a gradual perceptible brain

impairment. a fellow wrote me the other day and set our clients come in with an eighth grade reading level mostly. those who had six overdoses their reading level drops to second grade. those that had to overdoses and jobs a grade or two something like that. what i'm saying this is not harm free to be reviving people pushing people and nudging people getting people where they're not going to live with fentanyl on the street. >> throughout your writing you talk about mexican crystal meth, crack, opioid, heroin, fentanyl and the potency of marijuana today. are these drugs that are happening today designer drugs a

lot more potent and addictive than 20 or 30 or 40 years ago? >> without a doubt and crucially probably it's about a supply how easy it is to come up with the stuff and wherever it is one is a separate issue but when it comes to math and fentanyl, crack is like a footnote they are so prevalent because their synthetic they can be made with chemicals all year round. it used to be in the cartel world in mexico what was most important was a control of land anybody involved in production you could grow your marijuana or

opium poppies all that stuff under the sun. you don't need any of that with synthetic drugs you don't need land, son, fall, farmers harvesting none of that you only need a laboratory which is away from the prying eyes of helicopters. what you need and shipping ports to very large shipping ports on mexico close to the region that is drug central for mexico and one in the town and another port south of that in these two ports traffickers control a lot of the traffic in the flow within the ports and they can get access to all the world's chemical and all the chemicals they want made in china or india they can get through the ports and almost

unlimited quantities. that means they're able to make the drugs and quantities that we have simply never seen as a set at the outset of the show they've covered the entire country from l.a. skidrow you have the two drugs everywhere fentanyl and methamphetamine and that's largely because they control the chemical flow into those two ports. there are other ones but those of the ports were these chemicals common therefore simply staggering quantities of anthese drugs and do the unprecedented thing of cover the country with both of them at the same time we don't have much history with fentanyl but we have a long history of methamphetamine and the price of methamphetamine has dropped by

70 or 80% that was $19000 a pound now is $3000 upon it's 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 in mexico i was a freelancer and the other reporters who are deeply part of a big media corporation and people backing them up. i'm a freelancer, independent and a loner i don't have any backups. i covered immigration a more important a topic. asked me about dragon drugdr trafficking i said i agree with the typical mexican idea that drugs begin with demand that the supply follows demand the last 12 or 13 years writing these two books on this topic of change my opinion on that.

i believe that supply is paramount and supply is the reason in the story when you talk about the opioid epidemic we did not have an enormous addicted consumer or before the opioid and all manner of pain and that kinda stuff promoted by pharma and prescribed by doctors catastrophic supply in the mexican underworld taking over saying will supply basically all it is all about supply it affects everything and how many people get addicted and die how to treat it law-enforcement on and on like that. that's an idea that occurred after i left mexico and writing

about these. >> both dreamland and the leastt of us looks at the business organization of how drugs arrive in the united states and have a distributed. >> chris is in california please go ahead with the question or,. >> a country that spends more money on drug sniffing dogs, the big ten researchers come up with what may be the silver bullet. it came out all in october 21 the pharmaceutical university of california irvine researched ancient chinese it was found to inhibit tolerance which means it can be used two of eight eviction did you hear about that.

>> i'm afraid i have not heard about it but an easy to find online if you want to send me a link i'm very interested i apologize for not hearing about the specific study. feel free to look me up if you don't mind and shoot me a link if you don't mind. >> cornelius alexandria please go ahead with the question or,. >> i'm just curious because i been listening and you were talking about how america has essentially changed. i was a big role parole patriot and he said that would be the giant sucking sound because democrats and republicans wanted to connect canada, u.s. and mexico. you think this wasas the downfai of america? >> thank you for the question is a great one and you could spend

books discussing and is a very valid question. i would say free-trade like everything in life is about trade-off is just how you respond to the trade-offs which is crucial. we lost many jobs because of that. we also gained many jobs because of that. you have communities that did very well particularly in the west in certain parts of the atlantic coast as well. various places you can find austin, texas et cetera. you alson, find places that were hammeringmm by this. the problem that i think took place, we didn't see it as important to do with that.

my feeling i think this is largely true the jobs left to mexico might well have left elsewhere as well. i don't think however, we ever did enough to see what we could do as a culture in a country to prevent the jobs even in the middle of free-trade. i just don't see that we were taken with the free market religion which it amounted to. and therefore anything that happened there is no doubt as you travel through ohio, kentucky, it

him i don't think it's a good idea people here who are here illegally are exploited they are here providing competition to american workers. i think frequently but i think they are there because there is -- we believe in the free market in the free market is what we value these workers they do essential work. there is always the other issues which are huge and effective mechanize very clearly. it depends what i think frequently what it depends on his absolute position that one holds in the economy if you were in the middle upper-middle-class

is using immigration one way if you're towards the narrow lower end you will see it differently i was in westside san bernardino years ago and is largely mexican-american and people who came over from mexico in 1920 with their children and great grandchildren who were there and that's one of the biggest anti-immigrant that i've ever been in because two mothers who spent an hour telling me their perspective which is greatly valued. coming appear they are invading these are mexican-american families who were telling me these folks are invading they should not be here they are stealing the jobs that our kids need to have in the carwash and restaurants and those kind of jobs. there was a deepre resentment we

are americans and speak english we don't need to speak spanish there was a definite feeling. we are not these folks even though we have some of their last names and may go to the same catholic church we are different. from which point of view in the economy you view immigration peon african-american communities, years ago when this issue was hotter than it is today, were extraordinarily articulate, let's say, on this issue, that folks were coming here, they were unfair competition, they were living 5, 6 guys to an apartment, we cannot afford to do that, and they are taking jobs that we cannot compete with

at wages or hours a day that we cannot do. so all of that is part of this complicated mix. what to do about it, oh my god -- i don't know. to me, everything that has to happen has to happen by nationally. there cannot be a move with one country doing one thing and another is not doing anything. the same with drugs. host: robert, you are on book tv. caller: hello. thank you for taking my call. your assessment of the hollowing out of america due to reaganomics is a breath of fresh air. i often hear discussions. i don't hear it put in those terms. my question is, do you make the connection between the hollowing out of the industrial base, the

job market, and the racism ronald reagan used and later the republicans used as a catalyst to get people, particularly white people, to vote against her best interests? sam: my posts are very narrowly focused on -- my books are very narrowly focused on the drug issue so that is not,, nor does -- that does not come up, nor does reaganomics, although i can see the connection, and the treatment of the free market is an almost quasireligious way. i studied economics in the 1970's and 1980's and found it to be a rigid discipline where marxism was a religion, frick market -- free market was a

religion, it did not take into architect anything human and i kind of regret having studied at then, i think it would be more interesting today that it was in 1980. i would, however, say that there is a lot to what you are talking about. there is a remarkable ability of political marketers, it seems to me, to push buttons that they keenly understand will move people to do certain things, even if it does not make sense that they are doing at, because they are benefiting wealthy people when these people are working and that kind of thing -- working-class and that kind of thing, and you can see it in a more pronounced way today. you can name several issues that would be pushbutton issues,

abortion, guns, homosexuality, critical race theory, and some other stuff, just push those and people will respond. it does not matter what you actually mean by that or what the people who agree with you, what their policies are on that, it is just a way of pushing people's outrage and the neuroscience of outrage is a fascinating thing. we all evolved to have outrage because it is what police communities early on. it was a way of calling people out. you cannot do this, your behavior is hurting our community. but in order to do that, you had to step out into the public, you had to publicly accuse somebody, there had to be this cause that you had to bear. outrage now is not born by the

people who feel it, they just feel it and it feels good, particularly on the entire political spectrum of cable tv news where you just see people saying, these people are bad, you are right, they are bad. it gets into complicated topics. it is an interesting thing. it originates in that time period you are referring to. now, it is taken to a whole new level, it seems to me, where people are just being prodded and pushed, social media, cable tv news, two of the most toxic and winces in our society, and i'm referring to fox news and cnn both, this is not journalism , this is media personalities prodding us with outrage. we become like those mice in the cage that hit the cocaine water

over and over because it alarms our brains and we cannot get enough of it. we do not have cable tv news in our family at all, we turned off cable tv because of that. i could not stand it anymore. anyway, a long-winded answer to what you are asking. i do believe this is part of where we are now, this prodding to outrage and what that does is it makes people vote or support ideas that are contrary to their own best interests sometimes. host: i would say that c-span is founded and funded by the cable industry and we appreciate that very much. sam: there you go. host: rick is calling in from tennessee. you are on with sam quinones. are you with us? we have given rick two tries. i think that is enough. this is a text message from

peggy in pennsylvania. since fentanyl is used medically , at what point is the fentanyl illegal as it comes across the border? how is it packaged and how is it taught? -- caught. sam: it is illegal because it is made illicitly, following fda guidelines -- not in a factory following fda guidelines. then it is packaged, you name it , that is one of the big stories of today is the amount of supply they had been able to produce in mexico has forced them to innovate in terms of how it is packaged. what you are finding the last few years, you are finding counterfeit pills coming over by the tens of millions now.

starts in the thousands, now it is up to the tens of millions. you are finding counterfeit pills that look like percocet or xanax or tylenol or oxycodone, blue pills, they press them, they make these pills look almost exactly like the real thing except these pills have nothing but fentanyl. they make so much fentanyl, they are looking for ways of providing an administration vehicle and these administration vehicles are these little pills that look exactly like the legitimate versions that you see in pharmacies. so it is coming across like that, it is coming across by the kilo pack. most of this stuff is coming through border crossings, through heavily monitored border

crossings that we simply don't have the staff, i don't think -- 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 is huge numbers of trucks. because there is free-trade. host: steve in nebraska sends in a text, kind of follows up on peggy's. it seems obvious that the complicity of the mexican government is essential to the operations of the mexican cartels. are there any conceivable scenarios where this government complicity and corruption would change? sam: i would say that that is true when you say elements of the mexican government are complicit in this. the mexican government as a total, i'm not sure that is true. but enough to make this a major problem.

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

you can see the difference if you go to el paso whereas -- el paso juarez. el paso has i think 15 to 20 homicides a year. juarez, 3000. many more. even though they are 200 yards across a river from each other. you can see the grave difference, grave disparities. in mexico, they have invested in local government. we enjoy a remarkably resilient and flexible and innovative local government we are in mexico, i have covered many places in mexico, it still is backward, even though they have come a long way since i was there, it is still far to go. at the same time, it is 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, not easily and cheaply -- bought easily and cheaply and the united states and smuggled to mexico. those words are being fought with guns, the statistics i read are 62% to 70% purchased in the united states. the assault weapons that we have been talking about because of the mass shootings, because they are legal, you can buy them anywhere, they are cheap, they are easy, they have been the main fuel in mexico's drug war for a long time. we need to do something about

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

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

lose so much. i saw this when i lived in mexico. the rule was a tenuous thing in a lot of places. i would say that you've got these depictions of people who are up in the united states committing horrible torture -- i'm not saying it never happens, but it's good business reasons why that really is not the norm. you have, in fact, on the contrary, in certain areas i have been reporting and in the past, i would say colorado is one for example, you have different cartel groups, different trafficking organizations that may be at each other's throats in mexico, they are coexisting, sometimes collaborating in colorado or other parts of the country because it is about a business. this is about business, making money, everyone is clear on

that, and that is why you don't go committing these especially heinous crimes. not that no one has ever murdered behind the stuff. you just don't see the kinds of stuff that in mexico they have had to get used to with piles of body and people hanging from the overpass and beheadings, all of the stuff that never existed -- i lived in mexico from 1994 to 2004, i traveled by bus everywhere. i went up to the border, all these kinds of places, no problem ever. well, one time. and now, it is very difficult. but a lot of is because they have easy access to the weapons that are now on the news because of these mass shootings and because people don't -- because people buy them here easily and smoker themselves. host: character, you are on with sam quinones.

derek is in albuquerque. sam: great town. caller: i was going to ask you if you have ever been through here. sam: many times. caller: i will wrap this up as quick as possible. i'm a recovering addict and i recovered in 2012 through medicaid assistant treatment. the fentanyl problem here in albuquerque has overtaken our city. my uncle died of an overdose eight months ago. it is so prevalent in our town. one more thing, i liked what you said, the drugs come here, the guns and the money go back there. that is why we have such a problem. i wanted to see if you have -- if you think there's any solution to this besides massive rehab and people dying every day at massive numbers. host: before we get an answer, you say you got sober in 2012,

what was your drug at that point? caller: i started off using pills, the blue pills he was talking about. as the prescriptions and medication clinics made it to get harder, i switched to heroin and i had to get medicaid assistant treatment using methadone to get off of the heroin. host: thank you. sam: congratulations, good 4 u for you, keep going. very impressive achievement. i know how hard it can be. you keep going. feel free to get in touch with me on email, i would love to talk further with you about this. what you probably know to be true is if you had been using now, you might not have survived. because there is fentanyl in everything. that is the point. fentanyl changes everything and everybody dies. if you are 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. i would say, you are right, you who live in albuquerque, a town i love, my first two books were published by the university of new mexico press so i have been to albuquerque a good number of times as well as new mexico. i think that dope that comes in is paid for in the money go south along with the guns. it is important for americans to understand how many of the guns that we buy and sell, it is so easy to do, anybody can do it, how many of the guns are ensuring down in mexico that they can produce these catastrophic amounts of dope, drugs, fentanyl and method for mean.

it is all part of the symbiosis between the two countries. you cannot produce this kinds of dope without vast weaponry that is unceasing, it keeps on coming. that is what they get. the assault rifles -- cartel wars that we are 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 band to expire. that may be a coincidence, i don't know, but what i can say, as i said before, the guns that are being purchased here and smuggled south are making a certain that those guys can use their corruption, use a variety of other tools at their disposal, to produce enough

methamphetamines so that the price drops from $90,000 to $3000 a pound in nashville -- $19,000 to $3000 a pound in nashville. that fentanyl that is killing everybody, that is the price of those easy to buy guns, particular the assault weapons, going south. assault weapons are priced because they are in a war. these are guys in wars with each other, sometimes with the military. keep this in mind. host: something you write about, and this is a text message to you, what would happen if drugs were legalized in the u.s.? perhaps treated like alcohol? sam: well, that is an excellent question. i have a few things to say about that. i have gone back and forth on this topic many a time and it is always worth bringing up and batting around because it is important.

clearly, illegal drugs fuel mafias. we saw that with prohibition. legal drugs result in far more use than when they were illegal, very clear. you can see that with alcohol, i think, you can see it with a lot of different things. when you make stuff legal and toe from there, then it becomes more socially acceptable to do it, therefore you have to plan for the inevitable aftereffects or side effects from that increased use. we will always need jail because jail -- what is the drug that lands most people in jail? alcohol. we will always need jail because

of that. we will always need some way of dealing with the aftereffects or side effects of legalization. i would like to see, i guess personally, i would like to see us legalize one drug well, and right now, we are mangling the job with marijuana, in my opinion. think about it. what is one of the great lessons of the opioid epidemic? 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 is a whole story of opioids in our country. you can say, maybe we should make these trucks legal. but the opioid epidemic starts with legal drugs. it is not an illegal drug that

starts this, it is doctors and pharmaceutical companies promoting this, and this brings me to another part of this topic that i wrote about in the least of us, and that is to say that 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 -- we bridle too much against government intrusion and regulation. we are in the middle of climate change, an existential threat to this planet, and yet, in california and other places, we have made it legal to sell

marijuana that has been grown indoors. this is a weed that grows outdoors perfectly. we are growing at indoors with an enormous carbon footprint. why? have economic interests. it does not benefit anybody else. my feeling is, we do not have in this country 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 the lessons we shared -- we should have learned in prohibition. after prohibition was over, we did not legalize all of this bathtub hooch and allthe pot woh versions of marijuana -- vapes

that are 90 percent thc, the active ingredient in marijuana. seems like we need to step back, go very slowly, very cautiously, take our time and be aware that we are really, really bad at this. we don't know what we are doing. instead, we are just opening up the doors. it feels in some states, maybe just generally, it feels like alcohol pre-prohibition, which is anything goes. you want 90% thc vapes? fine. 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 is in their interest to want us to do that. there's a great book called "blitz." the one country that legalized methamphetamine. this book is about that country, it's about the third reich in nazi germany. they legalized methamphetamine. it seems to me there's at lessons about societal control when you start doing this. when i view it from the perspective i have been viewing it in the last couple of years, people say should we legalize drugs and i say that the opioid epidemic started with legal drugs. host: all four of sam quinones 'books are about people. he does opine about the legalization of drugs. i want to read a few select

sentences to add to what he just said. business combines are now everywhere. we call them big pharma, big tech, big oil. now emerging is big dope. i don't trust american capitalism to do drug legalization responsibly. he goes on to write decriminalizing drugs also removes the one lever we have to push men and women toward sobriety. waiting around for them to decide to opt for treatment is the opposite of compassion and the drugs on the street are as cheap, prevalent and edley as they are today. this is a text message -- hi, sam, i'm 73 years old and have to use opioid prescriptions for pain management to control osteoarthritis which can be disabling because of the abusive opiates. i had to sign a contract with my general practitioner. he's is the only prescriber and

no other doctor can be involved. i take the prescribed amount, no more. my insurance company monitors my prescriptions. people like me are subject to strict rules, so why aren't abusers monitored? sam: i would say yes, i would say we have changed a lot. i remember writing, when i was writing "dreamland" none of that was true. you could get refills for almost anything. sometimes it was almost pushed on you. i had my appendix out a year or so before and they gave me two viking in a day in the hospital and when they cut me loose the third day, they gave me 60 viking and and said take as needed. i had no idea what it was. i didn't know what vicodin was. i don't like taking pills, so i

took two and 58 remained in the back of my medicine cabinet. the strict regulation of those pills is a good thing. i do, however think we need to understand that people like the gentleman who wrote to you, who are clearly non-abusers, clearly , these drugs are a benefit to their lives. and this is the case all across the country. many people like that. cracking down on them -- it sounds like he's able to get his medication and it's a very good thing. but often times there are people who cannot get their medication because of this abuse, because the pendulum was here and now it's going back to over here now and that is something that needs to change. we need to modify that.

we need to take into account the person, and this has always been the story. before the opioid epidemic, very rarely did people get these pain meds, even in hospital. you had to have doctors, three different doctors sign off and no one would give refills and no one was taking drugs home. then you have the freeing up entirely of the prescribing practice and everybody has a refill and all you have to do is say i have a pain here and they would give me another refill. it seems to me we treat everybody the same. it's like all or nothing. nothing or all. it feels like we need to think more deeply about this and provide within our medical

structure time with doctors, patients suffering from chronic pain and they need time with doctors, 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 be told no, you are an abuser, you can become addicted, the history is showing this person is unable to handle it. i don't think we have this happy medium which is where we ought to be and i'm not sure all the reasons why not, but it doesn't seem folks like your collar there -- your caller there were taken into account. certainly people have lost access to these pills, these issues need to be addressed and i'm not sure they are. host: mike is calling in from

san bernardino california. caller: thank you. my question is on fennel -- fentanyl. i know there's a lot of money being made on sales but do you think there is a more sinister motive for introducing it into our country? also how widespread is it? is it worldwide? host: do you think there's a more sinister motive? caller: it did come from china. sam: i would say i haven't done reporting on the question you are asking, but it is absolutely a valid one. i may try to do some reporting on that if i can, maybe after the paperback version of this book comes out in november

because i think it's an important issue. i believe from anecdotally, speaking with people on the border, that there are signs in the cartel world in mexico that say we make fentanyl for the gringos and anyone selling fentanyl to mexicans will be killed. not sure how widespread that is either. but you have to view it, fentanyl and carfentanil, which is 110,000 times worse, as almost weapons of mass destruction. i frequently view what we are going through right now, it's a drug problem, a drug issue, preying on people who are already drug addicted but it feels as much to me like a poisoning than simply a drug issue when drugs were far more

accommodating. even heroin, speaking of heroin like this, but heroin was more forgiving. you could live for 40 years on heroin and you cannot on illicit fentanyl. i haven't done any reporting on this. i have inkling's that i can't really talk about right now that some of which is true, it's hard to know because china, they cut back on fentanyl, there are only a few companies allowed to make it now but they haven't cut back on the amount of precursors companies in china are allowed to make, and so that's where a lot of the trafficking world gets their chemicals, from china. it's a good question and i may try to get back at that topic once some of the hubbub dies down regarding my latest book.

host: overdose does hit record last year. this is the headline in the wall street journal. 100,000 people died of overdose deaths last year. more people died of overdoses during -- then during the vietnam war. phil, go ahead. caller: thank you, c-span. thank you, sam. i just want to ask an opinion. we are the only country under the law with the pursuit of happiness. given your exposure to mexico, can a movement occur with the five points -- with illicit

drugs as an operational enemy, 30 years, mexico joins usa, become the largest market in the economy and pursue cartels. host: what made you think about this? caller: because we are so entwined already and both are corrupt to 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. host: that is still in portland oregon. anything you want to address? sam: i'm not sure i have an opinion on that, sometimes when you are reporting, you just have to say i don't know. host: do you see a resolution to

the war on drugs, particularly in mexico? if so, how long until it's done? sam: it's got a lot of roots and -- i do believe the mexican government needs to step up and do a whole lot more than it has been doing recently and for most of its history has been doing. really it is not much of a partner. it's not to say we don't have our issues, as i have spoken with great -- at great link -- at great length here. but i have to say the country that really needs to address this country most deeply is mexico because it gets to bigger issues of a gross economic

inequality, unfairness, it gets to issues of investing in infrastructure, local infrastructure, all of that is part of this story. you can clearly see it if you know mexico very well. it also gets to the point where we need to deal with just the most basic stuff. i think traffickers -- it is my feeling, hunch, gut instinct, let's say that the trafficking world is making huge amounts of profits. it painted itself into a very difficult corner. first of all, there is no drug in the united states that is safe to use. no street drug that is safe to use. fennel, meth, marijuana, heroin

is mostly fentanyl. so you are finding an entire situation where you cannot exaggerate the dangers of the drugs on the street anymore. they are simply deadly. it is russian roulette every single time. that's one thing. they have prospered because they have for so many years all of these places where they could make their drugs, grow their drugs, marijuana, heroin poppies, etc.. now they have funneled all their production, narrow their production capabilities to a few ports if you do something about those ports and chemicals coming in they are clearly designed to make fentanyl. it would not be hard for the mexican government terry deeply

dig in what is coming through because there's only a few of them. would they go elsewhere? of course they would. who cares. they go somewhere else, they are not going to get the stuff in as easily into the united states making the stuff and going north a few hundred miles. it seems they have painted themselves into a very sticky place that we ought to take advantage of. first of all, in our schools, there is nothing exaggerated as you cannot exaggerate the dangerousness of drugs anymore. they can see it all around them. but i would say some kind of collaboration between the united states and mexico on these issues, although the current government of mexico does not

seem interested at all, a collaboration on dealing with chemicals coming through these ports. would it be a 100% solution? it would not. we don't need 100%, we need 10%, 15%, 30% solutions. that is the way forward, it seems to me. host: there's a website that you reference, judge for yourselves. info. i'm going to read one sentence from the washington post. how did the opioid epidemic overtake america? the narrative offered a two easy scapegoat. if not perdue, who drove the epidemic? it says oxycontin was only 4% of prescription opioid prescriptions. sam: all of that is true.

there's not one villain in this story. it's a complicated tale. it's not about one family only, though certainly one family, purdue pharma and the sackler family bear an outsize responsibility for what went on. there's a lot of roots to this story. there's americans wanting easy fixes to what a lot of time is rooted in our unwillingness to get in shape and eat better food and stop smoking and stop drinking and on and on. doctors would tell us we don't need these pills, it's our own personal responsibility, but we in a culture look back on that. there's a lot of corporate economic interest you see in the drug companies. every company that makes these pills was part of the mix.

johnson & johnson was, so are numerous companies. i would say this about oxycontin -- it's role is outsized because it's a tiny company. their importance to this story was they were part of this massive push of pharmaceutical sales in the mid-90's into the 2000. every company was part of this, hiring huge amounts of salesman and badger doctors until they buy your stuff, but they were the only companies who was solely a narcotic 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, so you would go from 150 milligrams to 300 milligrams daily of the stuff in an attempt to control your pain. every time your tolerance would level up, you have to take more. frequently, people would lose their insurance. those folks would then have no choice but to go into treatment, which is very hard to find. or switch to heroin. you saw oxycontin building up the tolerance of our addicted population all 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. so they would switch to heroin.

oxycontin created the tolerance levels nationwide other opioids would never have been able to create to that extent. when they do that, they end up creating heroin addicts in waiting. so, it's true some small percentage of all the pills prescribed were oxycontin, but because they took people up to those high tolerances, those folks frequently could not afford it. there's a lot of reasons why it happened but eventually they are on the street and have two switch to heroin. i would say it's clear to me the sackler family and purdue pharma

innovative, promotional at -- promotional techniques and strategies for selling a narcotic -- they are not selling an antihistamine, they are selling an addictive narcotic that is very aggressive and relentless. they were paid the biggest bonuses in the industry, so there's an outsized role for purdue pharma and the sackler family. but there is not one person or thing or family -- i say this in the book as well -- there's not one route to all of this. it's route is an american culture caller: this is a great conversation. you were talking earlier about the guns going into mexico and

you talk about collaborating with the mexican government. if you look at some of the things our government has tried doing, the first one was -- the one i'm going to speak about was understanding the guns and where the guns were going into the bad areas of mexico. host: we have kind of covered that area and we are running out of time. you are up on the border with canada come are you seeing similarities up there in drug flow? caller: here's the thing -- my father started under operation wet back, 1955. how not so much the goods and

services, but the -- host: i apologize. we are running a little short on time. one of the things we didn't get to come we always ask our authors what their favorite books are and what they are currently reading. here were sam quinones'responses -- killings by kevin trillin, the corpse had a familiar face, biography of power, never let me go, smiley's people, currently reading frederick douglass, prophet of freedom, five families, the reformation, a history, and the king james bible. i do need to bring up that last one. you write that you are not a

christian but so many of the stories you tell have been helped by christians and churches and people following the book of matthew, etc. sam: i would say this book is hard to write because i did not have a roadmap, which i had for "dreamland" i had a book proposal for stop -- book proposal. what i began to do is read fairly widely and i had read the gospels before, i'm not a christian but i do find the bible to be an absolutely essential book. i've read the gospel of matthew at a time when i was still personally thinking about these topics of what does this addiction epidemic mean? what does the shredding of

community mean? it means we turned our backs on the lease among us. it seems like the bulwark, the way forward is focusing in the most local way on trying to make your communities easier to live in and easier for vulnerable people. to 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 americans in the smallest, least sexy way, working to repair community.

that was the focus and the drug story evolved as i was doing that. i felt this was crucial because it showed us we had turned our back on this most potent and powerful idea. that's the way we deal best with the communal problems we faced together as a country. telling stories of americans involved in the smallest, little ways, trying to repair that was a radical thing. what they were doing is radical, almost revolutionary thing. it doesn't matter if we look after each other or not -- i think jesus clearly showed he knew the importance of community. he understood we could not live without it.

we have tried in this country for the last 40 years and i think the symptoms are friendless miss, loneliness and depression, suicide and most important, from my perspective, the addiction epidemic in all parts of the country in the last five years or so. host: sam quinones'books -- unfortunately, we did not get to the first books as much as we should have. his next books, "dreamland" which won the national books critic circle award and his most recent, "the least of us -- true tales of american hope in the time of fentanyl and meth" we certainly appreciate you joining us for the last two hours. sam: it ha