Event Date: 20180430

Summer Read Kick Off Featuring Dreamland Author Sam Quinones

WITF’s Transforming Health once again teams up with Aligning Forces for Quality – South Central PA and the Central PA library systems to present the “Summer Read”. The goal is to engage readers across Central PA in a conversation about the opioid epidemic and how we are confronting this crisis in our own local communities. Through September, the public is invited to participate in “A Summer Read”, a unique program encouraging residents to visit local libraries to borrow Dreamland and hold discussions with their book clubs, friends, family and colleagues.

The Opioid Crisis Here at Home: The Other Side of Pain

Join us to kick off the 2018 “Summer Read” with Sam Quinones, award-winning journalist and author of Dreamland. A local leader panel discussion will follow to facilitate community response to the epidemic that continues to affect our local communities.

Monday April 30, 2018 at 4:30 pm
Pullo Center-York, PA

4:30 pm – Book Signing
5:30 pm – Keynote Presentation
6:30 pm – Local Leader Panel Discussion

About Dreamland

In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became the vital center of the community. Now, addiction has devastated Portsmouth, as it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America–addiction like no other the country has ever faced. How that happened is the riveting story of Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.

Acclaimed journalist Sam Quinones weaves together two riveting tales of capitalism run amok whose unintentional collision has been a catastrophic opiate epidemic. The unfettered prescribing of pain medications during the 1990s reached its peak in Purdue Pharma’s campaign to market OxyContin, its new, expensive–extremely addictive–miracle painkiller. Meanwhile, a massive influx of black tar heroin–cheap, potent, and originating from one small county, Xalisco, Nayarit, on Mexico’s west coast and independent of any drug cartel, assaulted small town and mid-sized cities across the country, driven by a brilliant, almost unbeatable marketing and distribution system. Together these phenomena continue to lay waste to communities from Tennessee to Oregon, Indiana to New Mexico.

Finally, though, Quinones finds hope in the same Rust Belt river town that led the country into the opiate epidemic – Portsmouth, Ohio, where townspeople are turning away from dependence and toward economic as well as municipal self-reliance, and, with that, recovery. Introducing a memorable cast of characters–pharma pioneers, young Mexican entrepreneurs, narcotics investigators, survivors, and parents –Quinones shows how these tales fit together.

Dreamland is a revelatory account of the corrosive threat facing America and its heartland.