Sam Quinones

Journalist Sam Quinones chronicles how, over the past fifteen years, as opoid-based pain medications like OxyContin began flooding the prescription drug market, enterprising sugar cane farmers in a small county on the west coast of Mexico created a unique distribution system that brought black tar heroin-- the cheapest, most addictive form of the opiate, two to three times purer than its white powder cousin--to the United States. The result has been...

"From its opening in 1935, the United States Narcotic Farm in Lexington, Kentucky, epitomized the nation's ambivalence about how to deal with drug addiction. On the one hand, it functioned as a compassionate and humane hospital, an 'asylum on the hill' on 1,000 acres of farmland where addicts could recover from their drug habits. On the other hand, it was an imposing federal prison built for the incarceration of drug addicts. 'Narco, ' as it was known,...