Sam Quinones

Sam Quinones is a journalist, former LA Times reporter, author and storyteller.

His most recent book, The Least of Us, focuses on the devastation caused by methamphetamine and fentanyl, the latest evolution of innovation in the supply of mind-altering drugs in the United States. The latest versions of meth, he argues, are more emotionally damaging than before and have played a central role in the expansion of the homeless in tent encampments in American cities. The book explores the rising number of overdose deaths in the United States and what role community and other institutions might play in reducing the death toll.

His 2015 book of narrative nonfiction, Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, received rave reviews from Salon.com, Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus Reviews, and a bunch of Amazon.com readers.

Dreamland recounts twin tales of drug marketing: A pharmaceutical corporation flogs its legal new opiate painkiller as nonaddictive; immigrants from a small town in Nayarit, Mexico devise a method for retailing black-tar heroin like pizza and take that system nationwide riding a wave of pill addiction.

The result is our current scourge of opiate addiction: pain pills and heroin.

A reporter for almost 30 years, Quinones lived and worked as a freelance writer in Mexico from 1994 to 2004. He spent time with gang members and governors, taco vendors and Los Tigres del Norte. He wrote about soap operas, and he lived briefly in a drug-rehabilitation clinic in Zamora, while hanging out with a street gang. He did the same with a colony of transvestites in Mazatlan, with the merchants in the Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito, and with the relegated PRI congressmen known as the Bronx. He hung out with the promoters of Tijuana’s opera scene and with the makers of plaster statues of Mickey Mouse and Spiderman in that city’s Colonia Libertad.

His previous two acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction about Mexico and Mexican immigration made him, according to the SF Chronicle Book Review, “the most original writer on Mexico and the border.”

His first book, True Tales From Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx, is a collection of nonfiction stories about contemporary Mexico.

His second, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration, was called “genuinely original work, what great fiction and nonfiction aspire to be, these are the stories that stop time and remind us how great reading is.” (S.F. Chronicle).

In 1998, he received a Alicia Patterson Fellowship, and Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2008, for a career of excellence in reporting about Latin America.

He returned to the United States in 2004 to take a job with the LA Times, where for 10 years he wrote stories about immigrants, street gangs, drug trafficking, and marijuana growers in Northern California.