The story begins with an account of the rise to power of pharmaceutical companies in the United Sates in the 1990s. The drug companies begin paying hospitals to prescribe their drugs to more people, leading to a huge drug push in the industry. Simple ailments were treated with highly addictive prescription medications. It all comes to a head when Purdue Pharma releases OxyContin to the market according to a well-designed plan to make bank.
Around the same time, a heroin craze is beginning the western half of the country. The drug's producers have synthesized a cheap method of making extremely potent heroin in the previously unknown county of Xalisco, Nayarit. Unlike similar events, the production of this heroin began outside of any drug cartel's oversight, meaning it was produced by anonymous citizens. The U.S. government struggled to prevent the spread of the product because it was not distributed according to the same organization as cartel products. Additionally the residents of Xalisco managed to arrange for their heroin to be marketed en mass. Entire towns were ruined by the spread of heroin addiction as far north as Oregon and as far east as Tennessee.
Quinones himself travels to Portsmouth, Ohio after conducting research into the two above mentioned phenomena. In Portsmouth the community, once nearly destroyed by heroin addiction, the people have rallied behind one another to uplift their city. Quinones discovers that Portsmouth used their local swimming pool, called Dreamland, as a community center to fight drug abuse. That one simple gesture spread like wildfire throughout the city until everyone was helping their neighbor toward self-sufficiency and consequently economic success.
