The Least of Us
True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth
The Least of Us deepens the story of our nation’s opioid epidemic to include the spread of mass supplies of synthetic drugs (fentanyl and meth).
Fentanyl is the deadliest drug ever on US streets. Quinones also broke the major story of Mexican traffickers’ method of making methamphetamine in catastrophic supplies now accompanied by waves of psychosis resembling schizophrenia, mental illness, homelessness and tent encampments across America.
The Least of Us also delves into the neuroscience of addiction, concluding we live in a soup of legal substances and services whose addictiveness is ever-refined by consumer-product corporations.
“In a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like traffickers,” Quinones writes, “our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.”
Thus, as he set out to do this book, Quinones sought small, unnoticed stories of Americans involved in community repair.
The story of a man who secretly kept a community center open for kids in a crumbling neighborhood that even the city thought it had closed. A woman retired from corporate America who opens a tattoo removal clinic where she removes the pimp’s brand from the inner thigh of a prostitute. A woman who adopts an infant and cares for the child’s bedridden mother rendered a vegetable by drug overdose – rooted in a casual promise she made years before.
“After years of interviews, research, and writing, finally, that’s what this national saga has left me with,” Sam writes. “That the lessons of neuroscience, the epidemic, and the pandemic are really the same: That we are strongest in community, as weak as our most vulnerable, and the least of us lie within us all.”
Nominated as a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award for Best Nonfiction book of 2021, The Least of Us is “a marvelous achievement,” writes David Varno.
Reviews
“Sam Quinones is the indispensable ground-level guide to the epidemics of addiction that plague so many Americans. In The Least of Us, the tales of despair are brightened by seeing communities beginning to adapt and regrow to fight the horror that besets them. Everyone should read this.”
– ANGUS DEATON, Nobel Laureate in Economics, Princeton professor of economics, and co-author of Deaths of Despair.
“With deep compassion and piercing insight, Sam Quinones beautifully captures the pain of America’s opioid addiction and the gaping holes in society that allowed the tragedy to fester. He then not only offers condemnation of how we got here but true hope of how we can get out.”
– IOAN GRILLO, journalist and author of Blood Gun Money
“With The Least of Us, Sam Quinones continues to be the preeminent chronicler of the national opioid epidemic. By combining rigorous research, keen insight and listening to people’s stories across the country, Sam has once again captured not only the pain and sadness but the resiliency and optimism that have come to be the hallmark of this epidemic.”
– MICHAEL BOTTICELLI, former director, Office of National Drug Control Policy
“When I was chairman of the Senate health committee in 2018 and we were focused on developing legislation to address the nation’s opioid crisis, I held a hearing where Sam Quinones was the only witness. Such is Quinones’ command of the issue and the usefulness of his insights for our nation. In The Least of Us, Quinones has continued his meticulous reporting to capture a full picture of how America’s communities are working to resist the damage caused by illegal synthetic drugs – and also to fight the epidemic of isolation by repairing the threads of connection that have so badly frayed.”
– LAMAR ALEXANDER, former U.S. Senator from Tennessee, former chair of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.