See Los Angeles’ exclusive photo essay, “In the Shadows of Meth in Skid Row” (Photo: Teun Voeten)ĭreamland told the story of how the enormous use of opioid painkillers had created a massive population of addicts throughout the country. My job was to cover how drugs were trafficked once they crossed the border and arrived here in the U.S. Eventually, the Times realized it needed to devote more attention to the issue, so it formed a team to cover it. But shortly after I arrived at the Times, the drug wars kicked off in earnest, and things got crazier and more savage with every passing year. In 1994, though, I moved down to Mexico and worked there as a freelance reporter for ten years, until 2004, when I came home to work for the L.A. Times.Īs a journalist in Mexico, you obviously get some insight into the drug trade, but when I was there I really just covered immigration and politics. My first journalism job was at the Stockton Record. I was actually a crime reporter long before that. Is that how you became involved in reporting on the drug trade?

You started out as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times. “I didn’t write this to score political points. “I’m not really a political guy,” he says. His assertion that the new meth has been the unspoken culprit behind the nation’s out-of-control homelessness crisis has drawn darts from the Washington Post and the New York Times and praise from conservative pundits like Andrew Sullivan. Since it was published, Quinones’s book has generated a fair share of controversy. The former Los Angeles Times journalist sat down with editor-in-chief Maer Roshan for a lengthy discussion about this latest phase of America’s endlessly mutating drug epidemic. “It’s accompanied by severe, very rapid onset schizophrenia and paranoia,” he says. According to Quinones, a cheaper and far more potent strain of speed from Mexico has been flooding the country, a synthetic-chemical cocktail so potent it can send many users into rapid psychosis. Turns out there’s an answer to that question, which Quinones, 63, reveals in his latest book, The Least of Us, a deep dive into the even darker, even more destructive world of meth addiction. After all, what could be worse than heroin?” “I thought that was my last book about drugs. When Sam Quinones finished writing his 2015 best-selling exposé on black tar heroin and oxycodone- Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic-he figured he was pretty much done.

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