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  • The Least of Us

  • By: Sam Quinones
  • Narrated by: Tom Jordan
  • Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins
  • 4.8 out of 5 stars (8 ratings)

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The Least of Us cover art

The Least of Us

By: Sam Quinones
Narrated by: Tom Jordan
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Summary

From the New York Times best-selling author of Dreamland, a searing follow-up that explores the terrifying next stages of the opioid epidemic and the quiet yet ardent stories of community repair.

Sam Quinones traveled from Mexico to main streets across the US to create Dreamland, a groundbreaking portrait of the opioid epidemic that awakened the nation. As the nation struggled to put back the pieces, Quinones was among the first to see the dangers that lay ahead: synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders. In fentanyl, traffickers landed a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine. They laced it into cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills to cause tens of thousands of deaths - at the same time as Mexican traffickers made methamphetamine cheaper and more potent than ever, creating, Sam argues, swaths of mental illness and a surge in homelessness across the United States.

Quinones hit the road to investigate these new threats, discovering how addiction is exacerbated by consumer-product corporations. “In a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like traffickers,” he writes, “our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.” Amid a landscape of despair, Quinones found hope in those embracing the forgotten and ignored, illuminating the striking truth that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable.

Weaving analysis of the drug trade into stories of humble communities, The Least of Us delivers an unexpected and awe-inspiring response to the call that shocked the nation in Sam Quinones' award-winning Dreamland.

©2021 Sam Quinones (P)2021 Audible, Inc.

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Good but.....

This was a good book, however I was ready for it to end about 3/4 through. Perhaps because I listened to this on the back of listening to, Empire of Pain”...about the Sackler family. I just started finding it depressing and probably need to take a break from books on drugs for the moment! This is not to take away from the book as it was very informative!

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  • Utilisateur anonyme
  • 24-11-21

Top tier journalism and 100% honest

I am a cop and this maps 1:1 onto my experiences with people addicted to meth. This book needs to blow up!

13 people found this helpful

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  • Natura Revelada
  • 24-11-21

Insightful look at Drug addiction

As a recovering addict this book hit close to home and explained alot about the "New Meth" P2P.
I definitely recommend the book.

9 people found this helpful

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  • Andrea
  • 26-02-22

Life changing insights

Wow. I bought this book after learning that my niece is using meth , but also likely something else, now I see it is fentanyl. I have been so naive. I work with many homeless people in my job and this phenomenon of the new meth, mental illness and homelessness explains so much of what I have been witnessing.

7 people found this helpful

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  • Student-prime
  • 03-08-22

Overall excellent

The neuroscience is fairly poor but neuroscience also is not why you would open this book.
Only other thing I would have enjoyed is a little more science behind current street meth epidemic. He spends a lot of time speculating about how P2p meth is way more toxic than the meth of yore. He rather repetitively just amasses anecdotes from social workers as his evidentiary base for how harmful current meth is. Seems like it would have been easy to have someone (toxicologist, chemist, pathologist etc.) actually test street meth for level of adulterants these days to prove that P2p meth does in fact contain more deleterious chemicals than ephedrine based meth.

Overall tho a good follow up to dreamland. Would totally recommend.

5 people found this helpful

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  • M
  • 17-11-21

Bootstraps

Bootstraps do exist.
Together we can pull on them.
Together we can get boots on the ground

Gracias, Samuel, por haber escrito este libro. Con tus palabras estás creando comunidad.

¡¡¡ Pa’lante siempre !!!

4 people found this helpful

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  • piper bonura
  • 30-07-22

Excellent, Inciteful, Informative

After years as a health care provider, this book gave me definitive answers on the complicated behaviors we see with addiction. The explaination of the neurological changes caused by drugs of abuse was profoundly inciteful. I found the narrator's voice, pleasant and easy to understand.

3 people found this helpful

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  • Caske Redner
  • 17-06-22

Long-winded and full of dull, repeat information.

Similarly to the self-righteous, yet infinitely more interesting Dreamland, this book is full of obnoxious, flowery platitudes followed immediately by judgmental language and terminology that conveys no compassion whatsoever. The author still calls addicts "junkies" most of the time, while acknowledging in other parts that terms like "junkie" are problematic. He still calls sex workers "prostitutes," apparently still unaware that not all sex work is illegal and oblivious to the baggage that "prostitute" entails. For every interesting (and very short) chapter about how drugs like Fentanyl or methamphetamine fit into the narcotic ecosystem, there will be three (long-winded and very long) chapters where he will lick the boots of Republicans who were forced to act because the people affected by opioid addictions are their precious white children and overwhelmingly white constituents. Absolutely no critical thinking about what this kind of approach to public health crises would mean for the population at large. The author spent an irritating amount of time on the subject of licking the boots or Republicans who finally do what many liberals have been SCREAMING for decades. Sam Quinones sounds insincere, at best, and exploitative and uncaring at worst. Just read "Empire of Pain" by Patrick Keefe instead. You get a much more thorough, interesting and a writing style that isn't full of Quinones's irritating idiosyncrasies.

3 people found this helpful

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  • Solly
  • 07-02-22

Very chilling and very moving

This book is, sadly, as on point a his prior book Dreamland. The book mainly traces the post-opioid story of meth and fentanyl.
I see the scourge of the latest edition of the drug problem in my work. This book gave me so many new insights about aspects of how this has happened. And it has inspired me to try to do more. But the story is depressing because the problem is so entrenched and neurologically programmed.
I really appreciate that Sam Quinones wrote this book.

3 people found this helpful

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  • Jerry Greer
  • 11-06-22

Even Better Than Dreamland

I needed to buy the written copy as well to gleam all the data, insight, and wisdom..

2 people found this helpful

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  • Max
  • 05-06-22

Chapters are out of order, but a brilliant book

He should have a Pulitzer. I liked the reader, too. Nice voice. But the lack of order was irritating.

2 people found this helpful

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