"Featuring ... (or with ... ) a Mexican town, a drug company, a letter to the editor, pain doctors & pill mills, a true tale of drug marketing & the search for happiness in an age of Excess."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 353-356) and index.

Journalist Sam Quinones chronicles how, over the past fifteen years, as opoid-based pain medications like OxyContin began flooding the prescription drug market, enterprising sugar cane farmers in a small county on the west coast of Mexico created a unique distribution system that brought black tar heroin-- the cheapest, most addictive form of the opiate, two to three times purer than its white powder cousin-- to the United States. The result has been a drug scourge that has layed waste to communities from Tennessee to Oregon, Indiana to New Mexico.