Top 40 Sam Quinones Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “But Arthur Sackler is important to this story because he founded modern pharmaceutical advertising and, in the words of John Kallir, showed the industry “that amazing things can be achieved with direct selling and intensive direct advertising.” Years later, Purdue would put those strategies to use marketing its new opiate painkiller OxyContin.”

— Sam Quinones

2. “After more than a decade in which chronic pain was treated with highly addictive medicine, there still was no attempt to bring the studies of pain and addiction together. Specialists in pain and in addiction operated in different worlds.”

— Sam Quinones

3. “Through all this, patients were getting used to demanding drugs for treatment. They did not, however, have to accept the idea that they might, say, eat better and exercise more, and that this might help them lose weight and feel better. Doctors, of course, couldn’t insist. As the defenestration of the physician’s authority and clinical experience was under way, patients didn’t have to take accountability for their own behavior.”

— Sam Quinones

4. “Oxy prescriptions for chronic pain rose from 670,000 in 1997 to 6.2 million in 2002.”

— Sam Quinones

5. “A pill mill was a pain-management clinic, staffed by a doctor with little more than a prescription pad. A pill mill became a virtual ATM for dope as the doctor issued prescriptions to hundreds of people a day.”

— Sam Quinones

6. “Every patient who was prescribed the drug stood a chance of soon needing it every day. These people were willing to pay cash. They never missed an appointment. If diagnosis wasn’t your concern, a clinic was a low-overhead operation: a rented building, a few waiting rooms, some office staff. And bouncers. These clinics did require bouncers.”

— Sam Quinones

7. “Kentucky state legislator Katie Stine, a Republican, introduced a bill as I was writing this book that made it easier to charge a heroin dealer with the death of someone who died from an overdose.”

— Sam Quinones

8. “The Press Ganey patient surveys, it turned out, had an unintended effect in this context. It was to subtly pressure doctors to write unnecessary scripts for opiates. A doctor reluctant to write them was more likely to get a poor patient evaluation. Too many bad scores and a hospital began asking questions.”

— Sam Quinones

9. “That’s when they realized that right then and there drug overdose deaths were about to surpass fatal auto crashes as Ohio’s top cause of injury death.”

— Sam Quinones

10. “OxyContin is a simple pill. It contains only one drug: oxycodone, a painkiller that Germans synthesized in 1916 from thebaine, an opium derivative. Molecularly, oxycodone is similar to heroin.”

— Sam Quinones

11. “These drugs were advertised mostly to primary care physicians, who had little pain-management training and were making their money by churning patients through their offices at a thirteen-minute clip.”

— Sam Quinones

12. “In heroin addicts, I had seen the debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior.”

— Sam Quinones

13. “If a child was sick, maybe her mother was tense. Valium was marketed above all to women, pitched as way of bearing the stress of lives as wives and mothers. Before the feminist movement, women were presumed to need that kind of help for the rest of their lives, thus there was no worry then about its addictiveness.”

— Sam Quinones

14. “Broward County had four pain clinics in 2007 and 115 two years later.”

— Sam Quinones

15. “The opiate scourge might never have spread as quickly had these rural areas where it all started possessed a diversity of small retailers, whose owners had invested their lives in their stores, knew the addicts personally, and stood ready to defend against them. Walmart allowed junkie shoplifters to play Santa to the pill economy, filling dealers’ orders for toys and presents in exchange for dope.”

— Sam Quinones

16. “Cocaine and methamphetamine – the popular drugs through the 1980s and 1990s – are damaging drugs, but people don’t often fatally overdose on them. Heroin, which people do overdose on, hadn’t been a sustained problem since the 1970s. Drug overdoses in Ohio had remained pretty constant for decades.”

— Sam Quinones

17. “One of them was Kathy Newman, who in 1996 was a high school cheerleader and the daughter of a contractor. Kathy had just graduated from Portsmouth High School when she broke ribs in a car accident. The emergency room in town was wary of prescribing more than ibuprofen for pain. You should go see David Procter, her friends said: He’ll give you something that works.”

— Sam Quinones

18. “But they are not entitled to pain relief.”

— Sam Quinones

19. “In May 2001, Hale filed what is believed to be the first Oxy-related wrongful-death lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, on behalf of Jackie Burton. “Purdue.”

— Sam Quinones

20. “After kicking opiates, “it takes two years for your dopamine receptors to start working naturally,” Paul.”

— Sam Quinones

21. “But across America, thousands of people like Matt Schoonover were dying. Drug overdoses were killing more people every year than car accidents.”

— Sam Quinones

22. “Overdose deaths involving opiates rose from ten a day in 1999 to one every half hour by 2012. Abuse of prescription painkillers was behind 488,000 emergency room visits in 2011, almost triple the number of seven years before.”

— Sam Quinones

23. “Unable to afford street OxyContin, Matt at some point switched to the black tar heroin that had saturated the Columbus market, brought in by young Mexican men from a small state on Mexico’s Pacific coast called Nayarit.”

— Sam Quinones

24. “My footsteps echoed down small-town Main Streets. On one, a pharmacist left a note in the window of her store. She had enjoyed serving the town, she wrote, but couldn’t hang on anymore and she hoped they’d understand why she was leaving like all the rest. She left no forwarding address. Walmart.”

— Sam Quinones

25. “His customers were mostly professional women: lawyers, nurses, a prostitute or.”

— Sam Quinones

26. “Drug overdoses passed fatal vehicle accidents nationwide for the first time in 2008.”

— Sam Quinones

27. “Overdoses, and not burglaries and robberies, became the new barometers of the city’s heroin problem.”

— Sam Quinones

28. “The Xalisco traffickers’ innovation was literally a delivery mechanism as well. Guys from Xalisco had figured out that what white people – especially middle-class white kids – want most is service, convenience. They didn’t want to go to skid row or some seedy dope house to buy their drugs. Now they didn’t need to. The guys from Xalisco would deliver it to them.”

— Sam Quinones

29. “Another veteran Wal-Mart booster told me he would wear very baggy clothing, with long-john underwear underneath, taped at the ankles. He’d walk through the store stuffing merchandise in his long johns, which would balloon out, though nothing would show under his baggy pants and shirt. “I walked out of there, it looked like I was four hundred pounds,” he said.”

— Sam Quinones

30. “There was a little of nineteenth-century patent medicine in Valium’s DNA. It didn’t treat any root cause of stress. Instead, it treated vague symptoms and thus allowed doctors to avoid the complicated work of understanding the causes of that stress. Like patent medicines, Valium was a name-brand drug, promoted together with the idea that a pill could solve any ailment.”

— Sam Quinones

31. “She once found herself in an abandoned farmhouse with people she didn’t know, unaware how she got there. A pit bull ran through the living room, chased by an enraged rooster.”

— Sam Quinones

32. “I saw the football players and the cheerleaders getting into it. These are people I turned to heroin to get away from.”

— Sam Quinones

33. “Walmart, for a long time, did not require a receipt for returned goods. Anything stolen could be returned for a gift card for the full value of the merchandise. Dealers bought those cards for half their value in pills. A five-hundred-dollar Walmart card was worth three OxyContin 80s – for which the dealer had paid a few dollars with the Medicaid card scam. A vast trade in Walmart cards kept Portsmouth’s army of pill dealers in household necessities.”

— Sam Quinones

34. “Worldwide morphine consumption began to climb, rising thirtyfold between 1980 and 2011.”

— Sam Quinones

35. “We’ve seen a demonization of government and the exaltation of the free market in America over the previous thirty years. But here was a story where the battle against the free market’s worst effects was taken on mostly by anonymous public employees.”

— Sam Quinones

36. “After Dreamland closed, the town went indoors. Police took the place of the communal adult supervision that the pool had provided. Walmart became the spot to socialize.”

— Sam Quinones

37. “Phillip Prior was now knee-deep in what was unthinkable a few years before: rural, white heroin junkies. “I’ve yet to find one who didn’t start with OxyContin,” he said. “They wouldn’t be selling this quantity of heroin on the street right now if they hadn’t made these decisions in the boardroom.”

— Sam Quinones

38. “Multidisciplinary clinics began to fade. Over a thousand such clinics existed nationwide in 1998; only eighty-five were around seven years later.”

— Sam Quinones

39. “As I tried to chart the spread of the opiate epidemic, one thing dawned on me: Other than addicts and traffickers, most of the people I was speaking to were government workers. They were the only ones I saw fighting this scourge. We’ve seen a demonization of government and the exaltation of the free market in America over the previous thirty years. But here was a story where the battle against the free market’s worst effects was taken on mostly by anonymous public employees.”

— Sam Quinones

40. “Norman couldn’t have imagined this when he was scrounging surplus sofas and coaxing pennies from elected officials in the late 1990s. But as the opiate epidemic ravaged white communities across Tennessee, it had a way of changing the minds of even the hardest hard-liners.”

— Sam Quinones

41. “We can talk morality all day long, but if you’re drawing five hundred dollars a month and you have a Medicaid card that allows you to get a monthly supply of pills worth several thousand dollars, you’re going to sell your pills.”

— Sam Quinones

42. “The pain-treatment revolution had many faces and these mostly belonged to well-meaning doctors and dedicated nurses. But in the Rust Belt, another kind of pain had emerged. Waves of people sought disability as a way to survive as jobs departed.”

— Sam Quinones

43. “His black tar, once it came to an area where OxyContin had already tenderized the terrain, sold not to tapped-out old junkies but to younger kids, many from the suburbs, most of whom had money and all of whom were white. Their transition from Oxy to heroin, he saw, was a natural and easy one.”

— Sam Quinones

44. “By 2006, Brownlee’s staff believed they had evidence that the company had knowingly misbranded OxyContin as virtually nonaddictive.”

— Sam Quinones

45. “War spread the morphine molecule through the nineteenth century.”

— Sam Quinones

46. “America has devolved,” Lustig once wrote, “from the aspirational, achievement-oriented ‘city on a hill’ we once were, into the addicted and depressed society that we’ve now become. Because we abdicated happiness for pleasure. Because pleasure got cheap.” The supply of it was everywhere. Like street dope.”

— Sam Quinones

47. “Instead, the wealthiest countries, with 20 percent of the world’s population, came to consume almost all – more than 90 percent – of the world’s morphine. This.”

— Sam Quinones

48. “When your kid’s dying from a brain tumor or leukemia, the whole community shows up. They bring casseroles. They pray for you. They send you cards. When your kid’s on heroin, you don’t hear from anybody, until they die. Then everybody comes and they don’t know what to say.”

— Sam Quinones

49. “We live in a time when drug traffickers behave like multinational corporations and corporations behave like traffickers.”

— Sam Quinones