Sam Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist, a reporter for more than 30 years, and author of three acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction. He is a veteran reporter on immigration, gangs, drug trafficking, the border, and Mexico. He worked for 10 years for the L.A. Times. Before that, he made a living as a freelance writer in Mexico for a decade.
His third and most recent book is Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015), which chronicles the roots of America’s epidemic of opiate addiction -- involving prescription pain pills and heroin -- nation’s deadliest drug scourge in its history. Dreamland won a National Book Critics Circle award for the Best Nonfiction Book of 2015. It was also selected as one of the Best Books of 2015 by Amazon.com, the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Seattle Times, Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, Audible, and in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg Business by Nobel economics laureate, Prof. Angus Deaton, of Princeton University. In 2018, he testified before the U.S. Senate's Health Committee. He has spoken at more than 225 professional conferences, community town halls, and universities. He is at work on a follow-up to Dreamland, about fentanyl, methamphetamine, and stories of communities by the epidemic of addiction.
