"In the blue-collar Ohio city of Portsmouth, a swimming pool the size of a football field was built in 1929. Named Dreamland, it became the community's vital center. But that pool closed decades ago, and now addiction has devastated Portsmouth, the same way it has hundreds of small rural towns and suburbs across America. This Ohio community's unraveling is the story Dreamland tells. Sam Quinones explains how the rise of the prescription drug OxyContin,...

"The Sackler name has adorned the walls of many storied institutions -- Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller, OxyContin, that was the catalyst for the opioid...

The king of the pill mills was American Pain, a mega-clinic that served as a prototype for the rest. From a pristine former bank building, doctors distributed massive quantities of oxycodone to hundreds of customers a day, mostly traffickers and addicts who came by the vanload. Inked muscle-heads ran security, greeting the morning rush of pill poppers with cries of Welcome to the dope hole! Strippers and high-priced hookers operated the pharmacy,...