FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 24, 2021

Contact: Natalie Golub, 973-382-4560, natalie@drugfreenj.org

Award-Winning Author to Highlight Roots of Opioid Epidemic

PDFNJ and New Jersey Attorney General’s Office to Host 1^st Webinar of 2022

MILLBURN — The Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day Learning Series will kick off in 2022 by hosting award-winning author Sam Quinones in a webinar at 1 p.m. Thursday, January 27, presented by the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey (PDFNJ) and the Office of the New Jersey Coordinator of Addiction Responses and Enforcement Strategies (NJ CARES), which is responsible for overseeing addiction-fighting efforts across the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. The event is being held in collaboration with the Opioid Education Foundation of America.

In the webinar, “An Hour with Sam Quinones Author of ‘Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic,’” Quinones will discuss his 2015 book and his research into the opioid epidemic, which has ravaged the nation over the past two decades.

The webinar will be the first event of the 2022 Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day Learning Series, which began in 2020 and has been hosted as a collaboration between the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey and NJ CARES.

“Through his book, ‘Dreamland,’ Sam Quinones exposed the roots of the nation’s opioid epidemic,” said PDFNJ Executive Director Angelo Valente. “His work became a vital contribution to increasing the awareness of the crisis, and his research is invaluable in helping the public understand the issues we are currently facing.”

Quinones is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and author of three books of narrative nonfiction. He is a veteran reporter on immigration, gangs, drug trafficking, the border. Sam is a former reporter with the L.A. Times, where he worked for 10 years (2004 – 2014). Prior to that he lived and worked as a freelance writer in Mexico.

In “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic,” Quinones recounts twin stories of drug marketing in the 21^st Century. A pharmaceutical corporation touts its legal new opioid prescription painkiller as nonaddictive. Meanwhile, immigrants from a small town in Nayarit, Mexico, devise a method for retailing black-tar heroin like pizza in the United States, and take that system nationwide, riding a wave of addiction to prescription pills from coast to coast. The collision of those two forces has led to America’s deadliest drug scourge in modern times.

In 2021, PDFNJ and NJ CARES collaborated on 10 webinars as part of the Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day Learning Series. The organizations first combined efforts on the series in 2020 as a strategy to provide education on the opioid crisis in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The series is a branch of Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day initiative held in New Jersey on October 6 each year since 2016. The statewide single-day initiative is organized by PDFNJ and The Community Coalition for a Safe & Healthy Morris, in cooperation with the New Jersey Division of Mental Health and Addiction Services and the Governor’s Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse. The goal of the day is to mobilize the prevention and treatment communities, community leaders and concerned citizens to raise awareness of the potential for dependency on prescribed pain medicine, as well as their link to heroin and fentanyl use in the state.

In 2021, more than 3,000 people in New Jersey died from suspected drug overdoses, a vast majority of which involved some form of opioid including prescription painkillers, heroin and synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl.

To learn more about the Knock Out Opioid Abuse Day and to register for the webinar, please visit knockoutday.drugfreenj.org.

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Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey: Best known for its statewide substance use prevention advertising campaign, the Partnership for a Drug-Free New Jersey is a private not-for-profit coalition of professionals from the communications, corporate and government communities whose collective mission is to reduce demand for illicit drugs in New Jersey through media communication. To date, more than $200 million in broadcast time and print space has been donated to the Partnership’s New Jersey campaign, making it the largest public service advertising campaign in New Jersey’s history. Since its inception, the Partnership has garnered 201 advertising and public relations awards from national, regional and statewide media organizations.