Introduction
Building on the success of Fentanyl: The Drug Deadlier than Heroin—one of the first documentaries to reveal the scope of Canada’s opioid crisis—filmmaker Patrick McGuire partnered with VICE Canada and CTV’s W5, the country’s leading investigative news program, to create Steel Town Down.
Set in Sault Ste. Marie, a northern Ontario city of 75,000, Steel Town Down offers a powerful and intimate look at how the opioid epidemic is devastating smaller communities far from Canada’s major urban centres. In a city marked by the decline of once-thriving industry, the burden of responding to this crisis falls largely on a single frontline worker.
Steel Town Down tells a story that echoes far beyond Sault Ste. Marie, reflecting the deep and painful impact of opioid addiction in towns across North America and beyond.
Quotes
“It’s fun at first, when you’re like, I’m rebelling and I’m not getting caught, I feel so cool. And then it’s almost like a cry for help, where you’re like, I want to get caught, why isn’t anyone noticing me doing all this bad stuff? Am I just unloved? Does my family not care that I’m falling apart?“
“Harm reduction to me is making sure that you, as a person, is okay, whether you use drugs or not, and if you do use drugs, we want to make sure that you’re causing the least amount of harm as possible.”
“I feel one of the biggest issues in Sault Ste. Marie is the level of povery that we have, which is attached to food insecurity, which is attached to the housing issues, which is attached to education issues.”
“I’ve done drugs crying cuz I don’t want to do them. I’ve had a piece of tinfoil in my hand and a straw in my mouth crying. The last thing I wanted to do is do drugs and that’s the nature of addiction, right? I’m doing them when I don’t want to do them.”
QEVYN GIBSON
“[Narcan] is an opioid antagonist, so what it does is it attaches to the same receptors in your brain that the opium does, any opiate family, and it essentially blocks the action of that.”
“87% of the stigma that people who use drugs deal with or face comes from health care workers. So, if you just put that into context, if you’re someone who uses drugs and you find yourself in a situation where you’re overdosing, do you really want to go to an environment where you’re going to be told [awful things]?”
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