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Dopesick: Fentanyl's Deadly Grip
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Dopesick: Fentanyl's Deadly Grip

52 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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Alberta becomes ground zero for Canada's fentanyl crisis, and this VICE feature spends its runtime with the drug users living through it rather than the officials studying it from a distance. The film traces the crisis back to 2012, when the country pulled OxyContin from pharmacy shelves and replaced it with a reformulated version called OxyNeo, meant to resist crushing and injecting. Counterfeit pills pressed to look like OxyContin flooded in to fill the gap, except many contained fentanyl, an opioid strong enough that a miscalculated dose kills. Western Canada absorbs the worst of it, and the camera stays close to the people using, buying, and surviving the drug day to day, rather than cutting away to experts. One subject's story was edited after the film's original release over privacy concerns, a reminder of how exposed these lives already are. The result is less an explainer than a record of what a counterfeit-drug supply does to a community once it takes hold.