
Heroin Holiday
Every August, while Prague's office workers head to the coast, the city's heroin users set up a camp in the poppy fields on its outskirts, a break from dealers and police that functions as their own kind of vacation. VICE correspondent Thomas Morton spends time in the camp, talking with users including a man known as Banana about how they ended up there and what keeps them coming back each summer. The film follows the actual production chain start to finish: workers harvesting poppies grown legally for food and pharmaceutical use, campers cooking the raw opium into a usable form, and a lab test confirming the heroin's purity before it gets used. Morton asks plain questions rather than narrating from a distance, and the camp's routines, cooking pots, cots, waiting for a batch to finish, get shown without much editorializing. The result is less an expose than a portrait of how addiction organizes people's days, built around a supply chain most viewers have never seen up close.