OxyContin arrives in 1996 marketed as a breakthrough: a slow-release narcotic painkiller with, its maker insisted, low risk of addiction. Journalist Linden MacIntyre and CBC's the fifth estate track what happened next, as Canada climbs to the world's second-highest rate of prescription opioid addiction and overdose deaths. A woman describes the escalation in her own words: 40 milligrams, then a month later 80, her doctor simply raising the dose as her tolerance grew. The film lays out the money behind the marketing, from a few million dollars in Canadian sales in 1998 to $243 million twelve years later, with U.S. sales reaching $3.5 billion in 2010, and asks why medical schools and pain clinics adopted the drug so readily and why some are now walking it back. Ontario, Saskatchewan, and the Atlantic provinces eventually drop OxyContin from their health plans, and Purdue stops making it, replacing it with a reformulated version called OxyNeo. Whether that shift came in time is the question the film leaves open.