Steel Town Down: Overdose Crisis on the US-Canada Border

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, this documentary 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.

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"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."

"[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]?"