Love in the Time of Fentanyl
Directed, Edited, and Co-Produced by Colin Askey
Runtime: 80 minutes
Opening in New York February 3; airing on PBS and streaming via PBS Passport starting February 13

by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

(stating the obvious, but tw: drug use)

Remember when I said the last film I reviewed for MovieJawn wouldn’t be out of place on PBS? Well, Love in the Time of Fentanyl is scheduled to air on PBS but presents itself as a very different type of movie. (PBS contains multitudes.) The film opens with an overdose on a city sidewalk successfully reversed by three volunteers through a dose of Narcan and a canister of oxygen. This is Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood, which for the past several years has been hit with a crisis of deaths from opioid ODs, overwhelmingly from fentanyl. This group of volunteers is the Overdose Prevention Society (OPS), a volunteer-run, barely paid, and technically illegal but by all appearances widely welcomed safe injection site and resource center.

OPS is made up of a motley group of white and First Nations volunteers, equipped with Narcan, oxygen, pulse oximeters, and a strong sense of justice and care. As Ronnie Grigg, the hirsute “Narcan Jesus” amid the core group members that director Colin Askey follows in the film, says during the film to new volunteers, “Keep your standards high, because you are a world-changer.” (That scene alone was a good reminder to me to replace my expired-early-in-the-pandemic Narcan and get a new OD survival kit from the city.) The world of OPS–former and current drug users, veterans, sex workers, artists, musicians–is a tight-knit, traumatized community. Askey shows how OPS is central to Downtown Eastside time and again over the course of the eighty-minute film. The emotional stakes are clear: artists Trey and Smokey’s memorial walls in the alleys next to OPS lay bare the sheer number of lives lost (some in that very spot) with names continuing to be filled in. Burnout amid the volunteers is frequent, and OPS does not have the means to stay open twenty-four hours, a key point of agitation and activism in the final twenty minutes of the documentary. 

Amid the anguish and the tragedy, however, there’s focus and warmth in the group. We meet the documentary’s main characters walking, e-biking, and even rollerblading into OPS’s storefront headquarters. We see community lunches, karaoke, and rallies for a 24-hour OPS and a safer supply of opioids from poppies in Canada (rather than a supply via Turkey and Afghanistan increasingly contaminated with fentanyl). We see guitar playing, singing, and whistling among those within OPS’s walls. Askey even shows us multiple community dance parties, including a coda that brought a tear to my eye where we see Ronnie, after ten years at OPS, riding out into the sunset, interspersed with a volunteer dance in the injection site, as Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” is sung by one of the Downtown Eastsiders. 

This warmth is echoed in Askey’s direction and editing as well as Eli Cohn’s score. The word that kept coming to mind to describe the emotional tone was “gentle,” which I wouldn’t necessarily expect for a film depicting regular drug use and multiple reversed overdoses. Askey’s depiction of Dana, one of the managers at OPS, best exemplifies this sensibility. We see Dana in one scene cleaning, whistling, shooting up into his neck, and then getting back to cleaning, all with the same amount of care. We see him and another OPS volunteer complaining about the inconsistencies of the Star Wars sequels. We see him in his SRO facing the Downtown Eastside streets, reflecting on how the community has changed in recent years. And we see him alongside Sarah, the founder of OPS, testifying at City Hall for funding and resources. 

In short, we see drug users as whole human beings with contributions to their community and to society, fearlessly caring for their own. That’s a rare thing–as is any media presenting the case for safe injection sites in general–and it oughtn’t be. While the film concludes with a title card stating, “In over 35 years of operation around the world, no one has ever died of an overdose in an overdose prevention site,” and while OPS has served as model for community opioid care across Canada, there are just two safe injection sites in all of the US, both in Manhattan, and both are on shaky legal footing. Love in the Time of Fentanyl gives me hope that the conversation can change around pain, addiction, and opioids as well as the people who use them. I’m hopeful that Askey and the OPS volunteers depicted in the film can help bring forth a new era of policy in North America that provides care while instilling a sense of humanity, warmth, and, yes, love.

DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema for Documentary Film will feature Love in the Time of Fentanyl for a weeklong run February 3 through 9, ahead of its US broadcast premiere on Independent Lens starting February 13.