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

Patrick mcguire is the executive producer of STEEL TOWN DOWN (2018)…

Following the success of 2016's Fentanyl: The Drug Deadlier than Heroin, a groundbreaking documentary which was one of the first films to expose the reality of Canada's opioid problem, Patrick McGuire and VICE Canada teamed up with CTV's W5, the most watched investigative news program in the country, to produce Steel Town Down.

The film is a stirring and powerful account, which tracks the impact of the opioid crisis on Sault Ste. Marie, a small city of 75,000 people in northern Ontario. It tells a different type of story than we’re used to seeing—one outside of the major urban centres of Canada such as Toronto and Vancouver. And it paints a portrait of a place where once-lucrative industrial jobs have been disappearing for decades, and the only crisis worker is shouldering the havoc that opioid overdoses are wreaking through her city.

This story is one that affects people across North America, and the world at large. Saut Ste. Marie here takes the place of any town dealing with the opioid epidemic, and the pain it causes to its population.

Released in February 2018, the film had already been viewed over 1 million times by April 2018.