DOC TELLS ‘TRAGIC STORIES’
Filmmaker Embry calls for a change of approach in Painkiller: Inside the Opioid Crisis
For an issue as contentious and emotional as Canada’s opioid crisis, filmmaker Matt Embry ’s new documentary on the subject contains precious few conflicting views. In fact, it doesn’t contain any. Whether it’s activists, health workers, addiction experts, police, bureaucrats, doctors, or family members affected by this country ’s opioid-addiction epidemic, there seems to be clear consensus: Our approach to treating addiction is wrong and we need to change it or more people will die and more families will be destroyed. In fact, not one person interviewed in Embry’s Painkiller: Inside the Opioid Crisis offers any contrasting opinion at all.
“I think the biggest problem we’re dealing with is the stigma of addiction and understanding what addiction is and how we’re going to treat this,” says Embry. “The war on drugs has been an absolute failure. We’re not going to arrest ourselves out of this problem. We need to rethink the system and that’s rethinking what addiction is. It’s looking at the causal factors of this, whether people are suffering emotional or physical pain and are using various drugs to medicate that. We, as a system, need to look at that pain. Why are people in so much emotional, physical pain and how can we treat that in ways that are non-harmful and in ways where people aren’t going to die?”
Embry is currently on a crosscountry tour promoting the 45-minute documentary, which is a followup to his award-winning 2017 film Living Proof. That film, which screened at both the Toronto and Calgary international film festivals, was a personal portrait of the filmmaker’s experiences with multiple sclerosis that outlined his success using alternative treatments while taking aim at the major MS organizations and pharmaceutical companies.
In Painkiller, Embry again implicates big pharma to some degree, focusing on its initial misleading literature surrounding the addictive nature of opioids. But the film delves even deeper, going back to the murky origins of America’s illconceived War on Drugs under the Nixon administration and the impact it has had ever since on battling addiction in North American cities.
While the opioid crisis is a nationwide phenomenon, Embry spent much of his time in Vancouver where it is perhaps most visible. His film is chock full of disconcerting statistics as it examines the spike in overdoses and deaths with the rise of fentanyl as a street drug (It can be up to 100 times more powerful than heroin.) In Canada, there were 4,000 opioid-related deaths in 2017 and more than 1,035 in the first three months of 2018. In B.C. alone there were 1,400 overdose deaths in 2017. Only 11 per cent of those were on the streets, with most happening in homes. Embry zooms in on three families — from Langley, B.C., Edmonton and Calgary — to tell heartbreaking tales of promising young people who lost their lives or were severely injured by drug use. These weren’t homeless teens; they came from loving families and were gifted athletes, popular with their peers and honour-roll students.
“For our entire team, these are really tragic stories,” Embry says. “It’s traumatic, on a certain level, to sit down and have the families share this with us and to actually be in the real environments. This is something we have to harness to motivate us to share the story, those types of emotions. You have to dig deep and say ‘we have to share this story so this doesn’t happen again.’ ”
Painkiller is the maiden film from Telus Health Originals documentary series and is currently available on TELUS Optik TV on Demand. Producers thought Embry would be a good fit thanks to his previous film, Living Proof, which also delved into complex health issues. For each viewing of the documentary, TELUS plans to give $5 (up to $50,000 total) to organizations providing care through mobile health clinics.
Fentanyl, of course, has been in the news for a couple years now. But Embry said he was still shocked when he began looking into the project to learn the scope of the crisis.
“The extent of the crisis, I did not know,” Embry says. “When we started doing the research, and a significant amount of research went into this before we went to camera, it was really eye-opening
When we started doing the research … it was really eye-opening to me to see how huge of a problem this was.
to me to see how huge of a problem this was.”
Embry has been making documentaries for years, including early films about Theo Fleury, Ian Tyson and Jann Arden. But his focus has shifted in the past few years into more activist territory.
“I make documentaries for a reason and that is, hopefully, to make a better world,” he says. “I think what we want to do is shine a light on things. Maybe we’ve got problems in the world or negative things happening, but I try my absolute best to give solutions and leave viewers with hope.”