RAW OPIUM: PAIN, PLEASURE, PROFITS (Peter Findlay). Screens Wednesday (May 25) at the Royal, followed by a panel discussion. See listings. Rating: NNN
If you’re new to the subject, Peter Findlay’s primer on opium, heroin addiction and the war on drugs is a good place to start. It doesn’t go into great detail or bombard you with facts and figures in the manner of, say, Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job, but the broad strokes are accurate and the message is clear.
The movie takes us to Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Pakistan and adds news footage, archival material and various experts to cover opium growing, the economics for the farmers and the impossibility of policing the borders. It touches on local corruption and both American and Russian complicity in sustaining the trade, and it returns repeatedly to the severity, expense and futility of America’s domestic war on drugs.
Interspersed with the big picture are scenes of a Vancouver heroin user who puts a human face on the problem and a doctor who discusses treatment and the harm reduction philosophy at the InSite supervised injection clinic, where the addict enters the detox program.
The movie winds up in Portugal, where harm reduction has been officially embraced. That country has decriminalized drug use, thereby increasing the number of addicts entering treatment and reducing drug deaths and use among teens.
