After the Coal Rush

Glace Bay resident Thomas Ogley, a subject of Nance Ackerman's documentary Cottonland. Photo courtesy Nance Ackerman/Hot Docs.

As the 20th century found its end, Cape Breton fell on dark days. For as long as anyone could remember, coal, fish and steel had been staples of its economy. Atlantic fishing stocks plunged in the 1990s, though, and by 2000, 160 of the island’s mines had closed. In Glace Bay, 20 kilometres east of Sydney, population 20,000 and falling, depression and joblessness joined each other atop a towering plateau.

Cottonland, a documentary directed by Nova Scotia photographer Nance Ackerman, studies the aftermath of the town’s economic and social collapse. As the film begins, a broken utility wire slaps the exterior of a clapboard house. An indoor tableau follows. We see a tattooed forearm resting on a round table, with a lighter, spoon and syringe arranged nearby. A white substance sits in the bowl of the spoon. It’s OxyContin, a potent prescription painkiller. Taken in large doses, Oxy delivers a languid high akin to heroin or morphine. It is almost as addictive. Dirty hands press water from the syringe into the spoon. Flame from the lighter heats the blend. The camera cuts to a headshot. Brown eyes, heavy lids, a ballcap spun in reverse. The young man speaks.

“My name is Thomas Ogley, and I’m addicted to OxyContin. I’ve been addicted for probably over five years now. I started off when the doctors give it to me, and then I kept going.... [Now I do this] anywhere from two to 10 [times a day]. It all depends how much money I can get.” Ogley broke his back at age 23. He was prescribed OxyContin to manage the pain. A long time has passed since his last legal refill. His habit now costs about $200 a day, although he has no job to support it. “You just do it to be normal. You don’t get high no more. Like I never got high off doing this in months, man. It’s just — if you don’t do it, you’re deadly sick.”

In Glace Bay, his is a common tale. Since the mines closed, OxyContin abuse has devastated the community. “Cottonland,” a play on the drug’s name, has become the town’s unwanted sobriquet, a bruise that won’t heal. “[OxyContin] was already there to begin with because of the black lung and the cancer and the back injuries that are all a result of coal mining. It was easy access,” says Ackerman, outside a theatre on the University of Toronto’s downtown campus; she has come to the city to attend Cottonland’s world premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.

Filmmaker Nance Ackerman. Photo courtesy Hot Docs.

Stamford, Conn.’s Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin in 1995. The drug has one active ingredient, an opioid (synthetic opiate) called oxycodone. OxyContin’s molecular structure causes its pills to dissolve at a constant rate over a 12-hour period. It lasts much longer than older oxycodone-based meds like Percodan. (In Cottonland, we learn that one 80-milligram OxyContin pill — known as a “green monster” in Glace Bay — contains as much oxycodone as 16 Percodans.) As OxyContin came to market, doctors were already trending towards prescribing opiates for chronic pain. Purdue popularized its new drug with a widespread marketing campaign. Patients could take one pill in the morning and another before bed. There could be no more clock-watching with medications that had to be repeated throughout the day. For a time, OxyContin seemed too good to be true.

It was. Purdue underestimated (or ignored) a powerful force: addict ingenuity. As Cape Breton’s mines were closing, OxyContin users in western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, rural Maine and the Appalachian states of Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia discovered that the simple act of crushing their pills ruins their time-release matrix. Then they learned something else: snorted Oxy is a rocket ride to the moon. And if injected, it takes users all the way to Mars. (Purdue, according to Cottonland, now earns more than $1 billion annually from OxyContin sales. It faces more than 300 lawsuits alleging improper promotion of the drug.)

Illicit use boomed. OxyContin gained a street name, hillbilly heroin, then began its creep from Appalachia towards the U.S. eastern seaboard. From there, it spread north to the Maritimes. Unwitting doctors fed the surge. In less than three years, Oxy prescriptions in Cape Breton increased by 270 per cent.

Ackerman realized the drug’s toll when she visited Glace Bay in spring 2004, on assignment as a photojournalist for the Toronto Star. Already, 18 people from the area had died from OxyContin-related illnesses. During Ackerman’s stay, she met a recovering addict named Eddie Buchanan. Making a documentary was his idea. “Eddie watches documentaries obsessively. I think I’ve seen three in my life. I really had no experience making them,” she says. She had been on film sets as a still photographer, though, and felt confident enough to pitch the idea to the National Film Board of Canada. The NFB bit, and provided full funding for Cottonland. Buchanan collaborated on Ackerman’s script, then became the film’s narrator and emotional core.

“When we started doing the film, I just wanted to show the OxyContin problem. I thought it was just about people taking pills,” he says, while in Toronto with Ackerman for the premiere. “But Nance brought a whole other level to it. There’s a lot more going on. When you don’t have no money for your whole community and you get depressed, people turn to alcohol, people turn to drugs.”

Eddie Buchanan and Mary Hurley in front of their Glace Boy home. Two of their three children, Brooklyn and Brady, sit on the steps to their left. Photo courtesy Nance Ackerman/Hot Docs.

Buchanan is heavyset and light-hearted. His OxyContin addiction began with a prescription for migraine headaches. At first he popped the pills whole, but soon learned to crush and snort them. He introduced his girlfriend, Mary Hurley, to the drug. They travelled a downward spiral together, losing custody of their three young children along the way. “You do the first one, and then you need the next one just to function, because you’re already addicted,” she says in Cottonland. “It was like your whole body, every ache and pain you had, would go away,” adds Buchanan. “I didn’t give a s--- if the roof fell in. Everything could cave in around me, as long as I was stoned, I was happy.”

Another jawdropper comes during Buchanan’s interview with his grandmother, who, along with his grandfather, raised him. “Many was the time Eddie said he was going to kill himself. I told him go ahead and do it, get it over with. I never, ever thought Eddie would amount to anything, to tell you the truth,” she says, before addressing him directly. “I thought you’d be dead by now.” He whispers back: “I’m sorry.”

Methadone, a low-dose opiate that is used to treat heroin addiction, is the best-known cure for OxyContin dependency. When Buchanan decided to get clean, he had to travel five hours to Dartmouth to reach Glace Bay’s closest detox program. He stayed for three months, missing his family for every second. Hurley beat Oxy as well, and they regained custody of their kids. Now, though, Buchanan says they fear raising them in Glace Bay. Tighter controls have stanched the town’s supply of OxyContin since Cottonland was filmed, and it now has its own methadone program. (Thomas Ogley began treatment after the film wrapped. He remains clean today.) Many of the remaining users, though, have progressed from snorting to syringes. “There’s 14-year-old kids sticking needles in their arms,” Buchanan says. “If that’s how it is now, what is it going to be like when my kids become teenagers?”

Towards Cottonland’s finish, Ackerman contrasts the plight of Glace Bay with Membertou, a First Nations community that’s only 20 minutes away. When the mines closed, the people of Membertou bootstrapped together. The town is now prospering, with a zero unemployment rate and no major problems with pill abuse. It is a beacon to communities like Glace Bay. “That’s the big picture here,” Ackerman says. “[If we only focus on OxyContin addiction,] we’re just dealing with symptoms. The bigger issue is who’s responsible for what happens to a community after an industry goes in, rips everything up, then leaves. Who deals with the destruction left behind?”

Cottonland has caused concern in Glace Bay. No one there has seen the film yet, and Buchanan says he hears frequent chatter about it being a tabloid exposé that will be a disservice to the community. His neighbours can relax. Despite Ackerman’s self-deprecation, she proves herself a natural, balanced storyteller. And Buchanan makes an affable guide; his encounters with Ogley (the two men are longtime friends) and two recovering addicts who are also featured in Cottonland are equal parts compelling and compassionate.

“There are people in Glace Bay who have good jobs, good careers and nice houses. But we’re not making a film about nice houses. We’re trying to show the other side,” Buchanan says in the film. In Toronto, he continues that thought: “This is our story. The name Cottonland, that’s all you heard in the media. I wanted to show that we’re more than just junkies and addicts. We’re people.”

Cottonland is screening at Hot Docs on May 5.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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