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Streets of Plenty shows a side of Insite no one has ever seen before, the documentary’s director claimed.
Subject Misha Kleider took a hidden camera into Vancouver’s supervised drug injection site and secretly recorded his first dose of heroin.
The experience, boiled down to a three-minute segment near the conclusion of the film, showed a nurse who advised Kleider on how to safely inject the drug before he thrust a clean needle into his arm inside the medical facility’s injection room.
“If people want to know what actually happens there, the only way to prove that is to do it how we did it, which is to experience it,” director Corey Ogilvie said.
Portland Hotel Society director Mark Townsend took issue with the direction of the documentary.
“I felt that Misha was a tad irresponsible,” Townsend said. “We’re dealing with people who have a lot of pain and use drugs, as you can see from that film. I don’t think it’s very good to, just for a documentary, shoot up heroin and smoke crack cocaine.”
Townsend did, however, commend the documentary for explaining the connection between homelessness, mental illness and addiction.
“It puts an elephant in the room that a lot of people don’t want in the room,” he said. “There are issues of not enough housing, there are issues of not enough mental health services but intermingled with all of those is something called addiction.”