Sudbury, Ont., harm reduction worker stars in new documentary on the opioid crisis

A harm reduction worker who grew up in Sudbury, Ont., is the main character of a new documentary that screens at the Cinfest International Film Festival this evening.

Love in the Time of Fentanyl documents the lives of injection drug users and harm reduction workers in Vancouver's downtown eastside, which is often called ground zero of Canada's opioid crisis.

Ronnie Grigg, who grew up in Sudbury, has worked in harm reduction since the 1990s and has responded to more than 1,000 overdoses.

He was involved in the Portland Hotel Society, in Vancouver, which pioneered social housing with a non-eviction policy for people addicted to opioids.

Many of the people behind the Portland Hotel Society later started Insite, which became North America's first sanctioned supervised drug injection site in 2003.

"People don't die in those sites," Grigg said. "The fundamental issue is life and death and that's not hyperbole, that's not an exaggeration."

Grigg returned to Sudbury for the film screening, which starts at 6 p.m.

As a harm reduction worker, he said it's rare for people to notice his work.

"So to have a light shone on it like a documentary is quite unexpected and really great," he said.

Grigg added it's hard to find a person anywhere who hasn't been affected by the overdose crisis.

In August, data from Ontario's Office of the Chief Coroner revealed that Public Health Sudbury and Districts had an opioid death rate of 52.9 per 100,000 people from April 2021 to March 2022.

The district had the second opioid death rate in Ontario, after Thunder Bay, which reported an opioid death rate of 82.1 per 100,000 people in the same period.

Sudbury is set to have its own supervised consumption site soon. The site had a grand opening in July, but its operations were delayed due to staffing shortages.