User Reviews

I have watched this movie due to the fact I live in WV and know many of the same type of people who are in this documentary. The Documentary follows several people in Oceana, WV. Most who have lost everything including their kids due to drug abuse. I want to say it does explain who the pill epidemic started, its was due to the coal miners in the area getting pain from the hard work the mines bring. The mines a lot of the time have their own doctor who wrote out pain medication, anything to get the miners to keep working. Once they were on Max dose and stopped working, and they had to quit, they found out they were addicted. The younger people who don't work in the mines claim that there is nothing else to do, that a lot of their dad's were coal miners and had a lot of money and that's how they would use. No one saw it as a bad thing because the drugs they were using, doctors gave out. It goes into the hospitals as well as with a dentist. They talk to several people from a young mother who lost her kids, to man who lived under a bridge. It really eye opening how a drug can control you. Some of the people are clean in the film, but most are ongoing users. There is ongoing drug use and needles as well as how people are getting drugs in the city. Its sad but an interesting look into an ongoing problem all over the USA.

It begins a promising documentary but degenerates into the equivalent of a barroom of drunks, mumbling and blubbering in front of the camera. From weepy testimonials to low self-esteem problems, from "there's nothing to do here" complaints, braggy boasting, horrible rap-poems, women crying over their baby's futures and too many pious, truth-telling but completely wasted people's faces onscreen, soon the sympathy factor just plummets. At one point, people start blaming West Virginia itself. It's a major improvement compared to the pretentious swill that is "Louisiana", but the movie is a very slow merry-go-round of endless interviews with gorgeous montages set to beautiful music. The feature would work better if it were only the montages and maybe the interviews were condensed. Several characters garner no sympathy at all, especially one big hick who slobbers his loyalty to dope while moaning about his baby, this while his lovestruck girlfriend qualifies how important it is to deprive the family of money so her man can not to be sick. Plus, the guy litters. I had to fast-forward over this couple. A lot of pipe dreams shattered and teardrops shed, yet you learn very little. And being 10 years sober, I can cut a lot of slack to addicts and their testimonials, just not for so many who can't face their own mistakes and their own addictions.