We're looking at a coffin-shaped field, a strip of shadow giving way to a blue-gray and bone abstraction. We hear vigorous yet gentle slapping of fingers on flesh, and we somehow understand we are looking at a video shot on a mobile phone camera in portrait mode. An unseen hand picks up the phone and its camera focuses on the inert face of a young woman sitting in the driver's seat, her eyes rolled up white.
The unseen cinematographer pauses for a dramatic second, scanning the mask.
"Dude. Mikaila."
The subject moans softly. The camera operator puts the phone back down, allowing us a quick glimpse at the junkie works between the bucket seats, and goes back to her resuscitation work.
Slap slap slap slap-slap.
"Dude. What is it?"
This is how New Orleans-based filmmaker Nathan Willis' "7 Days: The Opioid Crisis in Arkansas" opens. It's the most sensational footage in the film, which will be aired on Arkansas PBS on Monday after premiering at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival.
It's not a film that will awe anyone with its production values or the spectacular footage it captures. It consists mainly of talking heads and shots of people doing normal things like playing golf and coaching baseball. It is dry and sober, presenting the horror as a matter of fact.
Because it is a matter of fact. Opioids are killing Americans at an alarming rate.
In 2020, 547 Arkansans died from drug overdoses, an increase of 195 from the previous year, according to Kirk Lane, Arkansas' drug director. Opioids have overtaken methamphetamine as the state's most dangerous street drug.
Nationally, two out of three drug overdose deaths involve opioids. One conservative estimate holds that between 1999 and 2019, more than 450,000 people died as a result of an opioid overdose.
And, "7 Days" emphasizes, a lot of the people who become addicted to opioids have no intention of abusing the drugs. They were simply prescribed them. They do a great job of alleviating pain. They also induce an euphoric sense of well-being. People like them not just because they make them feel OK, but because they bathe them in warmth, make them feel completed and whole.
These drugs induce cravings that will cause some people to seek them out at the expense of other parts of their lives. They want the drugs more than they want the approval of their family and friends, more than they want meaningful work, more than they want love or money.
It's not their fault. The film's title refers to the fact that a person who is prescribed opioids for seven days has a one-in-10 chance of still being on opioids a year later. It's easy to become addicted to opioids. It's difficult to resist using them when they are available. It's not a matter of willpower or strength of character.
While America has been fighting a "War on Drugs" for more than 50 years, these days most of us might agree our national drug problem is more a public health issue than a criminal justice issue. Willfully introducing a mind-altering substance into one's body might be morally suspect and medically unwise, but it ought not be in itself a crime.
Illicit drugs cause crime because people determined to self-medicate will find the means to achieve their goal. Mikaila Wingfield, the senseless woman in the opening of "7 Days," who survived that and several other overdoses before finding some purchase in a sober life, remembers raiding garages for gas cans to fill up her car.
She talks about having no money yet still finding ways to scrounge up enough for heroin, and fixing up in her car in the parking garage of Little Rock's Park Plaza mall. (Her parents had installed a GPS tracker on her car, so she wanted to go someplace that looked innocuous to score.)
Wingfield described the feeling of opioids as a "warm blanket" enveloping her from head to toe.
"When I first opened up that prescription box of oxycodone and I took that very first pill, it never came across my mind that that pill was going to turn into a syringe that I was then going to start putting in my body for many years until I destroyed everything in my life," Kyle Brewer, another interviewee, says.
Brewer, who now works as a counselor for recovering addicts, hardly fits the mold of a street drug user. Blond, clean-shaven, he appears on-camera in a Razorback golf shirt — he's interviewed during a round at Burns Park golf course in North Little Rock.
That's part of the point he wants to make; there is no typical profile of the opioid abuser. They can look like anyone, like your youth pastor or your boss. And most of them were started down the path of addiction — or "opioid overuse syndrome," as some people prefer to call it — by someone wearing a white coat.
WE KNEW WHO DID
Drugs were something my generation grew up with; in my high school, there were plenty of kids who didn't smoke pot or take amphetamines — black mollies (biphetamine), brown and clears (dextroamphetamine) — but we all knew plenty who did. And most of the adults we knew — parents, teachers, coaches — seemed terribly obtuse and/or wishfully ignorant about drugs.
I recall an evening in 1975, sitting in the knotty pine-paneled den of one of my best friends, an athlete and honor student, watching the evening news with his father, a full bird colonel in the Air Force, when Walter Cronkite quoted some statistics indicating that more than half of high school students in the U.S. regularly smoked marijuana.
"It can't possibly be that high, can it?" the colonel asked us.
My friend, who was only lightly buzzed, giggled, and said, "Dad, I think Walter's figures are kind of low."
And they were, at least in my crowd. We weren't stoners, but we were stoner-adjacent in that some of us bought weed from the stoners. (We were more beer-and-whiskey kids, though it struck me as ironic that beer and whiskey sometimes seemed harder to get.)
Looking back, it all seems pretty innocent — the marijuana that circulated through our cohort was tame compared to what the dispensaries furnish nowadays. The very idea of marijuana as something unsavory seems to be evaporating.
While we had our drug causalities, most of us emerged from adolescence and post-adolescence more or less intact. There's no good way to judge the real cost of drug use — one of the heaviest marijuana users I knew eventually ended up as a nuclear engineer, but some of his potential might have wafted away with all the the bong smoke — but all of us are buffeted by circumstance and whim. It's generally better to make mistakes earlier in life, when you still have time to recover.
When I was a kid, heroin — the only opioid we knew about — was something that killed rock stars. It was something to be avoided. (As Jason Isbell's dad advises him in his song "Outfit": "Have fun, but stay clear of the needle.") I didn't know anyone who used heroin until I was in my early 20s, hanging around with Shreveport-area blues musicians.
THIS IS NAIVE
After a few years covering crime, I developed a simple philosophy about drugs: They all should be legal and no one should use them. Or to be more precise, no one should abuse them. And while I understand this is naive and that some people are always going to chase their bliss, no matter the risks, the bigger problem with drug use is not what they might do to us but what we will do to each other in order to get them.
I'm for legalization of marijuana purely because every illicit bag of pot is stained by blood. The Mexican drug cartels that supplied most of the lousy bud my buddies used to consume killed and enslaved people. When cocaine came in, it made it worse. On a bright spring morning in 1983, I stood in a tidy Craftsman cottage in the Broadmoor area of Shreveport, where a family or four had been hacked to death by machetes for somehow getting on the wrong side of the cowboys bringing the stuff up from Miami. Somehow Al Pacino's over-the-top performance in "Scarface" has never amused me as much as it has some of my demographic peers.
It's not an easy problem; legalized cocaine might not be a good thing. But we'd be better off treating drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal issue. The War on Drugs is a self-perpetuating cycle, an economic engine that chews through resources, and has created and sustained both the Mexican cartels and an American prison industrial complex.
In a sense, we're all complicit — if the demand for illegal drugs wasn't present in the U.S., no one would smuggle in marijuana or cocaine. But people will self-medicate. We must begin to recognize that, regardless of whether the need for self-medication springs from a physical cause or a deficiency of character, the allure of some narcotics is so compelling that some users care only for getting their next hit.
"We'll never arrest our way out of a opioid problem in the United States," James Dawson, the special agent in charge of the Little Rock field office of the FBI, says in "7 Days." He says the "reality of it is, through education, through care, through involvement by family and community, I think that we stand the opportunity or the chance to move away from an opioid-based problem."
A chance.
MAKING DRUGS LEGAL
My thinking is that if you make drugs legal, you make it harder for criminals to profit from them.
But the opioid crisis was not something fomented by evil narcos in Medellin or Mexico City. It was started by a pharmaceutical company that wanted to increase its profits. In the late '90s, Big Pharma reassured the medical community that patients would not become addicted to opioid pain relievers. They incentivized health-care providers to prescribe them at ever increasing rates.
This led to a lot more people feeling the euphoria that can be transmitted by opioids, which meant that some people began to want to feel that way more and more often. But it turned out that the pills were indeed very addictive, and soon people developed tolerances which required them to use more and more of the drug to experience the feelings they were craving.
Their bodies might develop a dependence on the drugs, which meant they had to take them every six to eight hours simply not to experience withdrawal symptoms. As one interviewee in "7 Days" puts it, taking the drug allowed you to feel normal enough to walk around and do something with your day, though the clock in your head never let you forget that you needed to procure another fix to not be sick. So you basically spent all your time and resources chasing the drug.
Almost invariably the user would discover at some point that good old heroin — the killer street drug that you should avoid at all costs — was cheaper and easier to find than the synthetic prescription opioids they had originally been prescribed by doctors who had taken Hippocratic oaths to do no harm.
Because "7 Days" wants to save lives by pointing people in the direction of help, dissolving shame and enlisting empathy for victims, it spends a lot more time presenting the stories of the survivors and those left behind by the overdose of a loved one than in building a case against the cynical manufacturers and corporate pushers of the product.
A 53-minute film designed to fill an hour in a public broadcaster's schedule is probably not the forum to best explore the corporate treachery behind the opioid epidemic.
Besides, plenty of people are telling that story. There's a new Hulu series, "Dopesick," that stars Michael Keaton as a regretful small-town physician duped by Big Pharma into over-prescribing the drugs, and a forthcoming Netflix series called "Painkiller" that sounds like it's covering the same territory.
Earlier this year, we saw the release of the Nicholas Jarecki action drama "Crisis," starring Gary Oldman as a researcher dismayed by how his work had been misused by a drug company. The film version of "Hillbilly Elegy" was set against the opioid crisis in impoverished rural Ohio. The HBO documentary "Crime of the Century" was a deep dive into the moral and legal culpability of Purdue Pharma, the company owned and controlled by Mortimer and Raymond Sackler and their heirs, which began selling the opioid drug OxyContin in 1996.
There are a lot of people plowing that field.
So Willis can be forgiven an anecdotal approach — a core sampling of the crisis that concentrates on Arkansas faces and voices. He does include the medical community in the mix, highlighting Russellville's Dr. Kristin Martin and UAMS physicians Michael Mancino and Johnathan Goree.
"If patients are given seven days of opioids — just seven days — they have a one-in-10 chance of being on opioids in a year," Goree says. "While a lot of people love coffee, those people aren't going to sell their car or steal from their family members to pay for their cup of coffee ... Unfortunately, the love of opioids can become so powerful that people start to do those things."
"7 Days: The Opioid Crisis in Arkansas" will air at 8 p.m. Monday on Arkansas PBS and will be shown in public schools throughout the state during Red Ribbon Week, Oct. 23-31.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com