Dope is Death

Dope is Death

Mia Donovan / 2020 / English / Canada / 81 min

With short film Never Use Alone by Colin Matthews

In the early ’70s, narrow-minded politicians and adversarial government agencies treated struggling communities across the South Bronx as an afterthought. The Black Panthers and the Young Lords took matters into their own hands, uniting to think outside the box in order to improve the state of their neighborhoods. Together, they combined community activism with their progressive politics to create America’s first acupuncture detoxification program.

Director Mia Donovan’s Dope is Death chronicles these heroic feats of activism while discussing how community-specific support systems can make or break the recovery process. It’s a story about the Black and Brown diaspora refusing to back down against the oppressive systems designed to keep them fr