In a dark bedroom, Maddy is tying off her arm, getting ready to shoot heroin with her girlfriend, Page. Through the camera’s eye, we watch these intimate, gritty scenes in Jenny Mackenzie’s new documentary “Dying in Vein: The Opiate Generation.”
During the year the Utah filmmaker was following Maddy and Page, the 20-something women were under the care of counselors in “harm reduction” drug treatment programs and had agreed to not increase the amount of drugs they were using.
Maddy had been cut off financially by her parents, but wasn’t ready to enter a rehab program. “I always knew where the Naloxone was,” the filmmaker said of the drug used to treat narcotic overdoses in emergencies.