Swallow THIS: A Documentary About Methadone and COVID-19 reveals what happened in methadone clinics during the pandemic. Federal agencies lifted onerous restrictions on take-home doses and everyone was eligible for 14 or 28 days of medication. No more standing in line six days a week to drink methadone. It was LIBERATION!

Click here to register for the screening and discussion.

Co-directors Marilena Marchetti and Helen Redmond traveled across the country to document the impact of this unprecedented change. In bracingly honest interviews with patients, clinic staff, and drug-user activists from Connecticut to Tennessee, they learned that the new take-homes policy was adopted inconsistently and many clinics had returned to daily, in-person dosing.

Methadone clinics were created in the 1970s by the Nixon administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration. They were designed to control, surveil and punish Black and brown patients. Now is the time to shut down these carceral, apartheid clinics and allow methadone to be picked up at the pharmacy. It is time to free people who take methadone.

Swallow THIS is a call to action to abolish racist methadone clinics.

Co-directors Marilena Marchetti and Helen Redmond will be in conversation with Sessi Kuwabara Blanchard, student of law at Temple University.