I can’t recall when I first watched COTTONLAND, the 2006 documentary written and directed by Nance Ackerman with Eddie Buchanan, but I remember exactly how watching it made me feel.

As the opening black and white stills filled the screen, including a sad and lonely looking street enveloped in a dismal fog, followed by the first video footage of an old “company house” with dejected and faded siding as a broken wire banged helplessly in the wind with the ever-present grey and gloomy sky in the background, coupled with the sparse and melancholy music tracks by Jamie Alcorn, it all set the perfect tone for what you knew was going to be a dismal portrait of Glace Bay, a picturesque slice of the Maritimes rooted deep in coal mining history… but beneath our rocky shores and windswept coastline a cancer was growing.

As an independent filmmaker I applauded Nance Ackerman’s directing and Alain Dupras’s cinematography because Cottonland was brilliantly shot for the subject matter; but as a resident of Glace Bay it was both discouraging and maddening because there’s so much more to our town than what is being portrayed on the screen, but that doesn’t make for good filmmaking. The opening scenes with the on-screen captions, music and voice-over painted a very bleak and dismal outlook for Glace Bay… but isn’t that the outlook that Oxycontin addicts have of life?

In the voice-over Eddie did say; “There are people here who live good lives. Have good jobs, nice houses… but there’s another side to this place. This is Cottonland…”

Glace Bay was nicknamed Cottonland and Oxy Town because of the rampant use of Oxycontin, an opioid medication used for treatment of moderate to severe pain. It has been nicknamed “Hillbilly Heroin” because once the protective layer is removed from the pill, the drug inside is like instant heroin. Its addictive nature has earned it another moniker: The Green Monster.

As a filmmaker I wanted to shoot my own documentary called “This is Not Cottonland” to show that our town is more than the bleak future that documentary painted. It was not a slight against that film, as a filmmaker I think it was brilliantly shot and edited, I just wanted to show our town in a better light. Maybe I should shoot that documentary because a lot has changed since 2006 when this one first came out, right?

As I was walking to my fiancé’s house today I saw discard needles next to the sidewalk. I was furious. The elementary school was the next block over and a lot of small children use this exact sidewalk to get home from school, and some idiot leaves their drug needles for an innocent and curious child to find?

I called the police to have it removed. It didn’t matter how much it was raining, I waited for them to arrive because I couldn’t bring myself to leave. If a child happened across these needles before the police arrived and they got hurt, I would never have been able to forgive myself.

With each drop of rain that struck my face my anger increased because it’s irresponsible behavior like this that is making the rest of the island snub their nose at our home town. The sad part is, this is not an uncommon tale that people talk about in hushed whispers like a dirty little secret – we see this on our streets, sidewalks and beaches all the time. I’m sure you know a few people who saw a discarded needle just waiting for an unsuspecting child to discover it. You’ve probably seen it once or twice yourself.

Just across the street from my house is a magnificent view of the Atlantic Ocean. Many people visit that spot to take pictures and watch the fireworks display because of its vantage point, but people can no longer park their cars there – my neighbor was forced to make some calls to get the entrance blocked with large boulders because that spot not only attracted photographers and selfie-kings, it attracted drug users too.

Walking through the tall grass to take a picture was more akin to walking through a mine field because there were so many used needles tossed out of car windows just waiting to poke someone in the foot. My fiancé and I talked about getting married across the street from my house because of that magnificent view, but we both realized that will never happen because it was simply too dangerous.

I wanted to believe that over the years we finally outgrew our Cottonland reputation… but as I waited in the rain for the police to arrive to safely remove what I learned was three needles that some ****** tossed aside with a total disregard for anyone’s safety, I’m not so sure that I ever did.

Originally posted to my blog at https://kenncrawford.com/glace-bay-is-not-cottonland-is-it/