The famously known VICE magazine was created in 1994, and has since become one of the most distinguished magazines around the world. By talking about news, politics, and culture issues generally not portrayed in magazines, VICE has gained a reputation of rebelliousness by depicting this crude and original content based on today’s world.
Once focused on the importance of printing its publications, VICE has expanded its informative medium over the past few decades. The renown magazine is now greatly focused on its website publications, as well as on producing content for its YouTube channel, under the same name as the magazine.
Within it, documentaries that range up to two hours portray the life of people around the world. Series on reporters sneaking into North Korea, how cocaine is made, to an interview with a cannibal; VICE has it all. One of the latest documentaries is a forty minute long piece on the overdose crisis that is currently taking place on the US-Canada border.
The documentary, named Steel Town Down, depicts a city primarily focused on its economy-based steel industry, and how the societal part of the city has been forgotten within the economical growth of the city. People affected by the situation are now mostly drug addicts who have fallen in the cage that is boredom, thus seeing drugs as the only possible solution.
This production piece is based on a present day issue that is taking multiple lives everyday, thus, making the documentary so much more important and relevant. This feels like a call to action from part of VICE to the world. By interviewing current addicts, recovering addicts, and government figures within the border, VICE really does a great job on making people understand the situation that is currently taking place and why it has to be considered as a crisis.
Steel Town Down is just one of the many examples of great work that VICE has produced throughout the years. It is a raw depiction of a reality that can be buried within the marginalized side of society.