In Methadone: An American Way of Dealing, work is everywhere. Dayton, Ohio, the film’s primary location, is introduced to us as a “manufacturing community” beset by crime. These two types of work—factory and crime—come up again and again while we are in town. Straight work, at GM, or at a foundry, leads to getting high just to bear it, to “paint over the factory,” as one young worker puts it, and get through another soul-killing shift. Staying in the plant and getting by on methadone instead is tough. We meet only one worker doing this; he is trying to taper off and not making it, missing shifts for the first time because he feels so low. We meet many workers who have chosen to stay outside the factory, period, and stay high all the time. They claim they are living a better, more real life than their fathers did, trooping into factories every day with their coveralls and lunchboxes, “sheep” meekly accepting their slaughter. As the film notes, with its passing shots of street preachers and sex shows, the straight life is studded with its own addictive consolations. Dayton, we are told, has “1000 bars and just one [methadone] clinic.”