Haydee, you're welcome and delighted to hear from you. The past is often difficult. It can never be changed but it can be regarded differently. Time is a solvent. To that end, I will quote from 2 reviews of Dope from long ago:
"Their (the Rochlins ) refusal to interpret their subjects has made the film an unusually valuable testament to the spirit of its time and place.....Ultimately, the best analogy for the Rochlin's achievement is the old blues song which runs through it like a refrain: "Hey, baby, won't you come here quick/ This old cocaine's making me sick/ Cocaine all around my brain"
Dope shares the same tone of subdued pain and troubled acquiescence; and it is perhaps this, above all, which makes the film so distinctive"--Tony Rayns, London, Monthly Film Bulletin-June 1971
and this---
"When it premiered at the Locarno Festival in 1968, DOPE was praised by Variety's Gene Moskowitz as ' not just another look at the so-called drug, or hippie scene. A rugged documentary with revealing insights into the sad, touching, downbeat, sometimes tender drug scene'.
'One's perception of DOPE is even more complex today, when the immediacy and poignancy of its style mingle with other perspectives provided by the distance of seven years' according to John Hanhardt, Head of the Film Department. ' Seeing DOPE remains a harrowing experience while at the same time one feels a curious nostalgia, both for times past and for lives lost' . The edges between immediate experience and remote history begin to blur, we see at once 'how it is' and 'how it was'. Years from now DOPE will probably survive as an historical document of a time long ago. If so, it will surely inform and shape how anyone who has seen it thinks about the time and place it describes."
--Whitney Museum of American Art, press release for New American Filmmakers Series 1975

So, Haydee, Geno, your father has passed into myth and legend and like all heroes he has a fatal flaw perhaps...but the story of his death and even more so, his strong true wonderful music anchors the film and the film DOPE is, although really idiosyncratic, a true enough document of that time and that place.

The scenes of shooting up do carry a certain frisson for most people perhaps but they punctuate the film and carry a certain metaphorical meaning as well. It's hard for me to imagine the film without them. And dealing with a 40 year old past for me has had its perils as well. The past needs to be examined but also put gently away.

If you saw it long ago, you may want to see it on DVD which I could send to you..if you give me your address. For all other readers, Dope is available both as streaming video and DVD on the site www.dopethemovie.net and there is a trailer there as well.

Take care. Flame (flame.schon@gmail.com