Addictions
Alberta and opioids II: Marshall Smith’s ambitious campaign
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Marshall Smith. Photo: PW
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Alberta’s system builder
The Alberta model, made in BC
“I, as you know, have been everywhere in this field, from eating out of garbage cans to this office,” Marshall Smith said. “So I have a deep respect for everybody who works along that continuum.”
We were sitting in the office at the Alberta Legislature reserved for chiefs of staff to Alberta premiers. That’s Smith’s current job. Premier Danielle Smith was probably nearby, though I didn’t see her on this trip. On a shelf behind Marshall Smith were two coffee mugs of different design, each bearing the inscription WAKE UP. SAVE LIVES. REPEAT.
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Anyway, Marshall Smith (all future uses of “Smith” in this post will refer to him, unless I specify the premier) was talking about the continuum from dumpsters to the centre of power. “Where you work on that continuum obviously colours the way that you enter this conversation,” he said. “When you are standing on a sidewalk with a person in front of you, the solutions to that person’s problem look very different than what you might do to plan a broader system of care, for a large population of people.”
This was his way of anticipating criticisms he faces as a leading strategist behind Alberta’s emerging strategy for handling a deadly progression in opioid doses. Since he entered Alberta’s government as a more junior staffer in the government of former premier Jason Kenney in 2019, Smith has been working to put a much greater emphasis on recovery from addiction than on “harm reduction,” whose valuable goal is to keep drug users alive whether they recover or not. This makes him a bête noire among harm-reduction advocates. (You can read a mild critique of his efforts here; or a real scorcher here).
What Smith was saying was, in effect, If you work on the street, you’re going to be all about harm reduction, and I respect that. But he is working on drug policy for a whole province, and perhaps beyond, so he needs a broader perspective. “I’m a system builder. So I don’t have the luxury of just focusing on one particular substance. I have to worry about the whole population. I have to worry about the disease burden of addiction and drug use more broadly.”
He sees much to worry about. “Over the last 30 years in Canada, successive governments have failed miserably to anticipate and adequately address the type of services — both from a capital investment and an operating investment — to help people do this.” By “this,” he means escaping addiction. “We have not cared about people with mental health and addiction issues. And we had the ability to not care because up until the last six or seven years, the evidence of them was hidden away.”
Smith first started thinking about this when he was in British Columbia, where he began his recovery from a history of drug use. In 2018, at the BC Centre for Substance Use, Smith co-wrote a report with Dr. Evan Wood that called for a large new investment in facilities and programs to help people recover from addiction. The report is no longer on the BCCSU website, but you can download a copy here.
“It was a 39-point strategy to transform the system in British Columbia,” Smith recalled. “The government of British Columbia wasn’t interested in that strategy. They wanted to go a particular direction.
“So that report is now known as the Alberta model.”
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Marshall Smith in the dining hall of the Lakeview Recovery Community, opening in July. Photo: PW
In its first page, the Wood/Smith report said “British Columbia has long suffered because of the lack of an effective system to support individuals in and pursuing recovery from substance use disorders.” The system’s “overwhelming focus” was on keeping people alive rather than helping them get better. Wood and Smith wanted that to change.
The need for major new investments in addiction recovery was essentially uncontroversial in B.C. Indeed governments there still periodically announce they are making such investments. But Smith was perpetually unsatisfied with the scale of that commitment.
A year after BC’s new NDP government could-shouldered his report, Smith began working in the UCP government of Alberta’s then-new premier, Jason Kenney.
“Obviously we started off very modestly,” Smith said. “I worked in an office down in the basement. Mental health and addiction wasn’t a big deal. It really was very much a group of cubicles.”
Today, Alberta’s department of mental health and addiction is the seventh-largest ministry in the provincial government.
“The ROSC transformation that is going on in Alberta is massive. It is one of the most massive whole-of-government system transformations that I’ve seen,” Smith said. The premier chairs a ROSC committee of cabinet with seven ministers.
I guess I’d better unpack that acronym. ROSC stands for “recovery-oriented system of care,” a term that appeared in the 2018 report Smith co-wrote.
So you get the premier and her ministers of mental health and addiction, Indigenous relations, advanced education, health, community and social services, public safety and the attorney general meeting regularly to coordinate recovery policy. The premier’s chief of staff is on the file constantly. As I mentioned on Monday, he devoted a full day to explaining this broad effort to me.
“We spend enormous amounts of time and energy,” Smith said. “All of us live and breathe this. Anybody out there that thinks that we’re just, from a conservative perspective, just cavalierly doing this, that just couldn’t be more untrue. We we are in this completely and totally. We monitor almost everything that goes on in the system.”
What are they working on? Smith said the “recovery” part of that “recovery-oriented system of care” jargon-ball gets most of the attention, because it draws attention to the contrast between harm-reduction and abstinence-based recovery models. But Smith is a wonk, and if anything he is more interested in the “system of care” part. His goal is to ensure that every interaction an opioid user has with the modern government apparatus is designed to encourage recovery from dependency. Since people who use drugs tend to bump up against the state a lot, Alberta’s emerging system has a lot of moving parts. The goal is to hook the parts up more effectively.
One of the other men in Smith’s office, Dr. Nathaniel Day, chimed in. He’s been the lead strategist on substance use at Alberta Health Services. He’s an important Smith collaborator.
“Across Canada,” he said, “the system of care for people with addiction has been fragmented, poorly thought out — convenient.” He meant services had generally only been provided when, and where, it was easy for government to provide them. “If you look at opioid dependency treatment, if you lived in a suburban or rural community, it didn’t matter that you had an opioid use disorder. Tough. We had no services for you.”
Day designed the Virtual Opioid Dependency Program, which provides online consultations to patients anywhere in Alberta, and if needed, prescriptions to medications that can be filled at local pharmacies. For patients without coverage, the medication is free and if their local pharmacist has it in stock, available on the day of the call.
“We went in and said, enough is enough,” Day said. “What would be good enough for you and your family? And how do we take that to everybody?”
Which medication? “In this province, we’re huge fans of gold-standard opioid-replacement medications, and we use it a lot,” Smith said. “We have Sublocade, which is something that other provinces don’t have because it’s very expensive. It’s the injectable version of Suboxone. It’s a subcutaneous injection, it goes under the skin, it lasts for 30 days, where the oral is 24-hour. So that’s a thousand bucks a shot, and we pay for that.”
An obvious point about this is that these so-called opioid agonist treatments, or OATs, are big-time harm reduction. They greatly reduce both withdrawal symptoms and highs. One question that I still have, after watching everything Smith and the Alberta government are doing on drug recovery, is whether other provinces could afford to match it.
Running into those institutions
VODP is useful for people who are able to reach out for help from home. But other potential beneficiaries are distracted, or in distress. Very often they run into the police.
“So we took that technology” — the virtual access to physicians and treatment — “and we gave it to the 34 police agencies that we have in the province,” Smith said.
“We said to the officers, ‘If you encounter somebody who has an opioid-use disorder, you can get them started on opioid-use medication. You can, officer. Here’s the phone number to call. Put them on. We make the arrangements. They go to the pharmacy, right then and there. If they’re on the street, that can be done right in the back of a police car.
“If they are in custody at the cell block and they go into the cell block, we have put paramedics in every cell block in Alberta. So the first thing that happens to somebody when they’re arrested and they go into into municipal cells, they’re met by a paramedic that says, ‘Let’s talk about your substance use. Are you an opioid user? We can offer you immediate treatment right now. Right here. Would you like to do that?’ Through our police programs, we’re probably up to like 4,000 people who have taken us up on that.”
That’s what you can get done in a police cruiser or a holding pen. Lots of people go much further into the correctional system than that. So does Smith’s system of care.
“[Alberta’s] focus on corrections and police right now, admittedly, is the opposite of what some other jurisdictions are focusing on,” Smith said. If anything this was an understatement. A major argument for decriminalization and safe supply is that the last thing a drug user needs is the stigma of a criminal record. Other jurisdictions, Smith said, “are running away from those institutions when they should be running into those institutions.
“I’ll give you a very direct example why.
“We know, from the 2017 coroner’s report in Alberta that 40 percent of the people who died [of opioid-related causes] were in custody in the year prior to their death. That’s a really important piece of information, because it tells me I have a big chunk of population there that — if I can get at them, and if we can change the way that they experience this process — we can make a big dent in these numbers.”
A lot of people in the correctional system have substance-use disorder, even if that’s not what they’re in for. “We said, ‘Let’s really do a different way of thinking on this,’” Smith said. “Even though Corrections is a public-safety agency, we want the Ministry of Mental Health and Addiction to take over all Corrections health care.”
Perhaps four in five detainees, he said, “have alcoholism, addiction and mental-health issues. They’re all pooled up in one place and they’re not doing anything. They’ve got nothing but time on their hands. And I don’t have to build a new building? You’re kidding me! This is fantastic! Why wouldn’t I just put therapists in? So we now have treatment programs inside correctional centers.”
Of course a lot of places do programs for inmates. “But what they’re going to show you when you unpack that is, ‘Well, we give them this workbook,’” Smith said. “What they’re not doing is the deep transformative, therapy work that is necessary. And honestly, Paul, our Therapeutic Living Units are probably the best treatment programs we have in Alberta.”
With that, we piled into Smith’s SUV — Smith, Day and the third member of Smith’s team that day, a physician and consultant named Dr. Paul Sobey. A half-hour later we arrived at the Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre, northeast of Edmonton.
Here we visited the Therapeutic Living Unit, a full-time addiction-recovery program for 21 women who are housed separately from the general inmate population. That’s about 10% of the total population of women at Fort Saskatchewan. The program opened in February. Participants, who must apply, run through a 12-hour daily program of activity: morning check-in meetings, physical exercise, twice-daily smudge ceremonies reflecting the large Indigenous population in the correctional system, frequent meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous as well as the more recently developed SMART Recovery system. Participants are rarely alone during daylight hours. The program is designed to last for months, which struck me as an unusually long time for a recovery program.
Four of the program’s participants sat on a sofa and talked about their experience in the program. “I’ve been wondering and wondering if a program like this was going to happen,” one said.
“It’s like an answered prayer, honestly,” said another. “So I would just encourage you to keep opening places like this.”
That’s the plan. “We’ve got 12 correctional centers in Alberta,” Smith told me before our road trip. “Our goal is to have Therapeutic Living Units [in all of them]. There will come a time where we have whole correctional centers that are working on this model, right? This requires massive intervention, not tinkering around the edges. This is generational change in the way that we do corrections in Alberta.”
Connections
All of the four young women we heard from said they’re nervous about what happens when they get out of detention. Old acquaintances can encourage a return to old habits. Which is part of the reason why Alberta is also building a network of live-in Recovery Communities, long-term residential rehab programs to reinforce the lessons learned in the TLUs — or to help other people begin recovery if they didn’t arrive via the correctional system.
Once the system is fully built in 2027, “every correctional centre will have a sister Recovery Community,” Smith said. “That’s why we’re building 11 of them around the province. Five of them are on First Nations, in partnership with the First Nations.”
Here’s where the system starts to look like a system. After all, in the broadest outlines nothing’s new here. People in prisons have long received addiction counselling, and the Alberta government and various private groups have long run rehabs. But for the longest time, these assorted parts of the system could barely talk to one another. So the chances of a seamless transition from the correctional system to recovery care were lousy. They’re still not great, because the system is still being built, but the goal is a seamless network of care.
“Services in 2018, 2019 were very disconnected,” Warren Driechel, the Edmonton Police Service deputy chief we met the other day, told me. The bureaucratic runaround that we all have to face can be brutal on people with high needs and impaired function. Say you want to get on AISH, an income-support program for people with a medical condition. To do that, you need a doctor’s appointment. To get one, you need identification. To get ID, you need an address.
Public officials are working to provide services that match that complexity.
In January 2021, the EPS launched a “HELP Unit” to refer people to social services instead of just arresting them.
In September 2023, the police replaced the old holding cells where intoxicated people could dry out and then get dumped back on the street with an Integrated Care Centre where they could connect with social services that operate right in the centre.
And in January 2024, after many of the tent encampments were dismantled, a new Navigation and Support Centre became the city’s hub for providing medical, legal and bureaucratic help for people who have often been bereft.
The Nav Centre has nine shelter beds in the back where people can rest, if needed, while on-site staff and volunteers process their files. (Pets are welcome, unlike in some of the city’s shelters.) The centre has the province’s only on-site Service Alberta photo-ID station. On the day I visited, the Nav Centre assisted 50 people, with 24 visiting the desk run by the Hope Mission, 10 being helped by staff from Radius Health, 12 by the provincial department of mental health and addiction.
Everything old is new
Our final stop was the Lakeview Recovery Community outside Gunn, northwest of Edmonton. When it opens in July, it’ll be the third or fourth in a network of such long-term residential programs. Lethbridge and Red Deer have been open for a while. The goal is to have 11 centres up and running across the province by 2027. Smith hopes that once the full network of centres is open, long wait times in Red Deer and Lethbridge will shrink, perhaps to the point where some beds will be available on-demand.
Each recovery community has its quirks. Lakeview will be for men only. Five of the centres will be on Indigenous land. The minimum stay will be four months, with some residents staying for up to a year. That’s a long stint for a rehab; in some private rehabs, it’s unusual to stay for even a month. In theory every day you spend with a combination of counselling, group therapy, twelve-step programs and medical care will increase your chances of success. No resident will pay for their stay at any recovery community. It’s covered by the government.
Work crews have been renovating the Lakeview site since 2022. It’s an impressive place, roomy and bright, with rooms where residents can meet visiting family, a huge kitchen where residents will learn cooking skills, and a dispensary for opioid agonist treatment. Residents will share bungalows while they’re in the program, five or six to a house.
But it didn’t just come into existence. What’s now Lakeview began its existence as the McCullough Centre for homeless World War II veterans. It had been operating for years as an addiction rehab centre when Jason Kenney’s government closed it in 2021. When the government announced the site’s eventual reopening barely a year later, observers were baffled. Closing the centre fit a narrative about a government that put the bottom line over Albertans’ wellbeing. Refurbishing and reopening it was.. harder to explain. Fitting it into a network of nearly a dozen such centres that will, themselves, be better connected to street-level services and to the corrections system… well, we’ll see, won’t we?
I’m conscious of ending this installment in my series on opioids in Alberta on an ambivalent note. I simply don’t know how this will turn out. My first article, earlier this week, was about the scale of the challenge. This one is about the scale of the response. It’s impressive. It’s getting attention across the country. Sobey, the physician who was the third member of our little party as we toured the region’s facilities, has a consulting firm whose aim is to design recovery-oriented systems of care to any government that wants to start the conversation. His phone pinged with an inquiry from another provincial government while we were visiting the Fort Saskatchewan prison. These ideas may come soon to a province near you.
What we don’t know yet is whether they’ll work, or how well. In the third and final installment in this series, I’ll discuss a few reasons to reserve judgment.
But what Alberta is trying is, in many ways, not heretical. Nobody thinks it’s great design to leave desperate people to wander helplessly thorugh a piecemeal hodge-podge of social services and treatment options, with police and corrections hovering over it all as an aloof menace. Smith, his boss the premier, and several government departments are trying to build a better system.
There is room for many devils in the details. But if federalism is supposed to be a laboratory for testing different approaches to thorny problems, Alberta is testing this approach ambitiously. Watching Marshall Smith, I found myself wondering what other intractable governance problems could benefit from the sustained attention of an empowered senior staffer, a supportive head of government, and ministers and public servants working in close coordination.
Addictions
B.C. addiction centre should not accept drug industry funds
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The British Columbia Centre on Substance Abuse. (Photo credit: Alexandra Keeler)
News release from Break The Needle
By Canadian Affairs Editorial Board
Data released this week brought the welcome news that opioid-related deaths in Alberta have decreased substantially since last year. Opioid-related deaths have also decreased in B.C., although not as dramatically as in Alberta.
While the results are encouraging, more work needs to be done. And both provinces, which have taken very different approaches to the drug crisis, need to understand how their drug policies contribute to these results.
Fortunately, B.C. and Alberta both have research centres devoted to answering this very question. But we are disheartened to see that B.C.’s centre, the British Columbia Centre on Substance Abuse, accepts funding from pharmaceutical and drug companies.
As Canadian Affairs reported this week, the B.C. centre’s funding page lists pharmaceutical company Indivior, pharmacy chain Shoppers Drug Mart and cannabis companies Tilray and Canopy Growth as “past and current funders of activities at BCCSU — including work related to research, community engagement, and clinical training and education.”
This funding structure raises major red flags. Pharmaceutical and drug companies benefit from continued drug use and addiction. And in a context where B.C. has favoured harm-reduction policies such as safe consumption sites and safe supply, the risk of conflicts is especially high.
Indivior is the producer and manufacturer of Suboxone, a drug commonly prescribed to treat opioid-use disorder. Canada’s drug crisis has driven a surge in demand for prescription opioids to treat opioid-use order, with the number of Canadians receiving Suboxone and similar drugs up 44 per cent in 2020 from 2015, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction.
Indivior is also the subject of at least two class-action lawsuits claiming the company failed to disclose adverse health effects associated with using Suboxone.
In 2021, Shoppers Drug Mart made a $2-million gift to the University of British Columbia to establish a pharmacy fellowship and support the education of pharmacist-focused addiction treatment at the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use. A conflict of interest exists here as well, with pharmacies benefiting financially from continued demand for drugs.
Consider, for example, if B.C.’s centre produced research showing pharmaceutical interventions were not effective or less effective than other policy measures. Would researchers feel pressure to not publish those results or pursue further lines of inquiry? Similarly, would Indivior or Shoppers Drug Mart continue to provide funding if the centre published research in this vein?
These are not the kinds of questions researchers should have to consider when pursuing research in the public interest.
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In response to questions about whether accepting drug industry funding could compromise the objectivity of their research, the British Columbia Centre on Substance Abuse referred Canadian Affairs to their website’s funding page. This page states their research is supported by peer-reviewed grants and independent ethical reviews to ensure objectivity.
We would argue such steps are not sufficient, not least because conflicts of interest are a problem whether they are real or perceived. Even if researchers at the centre are not influenced by who is funding their work, the public could reasonably perceive the objectivity of their research to be compromised.
It is for this reason that ethics laws generally require officeholders to avoid both actual conflicts of interest as well as the appearance of conflicts.
It is also why the government of Alberta, in launching their new addictions research centre, the Canadian Centre of Recovery Excellence (CoRE), has taken steps to safeguard the integrity of its work. The government has imposed legislative safeguards to ensure CoRE cannot receive external funding that could be seen to compromise its research, a spokesperson for the centre told Canadian Affairs.
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the work done by the B.C. centre, CoRE and other centres like it. It is imperative that governments of all levels and stripes have quality, trusted research to inform decision-making about how best to respond to this tragic crisis.
The B.C. government and British Columbia Centre on Substance Abuse ought to implement their own safeguards to address these conflicts of interest immediately.
This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.
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Addictions
B.C. parents powerless to help their addicted teens
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B.C. parents say the province’s safer supply program and legal treatment framework leave them powerless to help their addicted teens
On Aug. 19, 2022, Kamilah Sword took a single hydromorphone pill, believing it to be safe. She overdosed and was found dead by her grandmother the next day. She was 14.
Kamilah believed the drug was safe — despite having bought it illicitly — because she was told it came from a government-run “safer supply” program, according to Kamillah’s best friend Grace Miller and her father.
“I’ll never get to see her get married, never have grandkids, never get to see her graduate,” said Kamilah’s father, Gregory Sword, lowering his chin to keep his voice steady.
“It’s a black hole in the heart that never heals.”
Sword faced significant challenges trying to get his daughter help during the year he was aware she was struggling with addiction. He blames British Columbia’s safer supply program and the province’s legal youth treatment framework for exacerbating his daughter’s challenges and ultimately contributing to her death.
“It’s a B.C. law — you cannot force a minor into rehab without their permission,” said Sword. “You cannot parent your kid between the ages of 12 and 18 without their consent.”
Sword is now pursuing legal action against the B.C. and federal governments and several health agencies, seeking accountability for what he views as systemic failures.
B.C.’s “Safe” supply program
B.C.’s prescribed safer supply program, which was first launched in 2020, is designed to reduce substance users’ reliance on dangerous street drugs. Users are prescribed hydromorphone — an opioid as potent as heroin — as an alternative to using potentially lethal street drugs.
However, participants in the program often sell their hydromorphone, in some cases to teenagers, to get money to buy stronger drugs like fentanyl.
According to Grace Miller, she and Kamilah would obtain hydromorphone — which is commonly referred to as Dilaudid or “dillies” — from a teenage friend who bought them in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The neighbourhood, which is the epicentre of Vancouver’s drug crisis, is a 30-minute SkyTrain ride from the teenagers’ home in Port Coquitlam.
Sword says he initially thought “dillies” referred to Dairy Queen’s Dilly Bars. “My daughter would ask me for $5, [and say], ‘Yeah, we’re going to Dairy Queen for a Dilly Bar.’ I had no idea.”
He says he only learned about hydromorphone after the coroner informed him that Kamilah had three substances in her system: cocaine, MDMA and hydromorphone.
“I had to start talking to people to figure out what [hydromorphone] was and where it was coming from.”
Sword is critical of B.C.’s safer supply program for being presented as safe and for lacking monitoring safeguards. “[Kamilah] knew where [the drugs] were coming from so she felt safe because her dealer would keep on telling her, ‘This is safe supply,’” Sword said.
In February, B.C. changed how it refers to the program from “prescribed safer supply” to “prescribed alternatives.”
Grace says another problem with the program is the quantities of drugs being distributed.
“It would be a big difference if the prescriptions that they were giving out were dosed properly,” she said, noting addicts would typically sell bottles containing 14 pills, with pricing starting at $1 a pill.
‘Safer supply’
Sword estimates his daughter struggled with addiction for about 18 to 24 months before her final, fatal overdose.
After Kamilah overdosed for the first time on Aug. 21, 2021, he tried to get her into treatment. A drug counsellor told him that, because she was over 12, she would need to verbally consent. Kamilah refused treatment.
B.C.’s Infants Act allows individuals aged 12 or older to consent to their own medical treatment if they understand the treatment and its implications. The province’s Mental Health Act requires minors aged 12 to 16 to consent to addiction or mental health treatment.
While parents can request involuntary admission for children under 16, a physician or nurse practitioner must first confirm the presence of a mental disorder that requires treatment. No law specifically addresses substance-use disorders in minors.
When Kamilah was admitted to the hospital on one occasion, she underwent a standard psychiatric evaluation and was quickly discharged — despite Sword’s protests.
Ontario also has a mental health law governing involuntary care. Similar to B.C., they permit involuntary care only where a minor has been diagnosed with a mental disorder.
By contrast, Alberta’s Protection of Children Abusing Drugs Act enables a parent or guardian to obtain a court order to place a child under 18 who is struggling with addiction into a secure facility for up to 15 days for detoxification, stabilization and assessment. Alberta is unique among the provinces and territories in permitting involuntary care of minors for substance-use issues.
Grace, who also became addicted to opioids, says her recovery journey involved several failed attempts.
“I never thought I would have almost died so many times,” said Grace, who is now 16. “I never thought I would even touch drugs in my life.”
Grace’s mother Amanda (a pseudonym) faced similar struggles as Sword in trying to get help for her daughter. Amanda says she was repeatedly told nothing more could be done for Grace, because Grace would not consent to treatment.
“One time, [Grace] overdosed at home, and I had to Narcan her because she was dead in her bed,” Amanda said. “I told the paramedic, ‘Our system is broken.’ And she just said, ‘Yes, I know.’”
Yet Grace, who today has been sober for 10 months, would question whether she even had the capacity to consent to treatment when she was addicted to drugs.
Under B.C.’s Health Care (Consent) and Care Facility (Admission) Act, an adult is only considered to have consented to health care if their consent is voluntary, informed, legitimately obtained and the individual is capable of making a decision about their care.
“Mentally able to give consent?” said Grace. “No, I was never really mentally there.”
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System failure
Today, Sword is one of two plaintiffs leading a class-action lawsuit against several provincial and federal health authorities and organizations, including the B.C. Ministry of Health, Health Canada, Vancouver Coastal Health and Vancouver Island Health.
All four of these agencies declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing court proceedings.
The lawsuit was filed Aug. 15 and is currently awaiting certification to proceed. It alleges the coroner initially identified safer supply drugs as a cause of Kamilah’s death, but later changed the report to omit this reference due to pressure from the province or for other unknown reasons.
It further alleges B.C. and Ottawa were aware that drugs prescribed under safer supply programs were being diverted as early as March 2021, but failed to monitor or control the drugs’ distribution. It points to a Health Canada report and data showing increased opioid-related problems from safer supply programs.
According to Amanda, Kamilah had wanted to overcome her addiction but B.C.’s system failed her.
“I had multiple conversations with Kamilah, and I know Kamilah wanted to get clean,” she says. “But she felt so stuck, like she couldn’t do it, and she felt guilty and ashamed.”
Grace, who battled addiction for four years, is relieved to be sober.
“I’ve never, ever been happier. I’ve never been healthier. It’s the best thing I’ve done for myself,” she said. “It’s just hard when you don’t have your best friend to do it with.”
This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.
Break The Needle. Our content is always free – but if you want to help us commission more high-quality journalism, consider getting a voluntary paid subscription.
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