Addictions
B.C. parents powerless to help their addicted teens
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.
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2025 Federal Election
Poilievre to invest in recovery, cut off federal funding for opioids and defund drug dens
From Conservative Party Communications
Poilievre will Make Recovery a Reality for 50,000 Canadians
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pledged he will bring the hope that our vulnerable Canadians need by expanding drug recovery programs, creating 50,000 new opportunities for Canadians seeking freedom from addiction. At the same time, he will stop federal funding for opioids, defund federal drug dens, and ensure that any remaining sites do not operate within 500 meters of schools, daycares, playgrounds, parks and seniors’ homes, and comply with strict new oversight rules that focus on pathways to treatment.
More than 50,000 people have lost their lives to fentanyl since 2015—more Canadians than died in the Second World War. Poilievre pledged to open a path to recovery while cracking down on the radical Liberal experiment with free access to illegal drugs that has made the crisis worse and brought disorder to local communities.
Specifically, Poilievre will:
- Fund treatment for 50,000 Canadians. A new Conservative government will fund treatment for 50,000 Canadians in treatment centres with a proven record of success at getting people off drugs. This includes successful models like the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre, which helps people recover and reunite with their families, communities, and culture. To ensure the best outcomes, funding will follow results. Where spaces in good treatment programs exist, we will use them, and where they need to expand, these funds will allow that.
- Ban drug dens from being located within 500 metres of schools, daycares, playgrounds, parks, and seniors’ homes and impose strict new oversight rules. Poilievre also pledged to crack down on the Liberals’ reckless experiments with free access to illegal drugs that allow provinces to operate drug sites with no oversight, while pausing any new federal exemptions until evidence justifies they support recovery. Existing federal sites will be required to operate away from residential communities and places where families and children frequent and will now also have to focus on connecting users with treatment, meet stricter regulatory standards or be shut down. He will also end the exemption for fly-by-night provincially-regulated sites.
“After the Lost Liberal Decade, Canada’s addiction crisis has spiralled out of control,” said Poilievre. “Families have been torn apart while children have to witness open drug use and walk through dangerous encampments to get to school. Canadians deserve better than the endless Liberal cycle of crime, despair, and death.”
Since the Liberals were first elected in 2015, our once-safe communities have become sordid and disordered, while more and more Canadians have been lost to the dangerous drugs the Liberals have flooded into our streets. In British Columbia, where the Liberals decriminalized dangerous drugs like fentanyl and meth, drug overdose deaths increased by 200 percent.
The Liberals also pursued a radical experiment of taxpayer-funded hard drugs, which are often diverted and resold to children and other vulnerable Canadians. The Vancouver Police Department has said that roughly half of all hydromorphone seizures were diverted from this hard drugs program, while the Waterloo Regional Police Service and Niagara Regional Police Service said that hydromorphone seizures had exploded by 1,090% and 1,577%, respectively.
Despite the death and despair that is now common on our streets, bizarrely Mark Carney told a room of Liberal supporters that 50,000 fentanyl deaths in Canada is not “a crisis.” He also hand-picked a Liberal candidate who said the Liberals “would be smart to lean into drug decriminalization” and another who said “legalizing all drugs would be good for Canada.”
Carney’s star candidate Gregor Robertson, an early advocate of decriminalization and so-called safe supply, wanted drug dens imposed on communities without any consultation or public safety considerations. During his disastrous tenure as Vancouver Mayor, overdoses increased by 600%.
Alberta has pioneered an approach that offers real hope by adopting a recovery-focused model of care, leading to a nearly 40 percent reduction in drug-poisoning deaths since 2023—three times the decrease seen in British Columbia. However, we must also end the Liberal drug policies that have worsened the crisis and harmed countless lives and families.
To fund this policy, a Conservative government will stop federal funding for opioids, defund federal drug dens, and sue the opioid manufacturers and consulting companies who created this crisis in the first place.
“Canadians deserve better than the Liberal cycle of crime, despair, and death,” said Poilievre. “We will treat addiction with compassion and accountability—not with more taxpayer-funded poison. We will turn hurt into hope by shutting down drug dens, restoring order in our communities, funding real recovery, and bringing our loved ones home drug-free.”
By Adam Zivo
Sweden, the U.K., and Canada all experimented with providing opioids to addicts. The results were disastrous.
[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. We encourage our readers to subscribe to them for high-quality analysis on urban issues]
Last August, Denver’s city council passed a proclamation endorsing radical “harm reduction” strategies to address the drug crisis. Among these was “safer supply,” the idea that the government should give drug users their drug of choice, for free. Safer supply is a popular idea among drug-reform activists. But other countries have already tested this experiment and seen disastrous results, including more addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. It would be foolish to follow their example.
The safer-supply movement maintains that drug-related overdoses, infections, and deaths are driven by the unpredictability of the black market, where drugs are inconsistently dosed and often adulterated with other toxic substances. With ultra-potent opioids like fentanyl, even minor dosing errors can prove fatal. Drug contaminants, which dealers use to provide a stronger high at a lower cost, can be just as deadly and potentially disfiguring.
Because of this, harm-reduction activists sometimes argue that governments should provide a free supply of unadulterated, “safe” drugs to get users to abandon the dangerous street supply. Or they say that such drugs should be sold in a controlled manner, like alcohol or cannabis—an endorsement of partial or total drug legalization.
But “safe” is a relative term: the drugs championed by these activists include pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl, hydromorphone (an opioid as potent as heroin), and prescription meth. Though less risky than their illicit alternatives, these drugs are still profoundly dangerous.
The theory behind safer supply is not entirely unreasonable, but in every country that has tried it, implementation has led to increased suffering and addiction. In Europe, only Sweden and the U.K. have tested safer supply, both in the 1960s. The Swedish model gave more than 100 addicts nearly unlimited access through their doctors to prescriptions for morphine and amphetamines, with no expectations of supervised consumption. Recipients mostly sold their free drugs on the black market, often through a network of “satellite patients” (addicts who purchased prescribed drugs). This led to an explosion of addiction and public disorder.
Most doctors quickly abandoned the experiment, and it was shut down after just two years and several high-profile overdose deaths, including that of a 17-year-old girl. Media coverage portrayed safer supply as a generational medical scandal and noted that the British, after experiencing similar problems, also abandoned their experiment.
While the U.S. has never formally adopted a safer-supply policy, it experienced something functionally similar during the OxyContin crisis of the 2000s. At the time, access to the powerful opioid was virtually unrestricted in many parts of North America. Addicts turned to pharmacies for an easy fix and often sold or traded their extra pills for a quick buck. Unscrupulous “pill mills” handed out prescriptions like candy, flooding communities with OxyContin and similar narcotics. The result was a devastating opioid epidemic—one that rages to this day, at a cumulative cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives. Canada was similarly affected.
The OxyContin crisis explains why many experienced addiction experts were aghast when Canada greatly expanded access to safer supply in 2020, following a four-year pilot project. They worried that the mistakes of the recent past were being made all over again, and that the recently vanquished pill mills had returned under the cloak of “harm reduction.”
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Most Canadian safer-supply prescribers dispense large quantities of hydromorphone with little to no supervised consumption. Patients can receive up to 40 eight-milligram pills per day—despite the fact that just two or three are enough to cause an overdose in someone without opioid tolerance. Some prescribers also provide supplementary fentanyl, oxycodone, or stimulants.
Unfortunately, many safer-supply patients sell or trade a significant portion of these drugs—primarily hydromorphone—in order to purchase more potent illicit substances, such as street fentanyl.
The problems with safer supply entered Canada’s consciousness in mid-2023, through an investigative report I wrote for the National Post. I interviewed 14 addiction physicians from across the country, who testified that safer-supply diversion is ubiquitous; that the street price of hydromorphone collapsed by up to 95 percent in communities where safer supply is available; that youth are consuming and becoming addicted to diverted safer-supply drugs; and that organized crime traffics these drugs.
Facing pushback, I interviewed former drug users, who estimated that roughly 80 percent of the safer-supply drugs flowing through their social circles was getting diverted. I documented dozens of examples of safer-supply trafficking online, representing tens of thousands of pills. I spoke with youth who had developed addictions from diverted safer supply and adults who had purchased thousands of such pills.
After months of public queries, the police department of London, Ontario—where safer supply was first piloted—revealed last summer that annual hydromorphone seizures rose over 3,000 percent between 2019 and 2023. The department later held a press conference warning that gangs clearly traffic safer supply. The police departments of two nearby midsize cities also saw their post-2019 hydromorphone seizures increase more than 1,000 percent.
The Canadian government quietly dropped its support for safer supply last year, cutting funding for many of its pilot programs. The province of British Columbia (the nexus of the harm-reduction movement) finally pulled back support last month, after a leaked presentation confirmed that safer-supply drugs are getting sold internationally and that the government is investigating 60 pharmacies for paying kickbacks to safer-supply patients. For now, all safer-supply drugs dispensed within the province must be consumed under supervision.
Harm-reduction activists have insisted that no hard evidence exists of widespread diversion of safer-supply drugs, but this is only because they refuse to study the issue. Most “studies” supporting safer supply are produced by ideologically driven activist-scholars, who tend to interview a small number of program enrollees. These activists also reject attempts to track diversion as “stigmatizing.”
The experiences of Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Canada offer a clear warning: safer supply is a reliably harmful policy. The outcomes speak for themselves—rising addiction, diversion, and little evidence of long-term benefit.
As the debate unfolds in the United States, policymakers would do well to learn from these failures. Americans should not be made to endure the consequences of a policy already discredited abroad simply because progressive leaders choose to ignore the record. The question now is whether we will repeat others’ mistakes—or chart a more responsible course.
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