B.C. parents powerless to help their addicted teens

News release from Break The Needle

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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Related Topics:#BreakTheNeedle AlexandraKeeler BCOverdoseDeaths BCSaferSupplyProgram GregSword KamilahSword

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The Shaky Science Behind Harm Reduction and Pediatric Gender Medicine

Published on October 28, 2025

Todayville

By Adam Zivo

Both are shaped by radical LGBTQ activism and questionable evidence.

Over the past decade, North America embraced two disastrous public health movements: pediatric gender medicine and “harm reduction” for drug use. Though seemingly unrelated, these movements are actually ideological siblings. Both were profoundly shaped by extremist LGBTQ activism, and both have produced grievous harms by prioritizing ideology over high-quality scientific evidence.

While harm reductionists are known today for championing interventions that supposedly minimize the negative effects of drug consumption, their movement has always been connected to radical “queer” activism. This alliance began during the 1980s AIDS crisis, when some LGBTQ activists, hoping to reduce HIV infections, partnered with addicts and drug-reform advocates to run underground needle exchanges.

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In the early 2000s, after the North American AIDS epidemic was brought under control, many HIV organizations maintained their relevance (and funding) by pivoting to addiction issues. Despite having no background in addiction medicine, their experience with drug users in the context of infectious diseases helped them position themselves as domain experts.

These organizations tended to conceptualize addiction as an incurable infection—akin to AIDS or Hepatitis C—and as a permanent disability. They were heavily staffed by progressives who, influenced by radical theory, saw addicts as a persecuted minority group. According to them, drug use itself was not the real problem—only society’s “moralizing” norms.

These factors drove many HIV organizations to lobby aggressively for harm reduction at the expense of recovery-oriented care. Their efforts proved highly successful in Canada, where I am based, as HIV researchers were a driving force behind the implementation of supervised consumption sites and “safer supply” (free, government-supplied recreational drugs for addicts).

From the 2010s onward, the association between harm reductionism and queer radicalism only strengthened, thanks to the popularization of “intersectional” social justice activism that emphasized overlapping forms of societal oppression. Progressive advocates demanded that “marginalized” groups, including drug addicts and the LGBTQ community, show enthusiastic solidarity with one another.

These two activist camps sometimes worked on the same issues. For example, the gay community is struggling with a silent epidemic of “chemsex” (a dangerous combination of drugs and anonymous sex), which harm reductionists and queer theorists collaboratively whitewash as a “life-affirming cultural practice” that fosters “belonging.”

For the most part, though, the alliance has been characterized by shared tones and tactics—and bad epistemology. Both groups deploy politicized, low-quality research produced by ideologically driven activist-researchers. The “evidence-base” for pediatric gender medicine, for example, consists of a large number of methodologically weak studies. These often use small, non-representative samples to justify specious claims about positive outcomes. Similarly, harm reduction researchers regularly conduct semi-structured interviews with small groups of drug users. Ignoring obvious limitations, they treat this testimony as objective evidence that pro-drug policies work or are desirable.

Gender clinicians and harm reductionists are also averse to politically inconvenient data. Gender clinicians have failed to track long-term patient outcomes for medically transitioned children. In some cases, they have shunned detransitioners and excluded them from their research. Harm reductionists have conspicuously ignored the input of former addicts, who generally oppose laissez-faire drug policies, and of non-addict community members who live near harm-reduction sites.

Both fields have inflated the benefits of their interventions while concealing grievous harms. Many vulnerable children, whose gender dysphoria otherwise might have resolved naturally, were chemically castrated and given unnecessary surgeries. In parallel, supervised consumption sites and “safer supply” entrenched addiction, normalized public drug use, flooded communities with opioids, and worsened public disorder—all without saving lives.

In both domains, some experts warned about poor research practices and unmeasured harms but were silenced by activists and ideologically captured institutions. In 2015, one of Canada’s leading sexologists, Kenneth Zucker, was fired from the gender clinic he had led for decades because he opposed automatically affirming young trans-identifying patients. Analogously, dozens of Canadian health-care professionals have told me that they feared publicly criticizing aspects of the harm-reduction movement. They thought doing so could invite activist harassment while jeopardizing their jobs and grants.

By bullying critics into silence, radical activists manufactured false consensus around their projects. The harm reductionists insist, against the evidence, that safer supply saves lives. Their idea of “evidence-based policymaking” amounts to giving addicts whatever they ask for. “The science is settled!” shout the supporters of pediatric gender medicine, though several systematic reviews proved it was not.

Both movements have faced a backlash in recent years. Jurisdictions throughout the world are, thankfully, curtailing irreversible medical procedures for gender-confused youth and shifting toward a psychotherapy-based “wait and see” approach. Drug decriminalization and safer supply are mostly dead in North America and have been increasingly disavowed by once-supportive political leaders.

Harm reductionists and queer activists are trying to salvage their broken experiments, occasionally by drawing explicit parallels between their twin movements. A 2025 paper published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, for example, asserts that “efforts to control, repress, and punish drug use and queer and trans existence are rising as right-wing extremism becomes increasingly mainstream.” As such, there is an urgent need to “cultivate shared solidarity and action . . . whether by attending protests, contacting elected officials, or vocally defending these groups in hostile spaces.”

How should critics respond? They should agree with their opponents that these two radical movements are linked—and emphasize that this is, in fact, a bad thing. Large swathes of the public understand that chemically and surgically altering vulnerable children is harmful, and that addicts shouldn’t be allowed to commandeer public spaces. Helping more people grasp why these phenomena arose concurrently could help consolidate public support for reform and facilitate a return to more restrained policies.

Adam Zivo is director of the Canadian Centre for Responsible Drug Policy.

[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research]

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Addictions

BC premier admits decriminalizing drugs was ‘not the right policy’

Published on October 16, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Premier David Eby acknowledged that British Columbia’s liberal policy on hard drugs ‘became was a permissive structure that … resulted in really unhappy consequences.’

The Premier of Canada’s most drug-permissive province admitted that allowing the decriminalization of hard drugs in British Columbia via a federal pilot program was a mistake.

Speaking at a luncheon organized by the Urban Development Institute last week in Vancouver, British Columbia, Premier David Eby said, “I was wrong … it was not the right policy.”

Eby said that allowing hard drug users not to be fined for possession was “not the right policy.

“What it became was a permissive structure that … resulted in really unhappy consequences,” he noted, as captured by Western Standard’s Jarryd Jäger.

LifeSiteNews reported that the British Columbia government decided to stop a so-called “safe supply” free drug program in light of a report revealing many of the hard drugs distributed via pharmacies were resold on the black market.

Last year, the Liberal government was forced to end a three-year drug decriminalizing experiment, the brainchild of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, in British Columbia that allowed people to have small amounts of cocaine and other hard drugs. However, public complaints about social disorder went through the roof during the experiment.

This is not the first time that Eby has admitted he was wrong.

Trudeau’s loose drug initiatives were deemed such a disaster in British Columbia that Eby’s government asked Trudeau to re-criminalize narcotic use in public spaces, a request that was granted.

Records show that the Liberal government has spent approximately $820 million from 2017 to 2022 on its Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy. However, even Canada’s own Department of Health in a 2023 report admitted that the Liberals’ drug program only had “minimal” results.