‘Our children would not be dead.’ Why these moms are advocating for safe drugs.

Jessica Michalofsky set off across rural British Columbia with one goal in mind: to pick up her son to take him back to the city of Victoria. Aubrey was struggling with addiction, and she wanted him home where she could try to keep him safe.

She arrived that night in the town of Nelson, pulling into a parking lot to figure out her next move. “I just wanted to get him into the car,” she says. And then her phone rang. Aubrey had died that day of an overdose.

Five years earlier, Ms. Michalofsky had been so relieved to get him in the car to Nelson, where he was born amid the snowcapped peaks and pristine lakes of the Kootenays. There, she thought, he could go to college and live with his father – far away from the easy drugs he started using as a teen. “I was terrified he was going to die,” she says.

At first, it seemed to work. He enrolled at Selkirk College, and graduated with awards.

But drugs were just as available, if not as visible, in rural British Columbia. With its vast distances and dearth of services, each mile away from methadone programs, doctor prescriptions, drug testing, and overdose prevention sites makes life for rural drug users more precarious.

Aubrey Michalofsky died Aug. 30, 2022, at age 25. He had fentanyl in his system. He is one of over 14,000 residents to have fatally overdosed since 2016, when the Canadian province declared a public health emergency amid a toxic supply of synthetic opioids. Last year, British Columbia whipped drug politics into a frenzy by making it legal to possess and consume small amounts of cocaine or heroin. Since Aubrey’s death, his mother has joined a growing chorus of advocates calling on the government to go even further. These mothers want the province to offer something many regard as unthinkable: a safe and regulated supply of drugs.

Critics, from politicians to the public, argue that supplying drugs makes them even more entrenched in the fabric of society, while taking resources from recovery and treatment. But for mothers like Ms. Michalofsky – the ones who arguably hate drugs more than anyone ever could – it’s the only compassionate way forward.

“None of us started out thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s get my kids some drugs.’ Nobody wants their kids to do drugs,” she says. “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of all drugs, great.”

But in 2023, British Columbia registered a record 2,558 suspected overdoses, the vast majority from poisoning.

“We have to think outside the box,” says Cheryl Dowden, executive director of ANKORS, a harm reduction organization in downtown Nelson, a historic silver-rush town of roughly 10,000 people. “The toxic drug crisis is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, and it’s not being treated that way.”

Compared with most other places, British Columbia has already thought outside the box.

In January 2023, the western province became the first in Canada to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of hard drugs. It was the second jurisdiction in North America to do so after Oregon. As in Oregon, the pilot program met public backlash, intensified by local and national politics. In May, the province asked the federal government to roll back the program, making it illegal again to consume drugs in public.

Canadian “common sense” or “compassion fatigue”?

Drug policy has become a political lightning rod. The Conservative rival to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has appealed to Canadian “common sense.” In May, Pierre Poilievre asked if British Columbians were with him on a different approach “that would ban the drugs, stop giving out tax-funded opioids, and instead invest in treatment and recovery to bring our loved ones home drug-free.”

Decriminalization, at its heart, was intended to destigmatize drug use and remove police from the equation of how best to help users. But in places like Nelson, it had the reverse effect. Nelson Police Chief Donovan Fisher talks about reams of letters his department received from community members angered that the police spent the year not doing anything about the drug use they were seeing in broad daylight, from City Hall to Main Street. Nelson Mayor Janice Morrison likened it to “compassion fatigue.”

When a safe inhalation site was proposed on the outskirts of downtown, a neighborhood group opposed it, wearied by an increase of drug use and disturbance near their homes. “A lot of parents are saying, ‘We don’t want to shelter our kids,’” says resident Kirsten Stolee, who has two teenage daughters, “but I don’t think kids should see what my kids have seen in the last year.”

Amber Streuckens was devastated when the inhalation site was canceled. While she is on the front lines of the crisis as an educator with the Rural Empowered Drug User Network, she understands the public response. “We’re seeing people die in our communities. We’re seeing people who are very destabilized by a toxic drug supply. ... There’s been no magic bullet, right? So I think public discontent is reasonable,” she says. “But I also think that it’s being weaponized in a very intentional way.”

It’s in this context that advocates for safe supply – the most controversial policy, but what advocates say is by far the most important – are trying to effect change. “Our main goal right now is to stop the deaths,” says Leslie McBain, who co-founded Moms Stop the Harm, a network of Canadian families who’ve lost children to the drug crisis. “But this fight seems to be getting more and more difficult.”

British Columbia has long pioneered drug policy. In 2003, Insite in Vancouver opened as the first legal, supervised safe consumption site in North America. The province has supported needle and syringe programs, methadone therapies, and expanded prescriptions of opioids and stimulants. The newest idea is the “compassion club” model, in which activists buy, test, and sell safe drugs at no profit.

Harm reduction policies have historically come from the bottom up by drug user groups responding to needs in their community – and only later “society comes around,” says Tim Dickson, a Vancouver-based lawyer.

He is currently representing the Drug Users Liberation Front, which had applied for an exemption to Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act to run a compassion club. The request was rejected; the group continued operating anyway. Last year, amid backlash to decriminalization and questions around the “diversion” of safe supply – whether criminals are getting their hands on the drugs – it was arrested and shut down.

Even though doctors can prescribe opioids and stimulants, the British Columbia coroner’s office says only a fraction of drug users access the medical system: some 5,000 per month out of 225,000 users.

Mr. Dickson agrees not all Canadians are yet on board with the notion of a compassion club. “But that doesn’t undercut whether it’s right and just and fair or not,” he says.

Many opponents fear a proliferation of drugs. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s World Drug Report 2024 notes that drug use has risen to 292 million users, a 20% increase in a decade. It also notes that in jurisdictions where cannabis has been legalized, drug use appears to have increased.

DJ Larkin, executive director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, says that nonmedical safe supply differs from the selling of cannabis because it wouldn’t be for profit. “We’re looking at this through the lens not of trying to sell people something,” they say, “but rather, if someone accesses it, how do we make sure it’s as least dangerous as possible?”

The British Columbia coroner’s office recently advocated expanding nonmedical supplies of drugs. While police Chief Donovan in Nelson grapples with some aspects of decriminalization, he’s come to see safe supply as the “lesser of two evils.”

Recovered drug user Guy Felicella says many people in the recovery community only support expanded treatment – not the provision of more drugs. But, he says, many forget that recovery is hardly ever linear.

“I’m not hard-line on it because it took me 31 years and it takes most people ... multiple years to figure out how to stay sober,” he says. “And when they relapse, that drug supply is sitting there waiting for them and kills them.”

“We’re always saying, ‘Get your drugs checked. Get your toxic drugs checked; get your illegal drugs checked,’” Mr. Felicella says. “Tell me what the difference is.”

“We miss these people”

The national debate has had a silencing effect in parts of rural British Columbia. One founder of a compassion club in Nelson declined to be interviewed because of the threats they face. In Nelson, ANKORS operates a drug testing center and an overdose prevention site. It works with three doctors who prescribe drugs. But many users live scattered throughout the valley. Bus service is scant. Many don’t own cars, and getting to appointments takes resources and time. “Transportation issues in rural communities are massive, and sometimes with pretty awful consequences,” Ms. Dowden says.

Last year, 16 people died of overdoses in Nelson. That pales in comparison with Vancouver, where 650 died. But Ms. Streuckens offers devastating context. “Maybe our numbers don’t seem as huge ... but we know most of those 16 people,” she says. “We miss these people.”

Ms. Michalofsky is reflective about her son’s death. She knows he could have died with any drug encounter over the years he used. But he was doing his best in Nelson when he enrolled himself in a methadone program, excelling at Selkirk College, where she is raising funds for the Aubrey Michalofsky Social Justice Scholarship.

At the time of his death, he was working a job as dishwasher and helping to take care of his ill father. But it was too hard to get into town without a car or reliable transport, she believes. Aubrey eventually left the methadone program, which is when he began to spiral. His mother says she just knew he should be back in Victoria.

An avid athlete, she has put her focus on advocating for safe supply with Moms Stop the Harm. Last year she ran 900 kilometers (559 miles) from Nelson to Victoria, setting off from the park along the lake where Aubrey celebrated his birthdays growing up.

The year before, she ran hundreds of miles around the provincial Health Ministry building. As a result of her endurance, she secured a meeting with the province’s public health official, Bonnie Henry, pleading with her to offer a bus service across rural areas to hand out methadone. “No,” is what she heard.

“Why?” she asked. “Why? We did all this stuff during COVID. Why can’t we do this?”

This spring, she got behind the wheel and traced the journey she made to the Kootenays to try to save her son – this time with a U-Haul.

Rural British Columbia has given her the opportunity to buy a farmhouse with a big garden for much less than in Victoria. It also gives her the chance to be close to where Aubrey last lived, and died.

But she’ll fight for what rural life took away from her family, too – safe drugs for a child struggling with addiction. She is joining forces with Moms Stop the Harm advocates throughout the region.

“Most of the moms that I know, we have become advocates of safe supply only because we see that our children would not be dead. They might still be addicted to meth or cocaine, but they wouldn’t be dead,” she says. “Sometimes I still can’t believe that it happened. It will be two years at the end of August. I still sometimes hope maybe it’s not true.”

Part 1: Stick, meet Carrot. How Portland police and activists teamed up to fight addiction.