Why many Thunder Bay, Ont., residents travel to B.C. for addiction and trauma treatment

Renee Graves says she was a different person about a year and a half ago, when she was in the grips of an opioid addiction that left her with several heart infections and a lengthy criminal record, and put her on the streets of Thunder Bay, Ont.

Her story is one of resilience and recovery, but also of how she, like dozens of others in northwestern Ontario, felt travelling several provinces west for treatment was their best option. 

Graves, 32, now lives in Victoria but grew up just outside Kakabeka Falls, north of Thunder Bay. Like many of her friends, she said, she started drinking and using drugs in high school.

"There [were] a few of us that were experimenting that did become drug addicts and then some didn't. So it is kind of like playing Russian roulette, I would say — like you either are an addict or you're not," she said.

When she was 15, she had her wisdom teeth removed and was prescribed oxycodone for pain, said her mother, Donna Harman, who pinpoints this era as the dawn of the city's opioid crisis.

Thunder Bay had the highest opioid toxicity mortality rate in the province last year at 77.2 per 100,000 population, while the provincial rate was 17.6 per 100,000, according to preliminary data from the Office of the Chief Coroner. The northwestern Ontario city also led the province in opioid deaths per capita in 2021.

Graves tried to get help by going to her doctor to attend meetings, detox and 12-step groups. But at 18, she said, she started dating someone who coerced her into becoming involved in the sex trade, working in it for more than a decade.

From her parents' place to shelters, jail cells, a cockroach-filled apartment and the streets, Graves was caught in a cycle of relapsing and reoffending.

She attended therapy and programming at the Algoma Treatment and Remand Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, but said jail isn't a place for rehabilitation. 

Even so, "I actually cried because I didn't want to leave because I knew that I was safe there," she said. "I did know that I wasn't going to stay clean.

"I do wonder sometimes if I subconsciously would purposely go to jail," she added.

During this time, Graves said, she also faced backlash from the community. 

"People would post things about me and they would call me the criminal junkie with the abnormally large forehead, and people would say that I should die and be killed, and people would throw things at me."

Eventually, a social service worker found her and gave her their card. Over time, they kept finding her, telling her she could be sent somewhere for treatment.