To solve the Sault’s drug crisis, we must listen to people who’ve survived it

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is part of an ongoing SooToday series — ‘Turning the Tide’ — that explores potential solutions to our city’s toxic drug crisis. You can read more about our project HERE. ​ ​

Riley McPhee is just 30 years old, and she’s spent nearly half of her life in active addiction. By her own account, most people who knew her considered her a lost cause.

She wasn’t.

“I was, for real, one of the least likely people to ever get sober,” says McPhee.

After being introduced to drugs in her teenage years, McPhee became addicted to fentanyl and crack cocaine – a potent, toxic mix that wreaked havoc on her life for well over a decade.

Over that span, she became the victim of human trafficking in Regina and Montreal, found herself living on the streets and working as an escort to support her addiction in Sault Ste. Marie, and ultimately lost contact with her family.

“My addiction brought me to places that I literally never thought I would ever go,” she says.

As hopeless as her addiction seemed, McPhee found a way to build a new, sober life – one where she’s already begun to help others. She’s now a social service worker student at George Brown College in Toronto, with nearly a year-and-a-half of sobriety to her name, and she has her family back in her life, too.

But not everyone is as fortunate as her. Numerous people in our community are still struggling with opioid addiction on a daily basis – and many don’t make it.

For years, headlines have been filled with grim statistics about skyrocketing overdoses, death rates, and the unimaginable toll shouldered by countless families and friends in Sault Ste. Marie, the province, and beyond.

Looking around the community, the situation can seem beyond repair, even hopeless, as Sault Ste. Marie has placed among the province’s top cities for opioid-related death rates over the past several years.

But there are people who find their way to the other side. They manage to turn the tide on the addictions that blight their lives.

In the fight against opioids, experts say it’s paramount to listen to those people.

“The voices and perspectives of people with lived and living experience have historically been left out of decision-making conversations,” says a recent report from Algoma Public Health. “Shifting power to people with lived and living experience to develop and lead initiatives can help remove barriers and make services/programs more effective.”

The report — Toxic Drugs in Algoma: Community Assessment and Next Steps — takes a close look at the opioid crisis across the region, taking care to include the experiences behind the statistics. 

It found that people with lived experience have an important message to share with others: that addiction is an illness, not a choice; that everyone deserves to be treated like a human, and that not everyone who uses drugs is the same.

People with lived experience understand the dark places drugs can lead – from losing contact with friends and family, to dealing with frightening and crippling mental health issues, and even losing a roof over your head.

They also understand what it takes to come back.

With that in mind, SooToday set out to speak to local residents with lived experience – to learn about what they’ve been through, how they came out on the other side of their addictions, and what our community can do to help others facing the same struggles.

We interviewed five people, ranging from 27 to 36 years old, who have each recovered from debilitating opioid addictions. Between them, they’ve experienced nearly four decades in active addiction, but have since strung together close to 20 combined years of recovery – a tally that grows each day.

Building those years of sobriety was a hard road. There were many points where others thought they were beyond redemption.

Although Haley Alopaeus made a speedy recovery when she decided it was time to get sober, addiction controlled her life for years.

Four years ago, the 27-year-old started taking methadone to transition off drugs, and enrolled in college to become an esthetician. Before that, however, she struggled with meth and fentanyl over a period of several years.

She began drinking and taking drugs in her teen years, as her mother dealt with abusive and unstable relationships while she was growing up – but she started using harder drugs when she was around 19.

“I think I was just trying to numb a pain that was deep down – caused by a bunch of trauma that I had dealt with and been through in my life,” she says.

“I just used it as a crutch to help myself feel better, and then it just went downhill from there because I ended up depending on these drugs so badly that I felt sick without it.”

After continual abuse, her meth use led to bouts of psychosis, which Alopaeus says she addressed by taking fentanyl – the only drug that could calm her down.

“I’d be awake for like a week at a time, so I would get terrified every single day. I thought people were coming to kill me,” she says. “That’s why I was so addicted to fentanyl, because that was the one that didn’t give me any crazy anxiety or anything.”

Through this stretch of her life, Alopaeus says she gradually lost contact with friends, and her relationship with family grew strained. 

“I held it against them while I was using, because I was like: ‘Why can’t you just be here for me? I want to get better, but why can’t you just be here?’ Nobody’s here, so I might as well continue using.”

One day, however, a frightening experience gave her the motivation she needed to get sober.

“My ex went into a drug-induced psychosis and tried to murder me,” she says. “He held me hostage for six hours and stabbed me and beat me up – a bunch of crazy stuff. After that, I was like: ‘I can’t keep continuing this lifestyle.’

“I just stepped away.”

From there, in a quick and remarkable series of events, Alopaeus enrolled in college, started taking methadone to get off drugs, reconnected with her loved ones – and never looked back.

“I just really wanted to motivate myself to do better, so I applied for college. I got into college. I started going probably two and a half weeks after this event that happened,” she says.

“I just literally pushed myself harder than I’ve ever done before, and it was very hard, but somehow I managed.”

Each person who spoke with SooToday had terrible moments when they realized how strong their addictions had become, and where the physical reality of their day-to-day lives degraded into instability, isolation, and desperation.

For 36-year-old Sophia Mallia, chilling words from her grandfather sparked her journey towards the six years of sobriety she has today.

“What really got to me was when my grandpa told me that he was just waiting for a phone call from the morgue,” Mallia says. “Different people have different rock bottoms, right? I ended up homeless, and that was my rock bottom.

“My grandpa said that, and then that happened – and then I was like, you know what? This life isn’t worth it; it’s not making me happy.”

Each of these people had their own reasons – and their own struggles – with achieving sobriety, but now that they’re sober, remarkable things are happening in their lives.

For 36-year-old Paul Durham, who’s now been sober for nearly four years, his mother put him back in her will on the same day he sat down with SooToday to tell his story.

“She said, ‘I’m at the bank. I need your address because I’m going to leave you money when I’m dead,’” Durham says.

“In active addiction, she said no matter what – I’m out. I spent through my inheritance; I robbed them so much, so that made me feel like they see the change in me.”

Durham recently bought a new truck, and hopes to buy a house in the next few years on the strength of the two jobs he now works – including one at the Ken Brown Recovery Home, where he was able recover himself amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amy Lebreton, 34, has gone on to work as a peer worker with CMHA, volunteer in the community – and she recently became a mother.

“I could have never imagined that this is what my life would be like. I didn’t think that this was attainable for me, but just putting one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, things kind of fell into place,” she says.

“I’m soaking in every second of it.”

It’s taken tremendous effort, willpower, and the right support to stay sober – which looks a bit different for each of them. 

For Durham, relapse remains an ever-looming threat.

“I could relapse tonight. You know what I mean? If I don’t take my medicine – like my meetings, my service work, my sponsor, or the literature . . . I could be using tonight,” he says.

The 12-step program offered at the Ken Brown Recovery Home is what, for him, has carried his recovery this far. As he fought with addiction for well over a decade, he found himself in and out of detox, rehab programs, and more. Nothing worked.

“I got introduced to 12 steps here. Every other place I’ve been to, they don’t work on these steps,” he says. “I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I would have done anything to try something new.”

A number of people working at the recovery home are recovered addicts themselves, and Durham was offered a job near the end of his stay as a client – a job he continues to this day. Being around others who have gone through addiction helps with processing the things he has lived through, and things current clients are living through today.

“Everybody that comes through here, we think we’re unique – like: ‘Oh, I’m the only one that has done this in my active addiction, or done that,’” he says. 

“There’s been times I shared at a meeting, and then somebody comes to me outside and says: ‘Fuck, I thought that I was the only one that did that’ … and then we talk about it, we go for coffee and we share our experience and how we got through it.”

Being able to relate, being able to understand – and be understood – is an invaluable part of maintaining sobriety and connecting with others for many who live through addiction. Stigma, isolation, and poor treatment are battles they faced on a day-to-day basis – on top of grappling with their addictions.

“It was super isolating towards the end, when I was doing the opiates. At that point I couldn’t really hide it – like I was physically looking ill,” says Lebreton.

“I was also on methadone towards the end of my using to try to stop, and even going into some of the pharmacies – you would see them talking to one of their customers, and then I would be the next in line, and it was a complete change in attitude, and being followed around stores.”

Those experiences, however, make recovered addicts particularly valuable for helping others who are still living through it.

“We’ve lived that experience. We’ve been on the streets. We know what these people are going through,” says Mallia. “We know there’s some sort of hurt that they’re dealing with.”

For Mallia, that meant enrolling in an addictions and mental health program at CTS College – where she’s currently a student and plans to help others.

“We need more mental health workers, even if they’re out on the street just talking to them, giving them encouragement. They don’t have that right now,” she says.

“People look at them funny. They’re being judged. I think we need more people that could go out there and talk to them and listen to them.”