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When my father died from an accidental drug overdose in 2017, I immediately picked up my camera to help me process what I was experiencing. His death gave my photography practice a specific urgency – it became essential to create in order to grieve and to survive that grief.
My father was one of more than 50,000 people in Canada to die from a drug overdose since British Columbia’s provincial health officer declared a public health emergency on April 14, 2016. To put this in perspective, the first Canadian death attributed to AIDS occurred in 1983 and approximately 21,000 people have died from AIDS since then.
In other words, we are currently living through one of the worst public health crises in generations. I believe that, just as with HIV/AIDS, one day these deaths will be more widely attributed to government neglect and policy failure.
The academics I know think so too. They’ve spent decades researching drug use, harm reduction, and health outcomes in hopes that their research will be used to inform policy, but they are now facing existential questions about continuing this research if the evidence isn’t being considered.
We meet regularly to share our despair over beers, exasperated that the data exists and isn’t being implemented, wondering what the point is of another study to prove what has already been proven again and again.
One of Canada’s first drug prohibition laws, The Opium Act of 1908, was passed by an all-white, mostly middle-class parliament that suggested opium smoking by Chinese people in Canada was a danger to the moral and physical health of the nation.
Those claims, however, were not based on scientific research to determine the potential for drugs to cause harm. Drug policy has continued, for the most part, to be formed following this shoddy blueprint.
We now have over a century of data that proves prohibition and criminalization do not decrease drug availability or drug use.
In fact, prohibition of drugs is what drives further toxicity and unpredictability in an unregulated drug supply and is the predominant cause of the current public health emergency.
More specifically, the lack of regulation has allowed fentanyl to enter the illicit drug supply, leading to the horrific increase in deaths over the past eight years.
The data shows there is a solution to this crisis, but politicians continue to ignore the advice of their own public health experts who have repeatedly called for governments to scale up safe-supply programs.
My response has been to create nuanced documentation of this catastrophe, to show that the story of the overdose crisis goes far beyond people slumped over on the sidewalk; it’s a story of unrelenting commitment, unconditional love, self sacrifice, perpetual grief, and the brutality that occurs when unrealistic ideals are more heavily weighted than human health and dignity.
I’m trying to make photographs that challenge the cliched and harmful narratives perpetuated by the media. These images are guided by a quote from photographer Judith Joy Ross who says, “If you see someone in beauty then you are inexorably connected to them. If you are connected to them you are concerned. If concerned then responsible. So it is a convenience to regard others casually. I am asking for a chance to point our attention in another direction, to point to all the reasons we are valuable, to all the reasons we are unique.”
The people I photograph say they let me follow them around with my camera because, like me, they believe there is value in having a visual record of the toxic drug crisis. But there is an unspoken understanding between us that this project is a way for me to stay connected to my dad and continue to honour and grieve him. I’m endlessly grateful for that gift.
The four people featured in this photo essay are people I care about deeply. They have had their lives eviscerated by the overdose crisis. And yet they represent a community that refuses to give up on each other, a community that refuses to give up on what’s right.
Trey Helten, a six-foot-two punk with a tattoo of a toilet behind his left ear, who I’ve heard described as a rough ‘n’ tough cream puff, spent 10 years homeless and using drugs in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
When we met in 2018 he was sober and working at an overdose prevention site, where he eventually became the manager, decorating the space with taxidermy and other ephemera, hoping it would create the feeling of a dive bar so people using the facility would feel comfortable. He also commissioned local artists to paint murals there, including one featuring the phone number to Vancouver Detox, which covered an entire wall.
Trey is the embodiment of radical empathy. Unflappable in his resolve that everyone deserves care, he put this into action day in and day out, doing whatever it took to not only keep people alive but to provide them with a sense of community – driving them to detox on his own time, helping them navigate the medical system, and administering dose after dose of Naloxone to literally save their lives.
Maintaining this pace and intensity of work for six years, through two concurrent public health emergencies, was impossible. The trauma of watching his community, the people he cared for on a daily basis, disappearing before his very eyes, eventually got to him – he hit burnout and relapsed.
Jeremy Kalicum has a fierce moral compass. After following up a degree in biology and chemistry with a Masters of Public Health, both of which he completed while working on the frontlines of the toxic drug crisis, he put his education and experience into action, setting up the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF) with co-founder Eris Nyx.
It can be easy to forget, but many of the rights we have – including access to safe abortion, needle exchange, birth control, women’s right to vote, and the end of segregation – are the direct result of civil disobedience. These laws changed because someone, or a group of people, were willing to sacrifice their own freedom for the greater good.
DULF is known for organizing actions of civil disobedience centered around research that proves that when people have access to a regulated supply of drugs they are – among many other positive outcomes – less likely to die from an overdose.
One of these actions was to open a compassion club where members could purchase unadulterated heroin, meth, and cocaine that had been tested for purity using mass spectrometry.
The 47 members of the club lived in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, were 19 years old and up, and were at high risk of overdose.
The club was financially supported, in part, by Vancouver Coastal Health, and was held to rigorous research standards in collaboration with Dr. Thomas Kerr and Dr. Mary Clare Kennedy.
Dr. Kerr, most notably, was a significant contributor to the scientific evaluation of Insite, North America’s first medically supervised injecting facility.
From the beginning, DULF informed the Vancouver Police Department of their project and made it clear they would shut the program down if the VPD asked them to.
But shortly after DULF published its preliminary research findings, the VPD raided and shut down the compassion club a year into operations.
Jeremy was arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking less than two months after writing the MCAT and applying to medical school and could now be looking at a life sentence in prison.
A month after the compassion club was closed down, the B.C. Coroners Service convened a death review panel to examine illicit drug toxicity deaths.
Their urgent recommendation for reducing these deaths was exactly what DULF had been doing: pursuing “a non-medical model that provides people who use drugs with an alternative to the unregulated drug market.”
As a part of their defense, DULF has filed a constitutional challenge against Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, in a process similar to the one that resulted in a legal status for Vancouver’s supervised injection site Insite.
Support for DULF is worldwide and includes doctors, coroners, nurses, academics, frontline workers, and many others (myself included) who have come together to support their legal efforts through fundraising.
Jeremy is the most stoic person I know, but my sense is that part of what keeps him centered through all of this is knowing that his arrest might contribute to the change of unjust drug laws.
When I asked Martin Steward what he wanted people to know about the toxic drug crisis, he told me he wished more people understood that things can go wrong despite how hard someone tries to do everything right.
Martin grew up outside of Toronto and was close to his younger brother Kenny, who he tried to shield from the abusive adults in their life. When he was 12 years old, he started using drugs as a way to escape his reality, but circumstances at home eventually became too much.
At 14 he left and started living in a tent behind a factory. He spent the next several years in and out of homelessness and in and out of employment, until he found himself in Nova Scotia, where he got married and had a child in his early twenties.
He managed to go back to school to receive specialized training in pipeline construction and was able to get a high-paying job in the oil and gas sector.
Everything was going relatively well for Martin until he was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, which became so debilitating that he had to leave his job. Extremely depressed, he made the move to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to live with his brother Kenny.
He was glad to be with his brother again, but Kenny had started using heroin and it wasn’t long before Martin was too.
Kenny introduced Martin to the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU), an organization that advocates for people who use drugs, and Martin found some stability there.
He began attending their member meetings and learning about harm reduction and advocacy. Over the past 14 years, Martin has continued to be an active member at VANDU, where he now works as an outreach supervisor and sits on the board.
The first time I met Traci Letts and her son Mike was in the food court at a mall in the Downtown Eastside where we ate tater tots and talked about the two of them participating in my photography project. The next time I met her was in the lobby of the single room occupancy where Mike had died four days earlier.
Over the next few months, Traci would text me if there was something happening that she thought might be useful for me to document.
One of the hardest days was when we went to buy the clothes that Mike would be cremated in. She picked out a Calvin Klein t-shirt, and a Nike tracksuit and shoes.
When we brought the outfit to the funeral home, Traci realized she’d forgotten to buy socks for Mike but was adamant that he needed socks if he was going to wear shoes.
Traci’s daughter Rebecca ran out to the car where her husband was waiting and asked him if he would take off his socks, which he did without question.
One day Traci texted me a selfie Trey had sent her a while back, of him and Mike at the overdose prevention site. She told me Trey would sometimes send photos of the two of them when Mike came in to use the space so she would know her son was safe. I added it to the folder on my phone of photos people have sent me of their loved ones who have died from overdose.
After Mike’s death, Traci didn’t miss a beat, continuing to make herself available to speak to press, sit on panels, attend rallies, or do anything else that was asked of her in the service of education and advocacy.
She even found time to console me. On the anniversary of my dad’s death she asked me what I wanted to do. I told her I was thinking of hitting up a driving range to swing a few clubs around in my dad’s honour. So that’s exactly what we did.
Recently Traci and I made our way to Vancouver Island to support a group of doctors who planned to open an unsanctioned overdose prevention site on hospital property.
We arrived the night before the action and Traci helped the doctors load their van with supplies, explaining in detail the most user-friendly way to prepare injection kits. She told them it’s best to use brown paper bags, as that’s more discreet, and listed, from memory, exactly which items need to be included in the kits.
The next day, when the team was repeatedly forced to leave, she moved boxes from one location to the next, wearing a button that said, “I love someone at risk of an overdose,” while hospital security followed, threatening to call the police.
Jackie Dives has been photographing the overdose crisis for almost a decade. A wider selection of her work is part of a touring 2025 exhibition which includes shows in Moncton, N.B., Hamilton, Ont., and Powell River, B.C.
- Photography and essay by Jackie Dives
- Editing by Lisan Jutras
- Visuals editing by Liz Sullivan
- Interactive design and development by Christopher Manza