Illustration by Matthew Daley

My mother’s house looks like my long-repressed childhood memories. The black floral wallpaper is veiled with dust, cloaking walls yellowed by years of chain- smoked cigarettes. Everything decorative is dangerous: swords hang in place of picture frames, flanked by ominous leather ropes of unknown origin.

My mother’s house feels like a castle, but one where everyone lives in the dungeon. It’s a house made of walls that could be so beautiful, if they weren’t so broken.

When I walk back into my mother’s house nearly two decades after our estrangement—a separation born the day her drinking became too much for me to bear—everything is just as I left it, just as I imagined it after all those years.

Well, almost everything.

In my vivid visions of those dark walls, I never imagined my adult self standing within them, hugging a person who is both a stranger and my mom at the same time. And I definitely couldn’t have envisioned how I would get there in the first place—that it would take psychedelics for my mind to open enough to let me open my mother’s front door.

*

Unlike my mother’s house, my psychedelic guide’s home is a sanctuary. Her porch is enclosed by warm stone and decorated with trinkets and treasures: crystals and incense line the windowsills, spider plants spill from hanging baskets like fountains of forest. Each time we meet, we sit on the floor, a pot of magic-mushroom-steeped tea steaming between us.

My guide is an underground plant medicine ceremonialist and bodyworker who uses psilocybin—the hallucinogenic component of magic mushrooms—to help people tap into their own inner knowing. She works outside of any medical system and doesn’t call herself a therapist. Instead, she holds space for people, using mushrooms to light the way.

I visit this guide because talk therapy always fell flat for me. I could recite the painful story of my childhood mechanically to anyone who asked, but I could never texturize these tales with feeling, because I didn’t seem to have any. My emotions were invisible rocks that I carried, weighing me down so viscerally that it would take a proper excavation to set myself free. Magic mushrooms, I hoped, would help me unearth the hurt.

*

Though psychedelic therapy is slowly becoming mainstream, with the federal government acknowledging promising clinical trial results and a first-of-its-kind in Canada psychedelic- assisted therapy program introduced at Vancouver Island University’s Nanaimo campus last year, it still remains illegal and largely underground thanks to its fractured history in the Western world.

Psychedelic use dates back centuries, with early psilocybin use (called teonanacatl) linked to the Olmec, Zapotec, Maya and Aztec in what is now called Mexico. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that scientists began to study it in North America, with researchers examining whether psychedelics could treat alcoholism and various mental illnesses.

Their investigations showed some of what shamans knew all along—that psychedelics could be used to treat addictions to other drugs, recover buried emotions and process childhood trauma, or even ease the mental distress faced by cancer patients. These results were promising enough to warrant further analysis, but as psychedelics became associated with anti-war counterculture in the 1960s, psychoactive substances became outlawed. For psychedelic research, the Summer of Love became the summer of loss.

As history book authors wrote their chapters on the War on Drugs, psychedelics remained tied to a harmful, hippie stigma. It wasn’t until the 1990s that interest in psychedelic research was gradually renewed, with studies assessing the effectiveness of MDMA, LSD (acid) and psilocybin to treat depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addictions. With tempered excitement, researchers began conducting the first human trials since the ’70s, instilling a new sense of hope in the field of psychotherapy.

Today, it seems we’re finally reaching the level of societal acceptance needed for a psychedelic therapy renaissance, with Health Canada offering some exemptions for researchers and health care practitioners to study or administer psilocybin and a number of convenient (yet illegal) mushroom dispensaries openly operating storefronts in major Canadian cities, akin to cannabis shops pre-legalization. These shifts are opening a potent path to healing for people like me.

*

At each visit, my guide asks me to begin my journey with an intention. Spilling a brave breath, I tell her I’m here to work through my childhood trauma. I want to dive deep into the cellars of my psyche that I’ve locked away from myself, to go back to the time of court orders and custody battles, child psychologists and threats of foster care—all those things that slashed the already precarious tightrope connection I had with my mother. Through my words, I pour my intention into my mug of mushroom tea.

It’s not long after drinking the psilocybin that my body feels lighter, colours become fractal and I enter that classic psychedelic state of oneness. I feel as though I am floating in bliss, embraced by levity. That is, until I’m not.

Abruptly, the room darkens and my lungs feel compressed beneath bricks. I see my heart trapped in a steel lockbox inside a pressure cooker. It vibrates like water coming to a boil, getting tighter and constricting, as toxic grey smoke billows from my body. Tears flood my face in a relentless stream. Overwhelmed by panic, I can barely grasp an inhale.

Everything that happens next happens so quickly, a lifetime of painful memories flip-booked in a nanosecond. I’m alone with the lightning inside of me and it’s terrifying. Out loud, I scream.

That’s when the lockbox shatters, revealing a white light emanating from my chest. I see my adult hand entwine its fingers with those of my child self. I hear myself telling her it’s okay, that we’re safe and we can let go of the pain now. As I do, my heart seems to release its venom. It leaves behind a void, but I see it as newfound space for the loving joy I’ve yearned for.

*

Thanks to neuroscientific research, the trippy magic of the psychedelic experience can actually be explained. It’s thought that at its root lies the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), which is active during states of rest and thought. With psychedelic use, the DMN slows down, creating space for new neural pathways that override the typical mental shortcuts the brain uses to process information quickly in day-to-day life. This can open the door to creativity, new ideas, meditative states and ego dissolution. It can also help us tap into deeper states of consciousness beyond our regular, waking awareness, which is likely why psychedelic users can often access buried emotions.

When these emotions are surfaced in a safe way, led by trained therapists and integrated using other therapeutic and trauma-informed modalities like somatic experiencing and talk therapy, or daily practices like yoga or journaling, people may have a chance to accept, forgive and heal from their past experiences. For many, like myself, this can be life-changing.

My guided journeys get worse before they get better, as I dig into the lingering pain of my abandonment wound. With the support of a counsellor trained in somatic experiencing, I feel like I’m knocking my own house down, deconstructing those survival-mode walls that I built for myself in childhood. I work hard to construct something new, and each day I come home from a journey, I begin to greet a little bit more of the person I want to be.

Slowly and non-linearly, I process my anger and shame, exchanging it for acceptance and compassion. I swing through depressive states and, against my extroverted nature, I isolate myself as I struggle to navigate the world wearing the mask of the old me—a mask that doesn’t seem to fit anymore. But feeling that ungrounded comes with opportunities to foster new outlooks: I’m finally able to replace a desperate longing for the maternal relationship I wish I had with an unconditional acceptance of the human that my mother is, flaws and all.

Out of the blue, I call her.

*

On the phone, my mother’s voice sounds unfamiliar. We talk about nothing, the weather, the news. The rift of almost 20 years is too wide to catch up more meaningfully. Struggling to change the subject with grace, I blurt out that I forgive her.

My mother seems caught off guard. She says thank you and not much else. But it’s the first test of my ability to love her without expectations. I forgive her as part of my own healing, and so I forgive her with no strings attached. The simplicity of the exchange is no match for the radiance of feeling unburdened—the feeling of turning my body into a comfortable home at last.

My sharp edges soften enough to bring me to her doorstep a year later, our first hug bringing me to immediate tears. We look at old baby photos and offer each other small but symbolic tokens: the rose quartz that I carried to every journey for her, and a pair of earrings from my late grandmother for me. We promise to keep in closer touch, which we won’t do, but I’m at peace with the way we are. Because standing there, at my mother’s doorstep, I could finally see that although the walls of my mother’s house may be broken, they’re still beautiful.

Jenna Rizvi was spending a significant chunk of their time organizing naloxone training workshops and fentanyl testing strip distribution events. But this isn’t what they do for work; they were volunteering during their first year as a student at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver.

In the 2021/22 school year, students at UBC relied on student groups like the Social Justice Centre (SJC) and the Alma Mater Society (AMS), the university’s independent student union, for drug- testing supplies. Rizvi, now a third-year UBC student and member of the SJC’s harm reduction working group, says the university was not widely providing these resources to students at the time.

Now, two years later, UBC offers drug testing supplies to students. But Rizvi says issues remain, particularly around harm reduction policies in student residence. Despite the start of a new provincial decriminalization program earlier this year, residents in collective living situations in B.C., like students in UBC dorms, could be subject to a range of drug policies, including some that severely restrict their use.

In January 2023, the B.C. government launched a three-year pilot program to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of certain drugs to help address the province’s ongoing toxic drug crisis. Under the new program, adults over the age of 18 cannot be charged or arrested for possession of 2.5 grams or less of opioids, crack-cocaine, powder cocaine, meth, and MDMA. Instead, law enforcement is supposed to offer information on local health services and, if requested, treatment options.

“The Province decriminalized people who use drugs to fight the shame and stigma of addictions. Breaking down these barriers will help create new pathways to life-saving services and care, so more people will feel comfortable reaching out for lifesaving supports,” a media relations spokesperson from the B.C. Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions wrote in a statement to This.

But, according to the ministry, drug use on private property may continue to be prohibited in many cases. For people living in collective housing, this could mean they are subject to different policies depending on where they live.

More than 15,000 student residents live on campus at the two biggest universities in B.C.—UBC and the University of Victoria (UVic)—and they are subject to stricter policies. According to the UVic 2023/24 residence contract, the possession, use, or trafficking of illegal drugs could result “in eviction from your Accommodation and/or referral to the Office of Student Life, and/ or the Saanich Police Department.”

In a June statement, a UVic spokesperson said “UVic’s housing policies are adapted every year to ensure the best possible experience for students living on campus. We make changes based on our expertise in creating a safe and healthy university residence community, as well as evolving provincial and federal laws.”

The spokesperson said it was too early to tell how the decriminalization program would affect UVic’s policies, but that the university will continue to monitor and adjust as necessary. When asked if UVic believed this policy followed a harm reduction approach, the spokesperson said all UVic residence staff take such an approach.

Meanwhile, UBC changed the language around the consequences for drug possession and use in its 2023/24 year-round and winter session residence contracts following student advocacy.

Previously, possession, use, and trafficking could result in eviction and referral to the police. Now, possession and use could lead to “the application of Residence Standards points (which could result in an Eviction) or discretionary sanctions,” while the consequences for trafficking remain the same.

“Given the decriminalization of some drugs for personal use in B.C., we are currently working to update the language in our housing contracts to reflect that change,” Matthew Ramsey, director of university affairs at UBC’s media relations department, said in a statement.

“Regardless of the evolution of the language in the contract, our practice will continue to be what it has for some time in these situations—to focus on the wellbeing of our residents.”

Ramsey added that only one student resident has been evicted over the past three years due to illegal drug use that had “repeated and significant impacts on other residents.”

Kamil Kanji, the vice-president academic and university affairs of the AMS, says the new language is a step in the right direction, though more needs to be done.

But Rizvi says the tone of the housing contract remains the same, despite the new language. “The idea that [the housing contract] is based in is the same which is, ‘We’re anti drugs and we’re not trying to help you,’” they say. Rizvi acknowledges the low number of evictions resulting from UBC’s housing contract, but they say the inclusion of such policies creates stigma regardless, reinforcing the idea that it’s okay for people who use drugs to be unhoused and have barriers around education.

In contrast, those at temporary and long-term shelters for unhoused people could potentially expect more lenient rules than those in residence. B.C. Housing, which partners with non-profit shelter operators across the province, follows the Housing First model that emphasizes housing as a basic need and doesn’t impose barriers to access, according to a statement sent to This in June. However, they noted that it is ultimately up to individual non-profit operators to set their own shelter policies.

Of the four Vancouver shelter operators that responded to This by press time, two, Lookout Society and PHS Community Services Society, have open drug use policies. The other two—Directions Youth Services and the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre Association—will not turn away or kick out those who use drugs.

Directions Youth Services, a division of Family Services of Greater Vancouver, offers shelter for people aged 13 to 25. “Our primary goal is to help youth access the services they need to stabilize so they can start to figure out what’s next for them,” says director Claire Ens.

In the meantime, public health researchers and advocates across the province are celebrating the start of the decriminalization program, but say additional measures are needed— particularly as some B.C. towns are trying to bypass the program through new bylaws and Conservative politicians criticize the program.

At UBC, Kanji and AMS president Esmé Decker say the AMS is continuing to work with the university to expand existing drug safety resources on campus, including increasing access to fentanyl and spectrometer testing and creating information campaigns on drug use. Fentanyl testing relies on strips (think pH test strips) to detect traces of fentanyl in a given sample, while spectrometer testing uses infrared light to detect up to six substances in a sample.

Rizvi says UBC should adopt a medical amnesty policy in student housing— something she says the SJC and the Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policies have called for. A medical amnesty policy would allow students to seek help during an overdose without facing repercussions from the university or law enforcement.

Whether it’s around housing or policies that affect campus more broadly, Rizvi says UBC should adopt a more neutral stance on drug use that encourages learning and reduces stigma.

“Let students adhere to what is provincially and federally the law and aside from that, [UBC] doesn’t really have a place, as I see it, in enforcing anything beyond that.”

Illustration by Akem

The noisy blender whirred, its blades rotating rapidly, crushing the brown beans for the steamed moi moi that Jide, her boyfriend, liked. Ogechukwu placed her hand on top to prevent it from moving as it juddered on the kitchen counter, the vibrations taking her back to a time when such electronics were forbidden at home, mainly because there was no stable electrical supply to power them and something more important always swallowed the money intended for appliances. She could picture her younger self stooping or bending with her mother over a kerosene stove on the rough cement floor—because a well-trained woman doesn’t sit in the kitchen. Back then, her Wife Material was no more than a handkerchief.

At the age of thirteen, Ogechukwu could make ambrosial egusi soup, with just the right amount of palm oil. Her okro soup was equally as tasty, paired with smoothly pounded yam that slid down the throat easily. She knew just the right amount of cocoyam to add to onugbu soup to make the spicy soup thick and rich. Her Wife Material grew until it became a wrapper she could tie proudly.

Her two younger brothers liked her onugbu because she chased away the striking bitterness of the leaves by washing them thoroughly in a bowl with small amounts of palm oil to reduce the foam, and salt to give the bitter leaf a short stringy shape. She could prepare moi moi with slices of boiled eggs and smoked fish. She could even bake; she baked birthday cakes in university to make extra money. By then, her Wife Material had become a massive patchwork of multicoloured ankara—complementary pieces stitched together and accumulating daily, as fast as she learned.

“Is that how you will behave in your husband’s house?”

If Ogechukwu lost a pound every time her mother asked her that question, she wouldn’t be on a ketogenic diet. It was flung at her most whenever her mother thought she was failing at some womanly task, like cooking or cleaning. It could be that she had asked her to prepare pap for the family to eat with akara, bread, or cooked beans. The one thing Ogechukwu could not make no matter how hard she tried was pap. Pap was designed to reduce her Wife Material, or so she thought each time her mother asked her to make it. Her mother would put chunks of the semi-hardened paste in cold water, making sure to keep it from becoming too watery or too thick. She would stir till all the lumps disappeared, pour boiling water on the mixture till it rose, stirring continuously, achieving a creamy porridge ready for sugar and milk. It was an act of magic Ogechukwu had yet to master.

“Ogechukwu, wetu anya na ala, bend down like a woman and look at things. Let it not be said that I did not train you well, so that when it is time for you to get married, nothing will hold you back,” her mother would say each time she failed.

Ogechukwu recalled the miniscule kerosene stove lit to warm the soup—for storage since there was no fridge. The small kitchen with its smoke-blackened walls was oven- like. From time to time, her mother would drag her right index finger across her own forehead, gathering sweat before flinging it away. Ogechukwu cringed every time it hit her. She’d rub her eyes, irritated by the kerosene fumes, looking longingly through the window at the dust her brothers raised while playing football, their shirts, which she would later be asked to wash, thrown carelessly aside along with their shoes. Her already irritated eyes filled with resentment and envy. There was no time for her to play; her time was for learning everything it took to please strange men who she was certain weren’t learning anything to please her if they were anything like her brothers.

“You won’t watch what I’m doing here, keep looking out the window. After now, they will say I didn’t teach you anything.”

Her mother lived in constant fear of they. Gripping the metal bars that guarded the windows, her face pressed against the warm metal, Ogechukwu was sure they had better things to do than worry about whether she could make pap.

Mama, who will say it? Who are those people who do not live here but keep dictating how I live in this house? Her mind screamed but her mouth refused to move and she swallowed her words like a ball of fufu dragged through soup and thrown down an open mouth. If she had an alarm that jolted her awake in her mother’s overpowering voice, she would never be late for anything.

Earlier that week, before Jide wanted moi moi, Ogechukwu had been to the market to buy ugu for soup. She’d just left work bone-tired, but Jide texted to say he wanted vegetable soup. She didn’t want to cut the leaves as it would take up more of her time and she had a report to send to her boss that night. She stepped up to a seller’s makeshift stall, a wooden table shaded by a sturdy tarpaulin roof, the same fabric as the Wife Material wrapped around her body. As she carefully selected the vegetable bunches she wanted from the pile, she tried to tell the seller to cut the leaves for her. Yet, when she opened her mouth, she heard a loud voice “Ehn! What happened to your hands? You want them to say that I didn’t train my only daughter well?” Her eyes darted around anxiously for her mother, her voice seemed to be coming from the mouths of multiple women in the crowd. Ogechukwu dropped her hands. “Pack it for me. I will cut it at home.”

She once broke a nail while hand washing Jide’s jeans. That same day, she used those aching hands to sweep and mop his entire house. Overnight, her Wife Material increased by a full yard.

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. This was why, earlier that morning, she had cancelled movie day with her friends to go to the market to buy smoked fish for the moi moi she was making for Jide.

“Aren’t you coming again?” her friend had asked over the phone.

“If I finish on time, by God’s grace I’ll be there.”

Her friend sighed. “Just say you’re not coming,” she said as she hung up.

“By God’s grace” was Ogechukwu’s way of saying she didn’t know what time she would finish and didn’t want to commit. She had learned it from her mother. It was what she said whenever she was invited anywhere. It was also her mother’s way of saying that she could not control time, but she had to make the best of it nonetheless and get married before her youthfulness faded. Perhaps that’s why she had named her Ogechukwu—God’s time.

Ogechukwu’s mother had told her on countless occasions, her round brown face contorting in well-meaning concern, “I am teaching you how to cook and you should be grateful. In my time, no one taught me how to cook, I learnt on my own. To keep your man, you must learn to cook, and cook well or else he will be snatched by another woman.” She said snatched as though a man were a ballot box hijacked by thugs during an election, not a human being with a choice in the matter. Ogechukwu often wanted to ask her mother “So why did papa leave you for another woman even with all your cooking skills?” But the words clung desperately to the roof of her mouth.

“Baby, are the beans not blended yet?” her boyfriend called from the sitting room. She wanted to ask him if he was deaf and didn’t hear the noise of the blender but she raised her voice to reply “It won’t take much time!” They had met at a traditional wedding. Her friend was getting married to a Yoruba man and to show her support, Ogechukwu had bought her asoebi, made from the bride’s Wife Material, cut and sold by the bride to guests to be sewn into various styles and worn to the wedding. “God’s time is the best. He will do your own for you when he’s ready,” her friend had said the day she bought the fabric. Ogechukwu wanted to retort that she had amassed many more yards of Wife Material than her friend had, and that when she finally got married, she would still have a thousand more to keep her husband warm after selling asoebi; but she decided to keep her peace so nobody would say she was jealous. On the wedding day, she had arrived at the bride’s house early to help with the cooking and had left the others when the work had considerably reduced to go and get dressed. The wedding was supposed to begin by 3 p.m., but Nigerians operated on African time: if you wanted them to show up by 3 p.m., you had to write 12 p.m. on the invitation. Especially in Lagos, where the traffic turned a thirty-minute journey into a two-hour one. It was cause and effect. The guests came late because they knew if they arrived early, nothing would be ready, and the organizers didn’t prepare as early as they should because they knew the guests wouldn’t come on time.

The bride’s friends cooked at the back of the bungalow, while the front hosted the decorated canopies, chairs and tables for the guests. Some women stirred fried rice garnished with carrots, green pepper and peas, using a long wooden spoon to reach inside the gigantic aluminum pot that stood on a tripod over a fire of wood, paper and charcoal. Others fried large pieces of meat and fish, some made semo for the soup, some packed the already prepared jollof rice into huge coolers procured for the purpose. Ogechukwu wanted to take a picture of her outfit for potential suitors to admire. Where else to snag your own husband than at a wedding? She decided that she didn’t want to stand in front of the canopies or the food, so she walked down to some cars parked by the side of the narrow street and gave a boy playing with a tyre her phone to take the picture. She picked a gleaming red car and began posing in front of it, when the car door opened and a man stepped out of the vehicle wearing the uniform of Yoruba demons—a billowing Agbada.

“That will be 15,000.”

“Excuse me?” She turned to him.

“You changed your pose fifteen times.”

“Oh, good joke,” she chuckled in relief.

But his face turned deadpan and he said in a menacing tone,

“Who is joking with you? Give me my money jare, did I buy the car for you?”

She looked around, embarrassed, collected her phone from the boy, and gave him a twenty naira note for his help.

She turned to face the man again. “I apologize for using your car. I can delete the pictures if you like.”

His blinding smile broke out in full force again, confusing her. “I was just kidding!” he burst out laughing.

She turned away angrily intending to ignore him, but throughout the wedding he tormented her by popping up unexpectedly, persistently asking for her number until she gave in. A week after that, he called just as she was shuffling through the drawers in her bedroom, searching for a rubber band to tie her hair.

“Hello gorgeous,” he drawled.

“Who is this?”

“The man of your dreams. What’s all that banging? Are you cooking something in the kitchen?”

“No, I’m looking for something.” Ogechukwu was relieved that he had called. How would she do her own wedding if men collected her number and didn’t call?

“Oh, it sounds like you’re cooking. Bet your food tastes wonderful though.”

She’d laughed dryly, squeezing her patchwork absentmindedly. Two weeks later, she was cooking at his house. “Why not? My kitchen is bigger than yours,” he’d said, after she’d offered up a weak refusal to his initial request. Now, his friends came over regularly to fill their bellies.

“Our wife,” they hailed, as they gobbled down meal after meal. “Original Wife Material!” Ogechukwu felt proud of her nearly-complete patchwork, wondering how many more yards she needed to be considered worthy of the ultimate prize—marriage. One thousand yards? A million? Was there ever enough? This Wife Material business was beginning to feel like a lifelong audition. Who decided what was enough? The material was getting too heavy for her to drag around whenever she needed to display it.

One of Jide’s friends had brought his girlfriend over once. A lithe, polished lady, her weave flowing down to the middle of her back, her naked skin glowing like she had been injected with glitter. Ogechukwu didn’t have friends who had no Wife Material. She sometimes saw them in public—naked women with nothing to cover their bodies—and she pitied them. This one ate eba with a fork while others used their hands.

“I love eba,” she’d said in a soft, alluring voice “But it gets under my nails you see.”

Ogechukwu had looked at the long, red acrylic nails, topped with tiny glittering stones shaped into a heart. How does she wash clothes, she’d thought.

“Thank goodness someone invented a washing machine,” the girlfriend had said as if she’d heard Ogechukwu’s thought. “Damilare gets someone to come twice a week to do the cooking. Jide is so lucky he found you. I can’t even trust Dami’s boiled eggs.” She smiled sweetly at her boyfriend who’d bent to whisper in her ear, making her laugh out loud. The laughter irritated Ogechukwu, as if they were mocking her. She looked at the posh creature and imagined what her Wife Material would be, if she had any; it would be made from a rich blend of velvet and mulberry silk, draped effortlessly over the chair like a cape.

As Ogechukwu watched the beans swirl noisily in the blender, she felt as though she were one of them. Whirling recklessly against her will, without direction. Her right hand moved to her phone, her fingers dialed her mother’s number.

“Hallo!” The blast of her mother’s voice bowled her over. She bulldozed on. “Kedu? How are you? It’s been long you called. What’s that irritating sound there?”

“I am blending beans for moi moi.”

“With what?” her mother asked incredulously.

“With an electric blender,” she replied in a subdued voice. “Ogeeeee!” Her mother stressed her name in its short form.

“After all my efforts? What happened to the mortar and pestle! What if your future mother-in-law sees you now? She would think you’re lazy and capable of finishing her son’s money with these unnecessary machines!”

Ogechukwu pictured her mother’s rough, leathery hands, toughened from decades of labour, capable of carrying hot pots straight from the fire without flinching. She thought of the Wife Material wrapped around her mother’s neck and body—a coarse fabric woven from gristly ropes.

Through sudden tears, Ogechukwu stared at the blender. She turned it off, then forcefully ripped off her Wife Material, screamed through the blinding pain, and flung it angrily to the ground. She watched it fall into a heap, and for the first time, felt like a feather rising into the air. She stared at the crumpled fabric that had once been her pride, and recognized it for the load it had been. She grabbed her bag from the counter, strode triumphantly to the sitting room naked, and pushed past Jide, ignoring his perplexed shouts.

“What is it? What of the moi moi? I’m talking to you!”

His continuous enquiries and yells dulled into background noise as she pushed the house door open and became one with the night.

Photo by Britney Supernault

Three years ago, Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet and Sanaa Humayun were both working as junior employees for art centres whose staff were predominately white. Callihoo Ligtvoet is Cree, Métis, Dutch and mixed European and Humayun is Pakistani; the two friends, who co-hosted a book club together, started to talk about the isolation they felt in their respective spaces as BIPOC artists, and how they felt their agency wasn’t being prioritized. They felt safe with one another, so they shared with each other that they’d faced barriers to access.

“We started having these very real conversations,” Humayun says, “and we realized that what we were doing was peer mentorship.” The product of these conversations was Making Space, a collective that focuses on early-career BIPOC artists and is what Humayun calls “in resistance to the art world at large,” a world which demands that artists produce with aggression. Instead, Amiskwaciwâskahikan-based Callihoo Ligtvoet and Mohkintsis-based Humayun are “two babies who made a group for other babies,” Humayun says, and have created a space of gentleness, which they say is an act of resistance in itself. “We talk about the experiences we’ve had, the people we felt unsafe with, and how to move through those experiences, in a way that’s honest and transparent,” Humayun says.

The collective helps members advocate for fair compensation when freelancing or working in institutional artistic spaces. It’s offered paid skill-sharing workshops, casual in-person hangouts, and hosted speaker events with established artists, who regularly tell Callihoo Ligtvoet and Humayun that they wish there’d been a similar group around when they’d started out. Members collaborated on an art show at McMullin Gallery in Edmonton that’s on through October. The bulk of its community, however, is rooted in its Slack channel of over 100 members, a place to share opportunities, portfolios, and recommended readings.

While there are always projects and plans in the works, the collective doesn’t focus on targeted regular meetups and ongoing deadlines because it’s based in the understanding that members’ capacity to make art and take on new projects can waver. Humayun says that people in the art world speak about community all the time, though often through institutional lenses in which creators’ identities are central to their work. But Making Space is a judgement-free zone, one whose casual drop-in style lets group members choose how much or little to take on and in what capacity to be part of group events.

“So many times Kiona and I say, like, ‘Am I going to take this call from my bed with no pants on? Yeah, probably,’” Callihoo Ligtvoet says. “We all have jobs, we all have families, we all have things that we’re going through. There are times that we’ve been posting events, and we’ve entered it kind of like, ‘I’m exhausted today, I’m feeling really heavy.’ And we leave and feel playful and so happy with the people that [we’re] spending time with. It doesn’t feel extractive.”

The collective’s drop-in style format is about members taking what they need, taking “what feels most relevant.” This way of operating, Callihoo Ligtvoet says, is intentional because the group is working to counteract ideas of exploitation.

“It directly ties into that scarcity mindset of having to produce all the time. So [we keep it] a space where people feel comfortable and there’s nothing owed of them. They don’t have to step into this with obligations, restrictions, or ways that they need to fit,” Callihoo Ligtvoet says.

This process didn’t come easily; it took many virtual and in-person conversations between Making Space community members about supports that they need to take on projects with deliverables, and conversations between Callihoo Ligtvoet and Humayun about keeping the group as low pressure and flexible as possible. Instead of making regular demands on people’s time, Making Space is a cheerleader for its members’ growth, always a soft place to land if they choose to move away and then actively engage again.

“The exciting part of Making Space,” Callihoo Ligtvoet says, “is that it’s always going to shift with us and with the people who still want it.”

“I want to know who you are, where you’re from and why you’re HERE.” His gaze swept to the opposite side of the room where a doll-like actress with the weightless confidence of a foam roller was already mid-sentence.

I’m from New Jersey. I’m here because when I was nine… Suddenly, her image doubled. I felt panicked. Sweat soaked my vintage red Lacoste sweater. My heart grew wings, my skin sprouted feet and as it crawled, my colon began evacuating. I was too high to be in movement class. I should not have started my day by combining two cups of green tea with five Xenadrine-EFX, a diet pill concentrated with synephrine and caffeine which I remember as chunky, purple, and star-shaped, but I didn’t yet know that.

*

That year, 2006, marked two years since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) shocking ban on ephedra—controversial amphetamine-esque compound and infamous darling of the 1990s weight loss industry. Ephedra contains ephedrine, a stimulant that imitates our fight-or-flight response, thereby triggering adrenaline. It’s also called ma huang, and is one of traditional Chinese medicine’s 5,000-year-old treatments for respiratory conditions. It holds a solid reputation for doing that job, though at much lower doses than what was later used in natural health products (NHPs).

NHPs gained popularity in the 1970s. Toxic pressure to be thin has been a predominant part of North American culture since at least the 1920s, but in Canada, it intensified in 1953 with the first Canadian weight-height survey, intended to trace the shape of Canadian body mass. From there, public health focused on discouraging personal habits that could lead to non-communicable diseases—inactivity, smoking, alcohol consumption. Body-size panic emerged in the 1970s in the U.S., too. By the 1990s, fatphobia became a moral panic. The World Health Organization labeled fatness an “epidemic,” media warned larger individuals to beware of certain oncoming death and the words “fat-free” convinced even my mother that trends like the Cabbage Soup Diet were totally healthy. Food became the enemy, and nutritional supplements rose as an obvious solution to the supposed problems of our bodies.

The issue with supplements, however, was that they weren’t stringently regulated. In the U.S., NHPs like ephedra were legally protected by the 1994 U.S. Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) which stated that, unlike pharmaceuticals, NHPs were freed from testing. Companies were not required to state the risks around their products nor prove their benefits. The same products were approved in Canada, where NHP regulation didn’t exist under any act. In both countries, the burden of proof was on consumers. As long as no one got verifiably hurt, companies could sell their fat-burning potions.

By 2002, ephedra manufacturers were selling $1.3 billion in ephedra- containing products per year. Manufacturers would reportedly produce one-month’s supply for as little as $4 and sell the bottle at health stores for $40. The Ephedra Education Council, a PR group comprised of industry representatives, maintained that 15 million consumers took the herb annually. Meanwhile, over 2,200 complaints regarding cardiac-related side effects, including stroke and death, filed into the FDA. Ephedra accounted for 64 percent of all adverse reactions to herbs reported to U.S. poison control centres. Still, the FDA required more proof before they could take action.

Proof came in February 2003. Steve Bechler, a 23-year-old pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, collapsed during spring training and died of complications relating to heatstroke less than 24 hours later. Bechler had been taking three ephedra-based diet pills per day. Toxicology reports confirmed high levels of it in his system. His death was one of several ephedra- related deaths in professional sports that had taken place since 2001.

In December 2003, the Bush administration announced a ban on ephedra. Manufacturers received letters demanding that they halt production of ephedra-related products, though they had already been in the news for 10 months and sales had sunk. But people’s desire to lose weight with the help of a pill hadn’t. There was already a new unregulated option out there, which the diet pill industry quickly latched onto: synephrine.

*

I first laid eyes on Xenadrine-EFX when I was 17 years old, but I had been dieting since middle school. When I was 11, I tried my best to starve myself throughout the day. After school, I’d sit and binge-eat the contents of our kitchen cupboards.

I was a naturally lonely and panicked kid. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was going blind, and vision loss was affecting my sense of safety. Large blindspots fragmented my visual fields which were then filtered by constant blinking lights, as if I lived behind a broken TV screen. My eye doctor’s advice was to “relax.” In the meantime, I had an impossible time connecting with other kids or even with my own family.

My family was fragmented in its own right. My mom dealt with a mental illness which at times restricted her availability. My dad was often out of town, working. After school, food became a reliable friend. I spent hours unsupervised, watching TV, munching my dad’s neglected snacks. I hid Twizzlers and Twix wrappers in my room until I could sneak them to a public garbage can. In the evenings, I planned new remedies to undo the effects of my snacking—laxatives, restriction diets, intense cardio. I quickly discovered that I loved running. It was the one health initiative that felt like a safe escape from anxiety. As I ran, I could picture myself gracefully racing among other athletes, but I was too embarrassed of my body to ask if I could compete or train.

No one put me on a diet. I somehow just learned that I was “too big” through some kind of cultural osmosis. Maybe it was because I was curvy and didn’t fit into clothing at the mall. I felt awkward and I equated awkward to ugly, ugly to large, large to loser. One of the most insidious errors in the late twentieth-century zeitgeist is the unscientific assumption that large bodies are a clear and identifiable problem. If that pressure hadn’t existed, I would never have swallowed a diet pill. But it did exist, and when I was admitted into SU, I planned a total makeover. I was working as a tutor earning between $80-100 per week. I took my savings to the mall. Nothing fit me.

As I was leaving, I passed Nutrition House. The windows were plastered in glossy images of regular people, displaying their BEFORE—tired, desperate, bloated, ancient—and their AFTER—glowing, wide-eyed and somehow much younger. It was clear to me that I was the BEFORE. The AFTER was calling me.

Cytodyne Technologies, the makers of what was soon to become my drug of choice, Xenadrine-EFX, were the masters of the diet pill ads. “Our incredibly advanced thermogenic formula literally “revs up” your body’s metabolism for rapid reductions in body fat and an incredible boost to your energy levels…John Murphy lost 37 lbs in just weeks!”

BEFORE—Dark, low-contrast image of a sad John Murphy with a belly.

AFTER—John Murphy as Superman. Stories are soothing because they permit escape. Words like thermogenic or any of the listed active ingredients in the product, such as synephrine and caffeine, were safe enough for John Murphy. That meant they were safe enough for me.

The cashier silently took my cash.

Outside the store, I took two tasteless capsules (in retrospect, disappointingly not star-shaped after all), as directed on the bottle. After an hour-long trip home, my face tingled.

*

When I arrived at Syracuse in September, I was taking five to six pills every hour, which contained the equivalent of about 3.5 cups of coffee, chased with plenty of green tea. I barely lost any weight, but I gained confidence, like I’d jumped into a sparkling future where everybody loved me. But, if time could be manipulated that easily, we wouldn’t need drugs.

I felt unreal on that first day as my classmates introduced themselves, and not in a good way. Hi, I’m from Wisconsin and I applied because my dad thought…I tuned out. The movement studio was melting. When I tuned back in, the next voice I heard came from right in front of me: I’m from New York and I’m here because I NEED to be here.

The New Yorker triggered my deepest fear. I didn’t belong there. If anything, I belonged in a hospital. My heart spanked my ribcage. I realized from the silence that it was my turn to speak. “My name is Rachel. I’m from Toronto and I just.” I swallowed hot gas, afraid this might be my dying statement. “I just want everyone to be my friend.” My head nodded forward, I gasped for air. Sudden laughter boomed around me.

When class finally ended, my dream had come true. Everyone wanted to be my friend. But I didn’t know what was happening, couldn’t separate reality from fiction. I ran away and straight through the building until I found my faculty advisor, Craig.

“Hello.” Craig looked at me like I was on fire. He was the teacher who’d auditioned me for the program but he didn’t recognize me. “What’s going on with you?”

“My name is Rachel Ganz and I’m an acting student and I shouldn’t have come here and I don’t want to stay here and I’m so sorry.”

Craig watched me sob.

“Look,” He waited for me to look at him. “I think you should stay. I can tell you have a lot—” he moved his hand to his chest and gestured outwards— “in you.”

I nodded my head many times, thanked him, and ran through campus to the back of my dorm to throw my freezer bag full of Xenadrine-EFX into the dumpster.

The next morning, throbbing pain radiated throughout my entire body.

At the time, I didn’t know very much about the effects of synephrine. However, as a stimulant, when combined with caffeine, it became the upper I felt I was missing. It seems possible that I’d developed a dependence on the pills, especially considering that when I stopped I had no appetite, no energy and no will to live.

After I stopped taking the supplement, I lost twenty pounds in less than a month. My mom came to visit and was disturbed by my new appearance; she said I looked sick. But I loved the way I looked. I began smoking to mitigate symptoms of withdrawal.

When my appetite returned over two months later, I went to the meal hall and ate a muffin. Then I ate another, then a third. I could not stop eating and my mood sank even deeper. I dropped most of my classes and waited, mostly in bed, for some kind of ending. I surfed pro-ana web forums, studied starvation tips and experimented with bulimia. My attitude needed an overhaul.But I was only 18 and severely depressed. Luckily, my roommate was also an acting student. She woke me up and walked me to class every morning. Without her, I don’t think I would have moved.

*

Sometimes, and from certain vantage points, it seems like we’re in a new era when it comes to our conceptions of bodies. Body positive celebrities are embracing themselves as they are naturally, and a quick scroll through TikTok and Instagram will reveal strong body positive, or at least neutral, communities. But other times, it seems like all that’s changed is the framing. While I faced the pressure to be thin at the mall, today we feel it in our beds, in our cars, on the toilet.

Robert Chinery Jr., Tracey Chinery and one of their companies, RTC Research & Development, LLC, the marketers of Xenadrine-EFX, were charged in 2005 with false advertising. They were fined $8 million in consumer redress.

Today, low dosages of synephrine and ephedra are still approved by Health Canada for use as natural health products. They’re sold in supplement stores, branded as decongestants by companies such as 4EverFit (Ephedra) and Synephrine 30. However, the combination of synephrine and caffeine is banned under Canadian law.

That doesn’t mean one can’t still access federally approved drugs that can make people smaller. A new kind of diet drug has emerged as a trend. Most famously, Ozempic, generically known as semaglutide and intended as a medicine to treat diabetes, has been popularized by the media as a “treatment” for living in a large body. As a result, it’s becoming harder for many to avoid the pressure to be thin.

Semaglutide was approved by the FDA in 2017. In some respects, its success is revolutionary. It works by mimicking GLP-1, a hormone that we produce in our gut. “After you eat food, the hormone goes from your gut to your pancreas to release insulin and to allow the insulin to store that food for later on,” explains Dr. Sean Wharton, who specializes in diabetes and weight loss and runs a clinic in Burlington, Ontario. “It also tells the brain that you’ve eaten food and to stop eating.” People living with type 2 diabetes often do not have enough GLP-1. Drugs that mimic GLP-1 are an immediate game-changer for them, but also for many people who want to lose weight.

Previously, bariatric surgery was the only available treatment for people who wanted or needed to lose a lot of weight quickly. Over a longer period of time, psychological interventions such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) have been shown to be useful, too. But, CBT is a privileged approach that’s often only available to people with time, money and stable lives. Medications such as semaglutide, in theory, can offer immediate intervention for people who want to lose weight who are also surviving complex, destabilizing pressures such as poverty, violence or racism.

Barriers to semaglutides include their cost, which is about $200 to $300 per month in Canada, or the fact that they are currently mostly injectables, which can be difficult to produce, store and ship. Also, at the time of publication, Ozempic has not been approved by Health Canada as a weight loss drug, though the agency acknowledges it may be prescribed “off-label,” meaning for a purpose other than that for which it’s approved. For those with type 2 diabetes, costs may be covered by provincial drug plans or private insurance plans, but it’s not a guarantee. Side effects are an issue, too: Ozempic’s include diarrhea, constipation, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. The drug can also cause gallbladder and kidney problems, pancreatitis and low blood sugar. Thyroid tumours are another potential side effect.

Still, these side effects aren’t warning people off the drug. This matters for another reason: people who hop on board celebrities’ and influencers’ endorsements of Ozempic as a weight loss tool could adversely affect the health of people with diabetes by causing shortages of the drug through their demand. That’s been happening globally at various points for the past year. The drug’s manufacturer, Novo Nordisk, announced in August that shortages are expected in Canada into October. There was a shortage here for a week in March, which was corrected after doctors reigned in prescriptions to Americans (in the U.S. the drug was largely unavailable, and can cost over $900 per month). In January and February, nearly one in five Ozempic prescriptions filled in B.C. was for an American. Over 30, 000 prescriptions for the drug were issued to Americans between Jan. 1 and April 19. In April, the province announced that non-residents will no longer be able to get Ozempic through mail-order or online. Americans can still buy Ozempic in Canada, but they have to do it in person. It was found by provincial health authorities that one Nova Scotia doctor, currently based in the U.S., was allegedly responsible for writing more than 17, 000 prescriptions over a period of a few months, and two online pharmacies in B.C. had filled most of them. That person’s licence has now been temporarily suspended.

It’s clear from this craze, and the boom in other semaglutide-based drugs like Rybelsus, a pill, and Wegovy, an injection approved for weight loss in Canada but not yet available here, that Ozempic is only the beginning.

As the drugs become more popular, though, the eating disorder treatment community expresses concern. “The temptation for people who are in larger bodies to take medication [like Ozempic] is really strong,” says Dr. Karen Trollope-Kumar, family physician and co-founder of Body Brave, a charity offering online eating disorder treatment and support services. Trollope-Kumar worries about adding to the “internalized stigma” of larger-bodied people and says the onslaught of self-blame may provoke disordered eating.

The rise in GLP-1 receptor agonists has strengthened the discussion of obesity as a disease, a stance that has been critiqued by fat activists, racialized people, and medical professionals. Obesity is determined by one’s body mass index, or BMI, which measures body fat based on height and weight. A person with a score of 30 or over is deemed to be obese. But pathologizing larger bodies and problematizing them doesn’t help people and can lead to disregard for people’s true health concerns. Further, BMI was created almost 200 years ago by a non-doctor who measured white bodies and created standards from those measurements. Today, it has been debunked by many as a largely unscientific, racist tool.

Trollope-Kumar’s approach is to think about health from a broader perspective and to prioritize social connections as a means of staying healthy. “If we feel socially connected to other people,” she says, “that’s actually the most protective factor for our health, not weight.”

*

I used to think weight loss would lead me to social connection. My sense of isolation has intensified as I’ve aged, possibly hitting its peak in 2018 when I was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic retinal disease which causes vision loss. Scared to lose all of my vision, I quit hobbies that felt dangerous or embarrassing, including fitness and running. Instead of participating, I sat alone and scrolled through fitness influencer content on Instagram, eating candy and gazing into the AFTER—transformed women with rippling muscles, long straight hair and impossible joy.

Later, when pandemic restrictions had come and then eased off again, my partner and I moved to Leslieville, a neighbourhood in Toronto’s east- end with large parks that’s close to waterfront trails. The long paved paths were populated with happy, healthy runners of all shapes, sizes and colours. They reminded me of the teenage treadmill escapes I used to take every morning and I wanted to join them.

But, I was afraid to be a blind runner. It wasn’t the AFTER I imagined. To conquer my fear, I began running with my dog. After a month, I ventured for longer runs, alone. I started signing up for races which introduced me to a long-sought-after community.

This past May, I ran my first marathon. By the 30th kilometre, I hit a wall and wasn’t sure if I was going to finish. But then, I noticed other people around me were also struggling. I followed a woman. She followed another guy. We became a small group, loosely connected by our will to keep going. We shared a rhythm and an experience, trotting in our bodies of all sizes, through the beautiful AFTER.

Photo by Gilaxia

One brisk November 1938 afternoon in Basel, Switzerland, chemist Albert Hofmann successfully synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide for the first time. The compound was set aside and forgotten for five years until Hofmann resynthesized it, accidentally absorbed some, and took the world’s first acid trip.

The discovery of acid, or LSD, changed the course of social history. Hofmann’s employer, Sandoz Laboratories, began selling it as a psychiatric panacea in 1947, hailing it as a cure for everything from alcoholism to schizophrenia to criminal behaviours and “sexual perversions.” Curious journalists warmly welcomed the new drug in their reporting.

The ’50s welcomed a new era of psychedelic research for a variety of ailments. Newspaper and magazine headlines were positive, mirroring the science world’s excitement around the newfound LSD. “Can This Drug Enlarge Man’s Mind?,” asked Gerald Heard in Horizon magazine in May 1963. He decided that it could. In November, Cosmopolitan ran a piece calling it “Hollywood’s Status Symbol Drug.”

This pro-psychedelic narrative didn’t last long, however, with some states banning sale and possession and concerned parents and citizens getting involved. It is here that we begin to see the media changing their perspectives on LSD and other psychedelic drugs, reporting on both the changing legal landscape and on shifting public opinion. “Stronger Curbs on LSD Proposed: Medical Society Committee Says Hallucination Drug is ‘Most Dangerous,’” read a headline in The New York Times on March 30, 1966. “Is the Trip Over for LSD?” asked Business Week on April 22. It was close: the psychedelic ’60s were entering the beginning of their end.

*

Mass media and the public are deeply, closely intertwined, with the media taking on the role of distillers, taking information straight from the source and providing it to the public in an easily digestible way. Beginning in the 1950s, mass media including newspapers and TV were the primary source of information to the public, and thus, the most important catalyst for moulding public opinion. On one hand, in the ’60s, the media was simply reporting on what some people already seemed to want to believe – that LSD and other psychedelic drugs could be dangerous. On the other, the media also played a role in shaping public opinion around these drugs and their potential dangers, and in creating the worries, often false, around them to begin with.

In 1968, possession of LSD became illegal in the U.S. After a June 17, 1971 press conference with then-U.S. president Richard Nixon, the term “war on drugs” became popularized with the media’s help. Editors quickly pivoted to publishing fear-mongering stories of addicts roaming the streets, exaggerated drug abuse statistics, and polarizing, racist takes. Usually, it was Black and other racialized people accused of being drug addicts and criminals and who made up the majority of American prison populations. By 1996, Black men were sent to prison for minor drug offences 13 times more often than white men.

Following this legal shift, drug reporting between the ’70s and ’90s skewed negative. “A New Generation Discovers LSD, and Its Dangers,” said The New York Times in December 1991. Between that headline and today, The New York Times has changed its tune. This same publication now shares dozens of stories on the so-called psychedelic renaissance. In the last few years, they’ve published pieces with a more curious tone: “What Does Good Psychedelic Therapy Look Like?” Dana G. Smith wondered this year.

In many ways, the media is responsible for shepherding the new era of acceptance we’re entering now. I think the modern-day psychedelic renaissance started around 2010 when The New York Times published “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again,” a dive into cancer patients’ experiments with psilocybin to face terminal diagnoses. Although certainly not the first (Wired published a piece on tech boys loving acid in in 2006, “LSD: The Geek’s Wonder Drug?”), a legacy publication sharing something so different from the public’s traditional understanding of medicine and healing, and from their previous stance, was radical. Since then, we’ve seen a noticeable increase in the media promotion of psychedelics.

But while journalists’ work functions as a cultural mirror, sometimes reflecting current public opinion back to the public, journalists, as the frontline workers in the information economy, need to look past existing trends and popular thought to report a more complete, and sometimes critical or unpleasant, truth.

*

Today, psychedelics are celebrated as a new healing cure, a way to get multiple years of therapy in one trip, and a way to treat anything and everything from depression to eating disorders to migraines. Media coverage is, for the most part, overwhelmingly positive. It seems the miracles of psychedelics don’t ever end. Celebrities are coming out as psychedelic supporters, donating millions to the cause of psychedelic therapy, and sharing their stories, whether healing or hilarious. Aaron Rodgers credits psychedelics with making him a better football player. Jaden Smith claims they made him more empathetic. Both were speakers at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’s (MAPS) June 2023 Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, which drew over 11,000 attendees. Contrary to the headlines of the ’70s and ’80s, headlines today don’t often mention that psychedelics may not work as intended and that there are plenty of harms and risks involved.

“[T]here’s so much misinformation being peddled, it’s leading people to not get the help that they need. And a big part of that misinformation is this notion that psychedelics are somehow a magic bullet, where you can go and have an experience and it’s going to fix things in you,” says author and psychedelic therapy advocate Shannon Duncan, who believes that the media needs to be more transparent in psychedelic reporting.

The top few results for a search on psilocybin therapy are articles preaching the power of magic mushrooms: “How psilocybin, the psychedelic in mushrooms, may rewire the brain to ease depression, anxiety and more,” reports CNN. Almost no articles show up discussing the risks involved and how to figure out if they’re a good fit.

The dangers of talking about psychedelics through a majorly positive, healing lens lie in what’s being omitted. In this regard, the responsibility of psychedelic reporters is huge, says Amanda Siebert, psychedelic and cannabis journalist and author. The main problem, she says, lies in exaggerated media and lack of media literacy. “People are not reading the entire thing. They’re skimming. They’re seeing ‘oh, this person did psychedelics and it cured their depression.’ I think the problem with that is it perpetuates this idea that psychedelics are a panacea.”

“I do ultimately think the onus is on the user,” says Dr. Erica Zelfand, a physician specializing in psychedelics and lead instructor at Oregon’s InnerTrek psychedelic facilitator training school. “It’s your body, it’s your consciousness, that’s your call.” The media’s job in this, she says, is to help people decide the right choice for them. She says journalists could be doing a better job of delivering accurate, nuanced data.

Dr. Dave Rabin, co-founder of Apollo Neuroscience, thinks media professionals aren’t doing enough work to find the right sources. He says many articles about psychedelic medicine cite experts who don’t practice it, or who aren’t involved in clinical research, which can sometimes lead to articles overstating the risks, backed up by people who don’t know enough to make those claims. He adds that too often, the therapy part of psychedelic therapy is pushed aside and not talked about nearly as much as the psychedelic part, which leaves an incomplete picture of how treatment works.

Acupuncturist, primary care provider, and psychedelic therapy advocate Dr. Jonathan Fields also says the media is missing out on key parts of the psychedelic therapy journey. “[The media is] kind of talking about everything except the most important thing, which is actually the fact that it works because it’s allowing you to change your mindset,” he says. A key to the therapy is integration: psilocybin can help people integrate useful tools learned through therapy, or help people stick to regular exercise. “Rather than just like, ‘I took mushrooms. I feel great.’”

Dr. Evan Lewis, vice president of psychedelic neurology at Numinus, a Canadian company with a series of clinics focusing on psychedelic therapy, says that the media and, by default, readers and other people, just “don’t understand the importance of having a really good therapist.” He says that what remains underreported is the whole framework around good preparation, guidance and integration.

On the note of media literacy, Siebert says, the issue is that “a lot of people don’t understand the relationship that PR plays.” This puts the publications at fault, too: Paid content isn’t being clearly disclosed in the psychedelic space, and neither is the “press release regurgitation” that Siebert says sometimes happens, automatically pivoting the “article” toward positive coverage. These things are not inherently bad—they just aren’t transparent.

Promoting almost exclusively positive news and information about psychedelics can be dangerous. Today’s news cycle is more than 24 hours—it’s deeper. The internet creates echo chambers and vacuums. Two people could have differing thoughts and both, after a Google search, could come back with apparent facts to back themselves up. Gen Z gets more of their information from TikTok rather than Google, and TikTok is full of diluted, or even totally wrong, information.

While we as reporters can’t control what someone is consuming on social media, we can control the messaging that we share and propagate on our own platforms and in our articles. We are not just writing about psychedelics for the sake of writing about psychedelics.

Charlotte Munro and her mom smiled for a selfie high above the frothy water of Niagara Falls. Amidst a difficult year where Munro endured both opioid withdrawal and a near-deadly infection, the weekend trip should have been a respite. But the getaway quickly turned sour because she was forced to forgo packing one essential item—her medication.

In 2014, after years of opioid use that began with a prescription for a fentanyl patch from her doctor for leg pain caused by necrosis, Munro decided to try methadone, one of the most effective medications in treating opioid addiction. It works by activating the same opioid receptors in the brain as drugs like heroin and fentanyl, except it’s slow-acting. This means that it can prevent withdrawal and reduce drug cravings. However, methadone itself is an opioid and subject to strict regulations in Canada and abroad.

These regulations limit access to take-home doses, forcing many patients to visit a pharmacy or clinic weekly or even daily to be observed while they take their medication. Patients are evaluated for signs of intoxication before they take their dose, watched while they take it, then their mouths are checked to confirm it’s been consumed. The purpose of these restrictions is to ensure methadone is used as prescribed, but the ensuing limitations on movement have caused some to refer to the drug as “liquid handcuffs.”

Daily observed doses shouldn’t render a patient completely tethered to their home pharmacy. Ralf Gerlach co-founded a harm-reduction organization in Münster, Germany just over 30 years ago and found his clients unsure if they could travel after starting methadone treatment. In response he wrote Methadone: Worldwide Travel Guide. He maintains that people should have access to this care wherever they go. “Denying freedom to travel is counterproductive to the goals of treatment,” Gerlach insists. “If doctors feel their patients are not stable enough for take-home dosing, courtesy dosing should be arranged at the place they travel to.” In practice though, courtesy dosing can wreck a two-day vacation to a nearby city.

Munro wasn’t prescribed any take-home doses for her trip, so she and her mom took a detour to a pharmacy near the Falls. Even though her doctor had called ahead and she had her ID and previous dose receipts, Munro’s methadone, which usually came in the form of a small, fruit-flavoured drink, hadn’t been prepared. She had to wait for the pharmacy to empty before being seen to. “I wasn’t given a fair turn in line like most people would get if you’re just going to the pharmacy to pick up a script,” she says. “I felt like a second-class citizen.” In her eight months of taking methadone, that was the only trip Munro attempted to make.

“A change of scenery and feeling like you’re part of society is healthy, it’s needed,” she says. Research shows exposure to new environments—in other words, travel—can boost our happiness. But for those who take methadone, this kind of happiness may not be available.

Tens of thousands of people across the country take methadone to treat opioid addiction. Treatment duration can range from less than a year to decades. While Canada struggles to address an opioid crisis that has killed more than 30, 000 people since 2016, aggravated by a drug supply poisoned with fentanyl and, more recently, benzodiazepines that render naloxone ineffective, methadone treatment for opioid addiction has proven critical—cutting a person’s chance of dying in half.

Although strict restrictions on take-home doses are slowly easing, they continue to impose barriers which may lead to people experiencing interruptions in treatment or discontinuing it altogether. They also limit freedom of movement for those who do take it. The drug is treated differently than many other life-saving medications; retrieving a dose from the pharmacy or methadone clinic is burdensome and can be deeply stigmatizing. What’s more is that research proves that lessening these restrictions is better for patients.

*

The first methadone treatment program in the world was founded in Vancouver in 1959. Residents of the Kitsilano neighbourhood originally set to house the clinic protested its opening and succeeded on the grounds that it would devalue their homes. At the time, two distinct conceptions of addiction treatment were clashing in B.C. Where the criminal model saw addiction as a moral shortcoming and pushed for indefinite compulsory treatment with a goal of abstinence, the medical model vied for voluntary treatment over punishment. The latter’s proponents suggested giving people addicted to heroin controlled levels of the same drug to help stabilize their lives, but this approach was ultimately rejected.

Amidst the discord Dr. Robert Halliday began treating patients for short-term opioid withdrawal with methadone. The drug had been synthesized by German scientists only 20 years prior and its efficacy for treating opioid addiction was mostly unknown at the time. Initially patients were given 12 days of methadone treatment to taper off the illicit opioid they were addicted to, but a few years later the clinic implemented what Halliday called “prolonged withdrawal”—allowing patients to take methadone for as long as they needed.

Both approaches had positive effects, however prolonged withdrawal saw more results, particularly for older patients who had been using drugs longer. Halliday cautioned against using abstinence to measure methadone’s efficacy. In a 1967 study that featured interviews with more than 150 of the clinic’s patients, he wrote that it’s “illogical to equate abstinence with a cure,” and compared methadone treatment for opioid addiction to insulin therapy for diabetes.

Instead, Halliday used factors such as relationships with family, work, a patient’s psychological wellbeing, and whether they developed healthy coping mechanisms to determine the success of methadone treatment.

At the turn of the millennium, professor Benedikt Fischer, a drug policy researcher, published a 40 year history of turbulent methadone policies in Canada. The success of Vancouver’s small-scale methadone treatment program prompted the practice to be widely accepted and 23 methadone programs opened across the country. In the early 1970s the government’s LeDain Commission published a series of reports on the non-medical use of drugs, including opioids, in Canada. It concluded that methadone was an effective treatment for opioid addiction and recommended a heroin substitution program when methadone was not adequate.

At the same time as the LeDain Commission, a special committee was struck to investigate methadone programs after a significant increase in the import of methadone into the country prompted concerns. It found that methadone was responsible for several overdose deaths and the widespread availability of the drug was brought about by private doctors without the knowledge to properly prescribe it. The committee thus recommended methadone guidelines that said it should only be prescribed to those with at least one year of opioid dependence, frequent urine screening for illicit drugs should occur with treatment, written prescriptions for methadone should be prohibited, patients must take the drug under supervision, doctors need authorization from the federal health authority to prescribe it, and any violation of the guidelines would be a criminal offence.

As a result, the number of patients taking methadone in Canada decreased from about 1,700 to about 1,100 in just three years. Over the years restrictions on people addicted to opioids continued—B.C.’s Heroin Treatment Act proposed compulsory treatment of up to three years for opioid addiction. While this was struck down in the province’s Supreme Court, policies restricting access to methadone persisted over the following decades.

In 1995, the federal government abruptly transferred oversight of methadone programs to the provinces. Since then, rules and regulations for methadone treatment, now one of several medications used to treat opioid addiction known under the umbrella term opioid agonist therapy, have developed differently in every province, with services in B.C. and Ontario expanding the most.

However, consistent throughout the country is the concept of contingency management, where people can earn take-home doses through meeting program requirements such as daily attendance at the pharmacy or clinic to receive an observed dose and frequent urine testing to check for prescribed and non-prescribed drugs.

“I was on methadone and suboxone for 18 years. And in that 18 years, I never once earned a take home dose,” says Toronto- based Andrew McLeod.

The restrictions on methadone and suboxone, a similar medication used in opioid agonist therapy, isolated McLeod. Being forced to make daily pharmacy visits means “you’re not engaging in society; instead, you’re kind of observing it,” McLeod says.

His rigid daily appointment made finding work difficult, with one employer never calling back after hearing he would be gone for half the day to visit the methadone clinic. It also affected his ability to spend time with loved ones. For nearly two decades, if McLeod wanted to be with his family at the cottage in Kingston, Ontario, away from his pharmacy, he had to secure heroin or fentanyl or else risk withdrawal, which he describes as excruciating. “It’s probably one of the worst feelings in the world. The withdrawal is what often takes people back.”

“Take the worst flu you’ve ever had,” he says, “then multiply that by 25 or 50. I’ve seen people violently sick.” At that point, McLeod explains, if he could not make it to the clinic in time or there was an error faxing his prescription, he had to find an alternative opioid. “I cannot live in that sickness.”

“One of the most dangerous situations is when someone decides for whatever reason, they want to abruptly stop their opioid agonist therapy,” says Dr. Vincent Lam, an emergency and addictions physician in Toronto. “Sometimes this can happen just because they’re frustrated with the limitations of the program.”

In the agony of withdrawal, patients are more likely to access another source of opioids, and with a lower opioid tolerance, this can be deadly.

*

Alongside take-home doses for people who want them, activists in B.C. and across Canada are fighting for safer supply, meaning access to prescribed medication in lieu of potentially toxic illegal drugs.

In B.C., small pilot programs providing hydromorphone to those who use illegal drugs and are at risk of overdosing were established in 2020. However, the province continues to suffer the consequences of toxic supply with 2,300 people dead due to poisoned drugs in 2022. This year, B.C.’s government decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs, though activists and researchers warn that without an accessible safer supply, this is not enough.

After starting his career as an emergency room physician, Lam yearned for more continuity of care. He began working in addictions medicine and was surprised at the positive impact even a couple of weeks of opioid agonist therapy had on a patient’s wellbeing. Lam explains that addictions medicine has historically been the subject of additional oversight and scrutiny compared to other specialties, and says it’s a field which, in many ways, is stigmatized within the medical community.

Lam recently spearheaded the drafting of new methadone take-home dosing guidelines to make the program more accessible, replacing the former contingency method. These new guidelines are meant to help advise physicians in taking a more patient-centred approach. Instead of sweeping, generalized criteria for take-home doses, doctors are encouraged to look at factors such as whether someone can safely store their medication, a person’s overall stability, and their amount of time on methadone. Abstinence from non- prescribed drugs is no longer required to access take-home doses, although it may affect how many are permitted.

Changes to the guidelines were in part brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. To reduce the risk of an outbreak, take-home dose allowances were increased for those who already had them and provided to people who were formerly only permitted observed doses. Researchers found that as a result, in Ontario the risks of treatment discontinuation and opioid-related overdoses were lowered.

A lingering point of concern for those critical of loosening methadone treatment rules is the potential for diversion. That is, methadone being acquired or used by someone it’s not prescribed to. While diversion does occur and improperly stored doses pose a public health risk, studies have shown that the main motivation for diversion is to provide safer drugs for others during an overdose crisis.“People have done it for me. I’ve done it for people who are dope sick. I’ve given them some of my methadone before to help them along so that they don’t have to do something else,” says Garth Mullins. Mullins is a board member of the B.C. Association of People on Opioid Maintenance and host of “Crackdown,” a podcast about drugs run by drug users.

Mullins first encountered harm reduction when he was 19, sleeping in a San Francisco park and using black tar heroin. At the time, syringes were difficult to find in the U.S., needle exchanges were illegal, and HIV was spreading among people who injected drugs. Mullins remembers using bleach in an attempt to sterilize needles and a match striker to sharpen them when they dulled. Then a group came by with buckets and new syringes. “It was a guerilla needle exchange. It was an act of civil disobedience in public health. It touched me and left a mark,” Mullins says.

While he has been taking methadone for more than 20 years and travelled abroad to Portugal with take-home doses during that time, Mullins understands why someone wouldn’t continue treatment. “A lot of people have just had enough. They don’t want any more people monitoring their lives, and want to get back a little bit of that dignity and self-determination…A methadone clinic seems like this weird hybrid between a place of healthcare and a place of punishment,” he says.

Alongside restricted travel, limited or no carries means someone fleeing disaster can’t access a supply of emergency medication. With wildfires burning more of the country every year and floods increasing in frequency and severity, this issue is growing more pressing.

The same restrictions that prevent people taking methadone from traveling are exacerbated for people in need of treatment living in remote regions. While opioid addiction is still prominent in rural areas, geographical barriers mean daily pharmacy access for some is impossible, like for Charlotte Munro, who was often forced to forgo treatment when her town’s pharmacy was closed on Sundays. If she wanted her medicine, she’d have to take a 45-minute cab ride to Stratford. Harsh regulations meant Munro’s access to methadone was precarious, putting her at risk of entering withdrawal. Her doctor was aware she was missing doses on Sundays, but that didn’t change her predicament.

*

Almost a decade since Munro waited for a pharmacy to empty in Niagara Falls, the evidence of medical stigma sits in a box in her hallway. A few months after the weekend trip she became severely ill with endocarditis, an infection of the inner lining of the heart. Munro was turned away from three hospitals in one week. “They weren’t doing the tests, they were just thinking I was trying to get drugs,” she explains. She feels that her methadone prescription sparked bias.

The Friday of that week Munro fell into a coma and was rushed to Stratford General Hospital. She remained unconscious for two weeks and spent months recovering.

Now an activist and full-time student in Indigenous Social Work at Laurentian University, Munro requested her medical records from that period. She intends to go through the large box to understand why she was treated so poorly and present her findings, but hasn’t felt emotionally ready to relive the experience.

Even last year, however, Munro was traumatized by her treatment at the hospital while giving birth to her son. Munro wasn’t given adequate support with breastfeeding, her concerns were dismissed, and her chart noted that she had consumed alcohol during the pregnancy, which she says is untrue. “I’ve been so successful in my recovery… and then I go in there and none of that matters. It’s just what they see on paper. It was probably a flagged file,” she says. “I feel like it robbed me of certain things that I should have been enjoying with my son,” Munro recounts. “I was basically being looked at like an unfit parent.”

Both Munro and Andrew McLeod are co-authors on the new set of methadone take-home dosing guidelines, offering their perspectives for a more human- centred approach. McLeod is now a social service worker and addictions counsellor.

“Addiction, it’s got a lot of pieces to it. It’s not just as simple as changing carries and everything will get better,” McLeod says. Three-and-a-half years ago, he tapered off of methadone by slowly decreasing his dosage. The process was physically arduous as he endured some withdrawal, but he’s experienced new freedom. “Instead of having to make my way to this pharmacy, I could get up in the morning and I could go to work, or I could go to school. I was able to go visit my mom and my kids. I was able to go to college,” says Mcleod. Last summer, he went to B.C. for his first vacation in over 20 years, which he says is sad.

Alongside changes to how methadone is prescribed, McLeod believes that housing, access to education, jobs, especially for those with criminal convictions, and support to help families affected by addiction are all equally as important. Without housing, family, and employment opportunities, McLeod believes many will look at methadone treatment and think “what’s the point?”

However, the truth about the treatment of opioid addiction in Canada has been clear for more than 60 years. Abstinence- based, compulsory, and punitive programs are often ineffective. Yet echoes of these regressive policies remain and fester in strict contingency management, lack of patient-centred care, and a continued resistance to implementing harm-reduction from officials at all levels of government.

*

Accessible opioid agonist therapy is a matter of life and death. While new person-centred and evidence-based methadone take-home guidelines and the decriminalization of small amounts of drug possession in B.C. are steps forward, the restrictions to travel Charlotte Munro faced nine years ago are still a reality to many across the country. The stakes could not be higher. An average of 20 people per day died of opioid-related overdoses in 2022. Safer supply programs that would provide people with unpoisoned drugs are difficult to access and although smoking is now involved in most overdose deaths in B.C., inhaled drugs are only permitted in a handful of safe consumption sites across the country. Ensuring freedom of movement for those who take methadone as well as improving access to this life-saving drug is critical.

An ocean away from Munro and McLeod, Gerlach still monitors drug policy in North America. Set to retire from his organization this year, Gerlach plans to continue updating the guide, now called Substitution: World Travel Guide, to include other opioid agonist therapy medications like suboxone. Poring over almost 200 sets of national import regulations and securing contact details of doctors and clinics is tedious work, but 26 years after the guide’s first publication, and in spite of limited funding, it’s helped thousands of people travel internationally. For Gerlach, it isn’t a question of whether someone taking methadone or other opioid agonist therapy medications should travel, but of how. “Travelling,” he says, “is a human right.”

Image courtesy of Dopamine Montréal.

A pride flag flaps defiantly in the wind above a welcoming front porch. A basket of free naloxone kits hangs on the front door. On the wall upstairs, a poster reads “Activities to avoid dying sad/to make you happy” and lists acupuncture, bowling, and picnics.

This is the home of Dopamine Montréal. Just like its namesake, Dopamine uptakes and releases a rush of essential resources to those who use illicit drugs. But the organization operates under the spectre of the law: Clients, many of whom are low-income or houseless, struggle to access employment, housing, and security as long as drug use is criminalized.

Montreal is considered a progressive urban centre, located in a province with relatively strong social services like universal daycare and subsidized college programs. When it comes to tackling the overdose crisis, though, the city is in traction. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, 541 people died from an opioid-related drug overdose in Quebec in 2022, an increase of nearly 20 percent from the year before. Emergency interventions in the city of Montreal were reportedly four times as frequent in 2022 as they were before the pandemic. These numbers paint an incomplete picture, however. CACTUS Montréal, another harm reduction organization that serves the Gay Village, recorded a 350 percent increase in overdose deaths in the city from 2019 to 2022—about one per day. According to their numbers, as of this January, the rate has jumped to two per day.

Harm reduction groups such as Dopamine and CACTUS are filling the gaps in community care. Established in 1994 amid the HIV/AIDS crisis, Dopamine serves the Hochelaga- Maisonneuve neighbourhood through a day centre located in a converted home and a supervised injection site (SIS) a few streets over that operates from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. After what CACTUS says was a decade-long bureaucratic process involving loads of paperwork and city approval, the SIS opened in 2017 alongside CACTUS Montréal’s.

Dopamine was founded on three core values: humanism, accessibility, and solidarity. The words reinforce that Dopamine is part of a political struggle against the conditions that create poverty and lead to people being incarcerated for drug-related crimes.

Executive director Martin Pagé knows how the cycle works; he’s seen it firsthand through his personal experience and through Dopamine’s staff, several of whom used or continue to use their services. “We are par et pour,” he says, both by and for the community. Criminalizing drugs pushes the market underground, where products are cut with riskier substances, such as often-deadly fentanyl or carfentanil, at variable concentrations. Once someone’s drug use is made legible through a criminal record, barriers to housing and employment get even taller. “It’s the exact opposite of what they should be doing,” Pagé says. Without safe, controlled injection sites that provide sterile tools, the risk of contracting HIV or Hepatitis C grows significantly.

At Dopamine, academic experience and lived experience are both valued and essential to fostering trust with clients. Intervention coordinator Yanick Paradis has worked at Dopamine for 18 years, with 12 years of street work experience. Many staff and casual employees are users themselves, Paradis explains. “We involve the people who visit the organization at different levels,” he says. “We will compensate people for their work, no matter what kind, whether it’s lawn mowing or a service offer…Ideally, our group is led by the community.”

As the organization has a history rooted in the AIDS epidemic, an integral part of their community mandate is to make health services accessible. Dopamine runs a drop-in medical clinic every Tuesday for their regular clients. Though it’s not a totally effective alternative to Quebec’s crumbling health-care infrastructure, the clinic focuses on preventive care and follow-ups for those who face barriers to access. “We reflected on how we could bring community health closer, and have health care that gives people positive experiences,” Pagé explains.

Pagé says the pandemic exacerbated every problem the community group sees. Clients are in increasingly precarious housing situations; the social safety net is eroding and organizations like theirs represent the last threads. And sex workers, immigrants, and trans people all find themselves at the intersection of socioeconomic instability and government negligence.

As paramedics administered naloxone a record high of 291 times in the city in 2022, according to Radio-Canada, drug testing has become one of the most crucial services Dopamine and CACTUS have to offer. Data gathered by CACTUS reports that Montreal’s Gay Village is at the epicentre of the overdose crisis in Quebec. But municipal and provincial governments are not treating it that way, though there’s precedent to do better. British Columbia was granted a federal exemption to decriminalize possession of illicit substances weighing less than 2.5 grams in January of this year, while the city of Toronto began the process of applying for the same exemption in 2021. Long-progressive Edmonton, often subject to Alberta’s conservative political lean despite its ability to operate separately, tabled a motion to decriminalize drugs within the city. Over 100 harm reduction groups across the country support the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition’s proposal to make all drugs legal for personal use nationwide— but fierce opposition from some premiers, municipal governments and lobbyist groups makes it unlikely to move forward.

In the summer of 2022, Mayor Valérie Plante told the CBC that she supported the idea of decriminalization in Montreal. Her administration has yet to apply for the same exemption.

The municipal government’s vague response illustrates just how easy it is to shirk responsibility for a manufactured crisis. “We are actually in a worse situation than we were [in] the HIV pandemic,” says Jean-François Mary, CACTUS’s executive director. “Because actually, in those days, there was a real partnership between public health and community organizations.” In the 1990s, a Quebec coalition representing 31 community organizations gave presentations to a federal committee to advocate for increased funding and support. Now, Mary says that public health officials are detached from the reality of intervention on the ground, hindering their approach to resource allocation.

“They talk, we die,” is the slogan CACTUS and Dopamine jointly rallied behind at a protest in early April. They are pushing for decriminalization, increased funding from Quebec’s public health division, and a non-prohibitive approach to the overdose crisis. “And Valérie Plante is talking,” says Mary. “But what are they doing? What have they done?”

CACTUS provided the municipal government with the paperwork to apply for the exemption, according to Mary. In an email to This, the city’s media relations office referred to a non-partisan motion adopted by city councillors in 2021, asserting that they were in favour of decriminalizing simple possession and calling on the city to apply for the exemption. But they did not confirm that an application was in the works. They did say the “[police] will continue to apply the law.”

People working on the ground know that prohibition won’t help those already pushed to the margins. “An important saying in harm reduction is if you can’t help, then at least try to do no harm,” Pagé says. Whether Montreal’s policymakers will heed this duty of care remains to be seen.