How the opioid crisis is ravaging Canada’s prisons

WINNIPEG — The vomiting and shaking didn’t surprise him.
But the withdrawal cravings were something else. So intense Ian Desjarlais had to cling to the halfway house couch to fight the urge to comb the floor for mislaid crystals of meth.
In the darkest hours and minutes, the Indigenous 39-year-old conjured up the faces of men he had known behind bars — men in the grip of addiction — their faces a vivid reminder of what he was fighting against.
Some of those men were dead. Others returned to prison so fast, after breaking parole by using drugs, that their short-lived freedom seemed just a brief intermission in a life-sentence of despair.
During those gruelling first days of recovery, Ian drank water in hopeful sips. He shivered, frightened and alone. He pleaded for sleep. But every moment he endured brought him one step closer to breaking free of the drugs that claim so many in Canada’s federal prisons.
It was the hardest thing he’s ever done.
“It was excruciating,” Ian said, shaking his head.
“It was a battle for my body and my mind.”
His fight ended in triumph. He made it through the battle of prison addiction and the battle of withdrawal and emerged into a lasting recovery.
But his feat is, tragically, far too rare.
As Canada grapples with a severe national drug crisis, experts say the country’s prisons are overwhelmed and underprepared. Convicts are sent into a miserable loop where prison fuels their addictions instead of stamping them out, making it nearly impossible for them to reintegrate into society and almost certain to reoffend.
Everyone pays the price.
“Canadian prisons are worsening the country’s addiction crisis,” said Kim Beaudin, vice-chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, who advocates for Indigenous offenders across the country.
Federal prisons have been unable to control the use of increasingly toxic illicit drugs, and they don’t have the skilled staff or resources to treat those who need it.
But Ian’s journey proves that Canada’s prison drug crisis can be overcome. He faced roadblocks and relapses. But with the support of the woman he loves, he was able to shake his addictions and devote his life to helping others do the same. In complex, disheartening circumstances, he offers hope.
University of Alberta research estimates that up to 90 per cent of Canadian prison inmates have substance abuse issues. Many offenders have addictions that led them to commit the crimes for which they are incarcerated. Others get hooked on illicit drugs in prison.
Ian fell into both categories. He was drinking alcohol when he committed the crimes in his lengthy criminal record. He also spiralled into devastating hard-drug dependence while in prison.
Slim and modest in stature, Ian is visually striking with his hair artfully shaved and his skin a showcase of expressive tattoos.
The father of three smoked marijuana from a young age but swore he would never inject drugs. He knew how dangerously addictive they are and the higher risk of death they pose.
But in prison, injectable morphine, cocaine and crystal meth use was rampant, he said. In the grip of boredom and misery, his resistance crumbled.
“When I first injected, it was the best feeling ever,” he said, smiling at just remembering the high.
“It felt like a hug from God.”
Today, in recovery, Ian has a bright future. He splits his life between mandatory stays at a Winnipeg halfway house and a happy home with his partner, Lea-Ann Backlin, and their one-year-old daughter, Galaxy. He has a promising career helping other people heal.
But Ian cannot stop puzzling over his life: how addiction first wounded, then hardened him and finally opened his heart. What he has learned, he is convinced, can help others right now. In the future, he hopes he can help change the system to break the vicious cycle of incarceration and addiction.
Ian grew up surrounded by the suffering that alcohol and drugs first obscure, but multiply in their wake.
“There were a lot of traumas and abuse in our family,” he said in one of a series of in-person and video interviews with the Star over the past eight months.
The trauma began four months before he was born when his 21-year-old father, a Pasqua First Nation survivor of residential schools, was killed in a motorcycle accident. Soon after, his 18-year-old Métis mother fell into the claws of addiction and abandoned him.
Ian and his older brother, Conridge, were taken in by their mother’s parents who were already taking care of their three teenagers. They were residents of Regina’s North Central neighbourhood, labelled “Canada’s Worst” by a national magazine. It was the site of Canada’s highest rate of violent crime.
Among the shacks and back alleys that sheltered drug-shooting galleries, underage sex workers and violent gang members, the brothers learned to survive by pretending to be strong and avoiding their grandfather’s iron fists.
They ached for their mother.
Ian remembers seeing her, when he was about eight years old, lying on the floor crying as her partner abused her.
In another memory, she is smiling in a bright yellow dress. But her face is puffy and sports a black eye.
“I couldn’t understand why my mom would (desert) us,” he said with despair.
“Was I not good enough?”
Ian was nine years old when he started drinking. By 12, he was fully dependent on alcohol and marijuana.
Alcohol drowned his pain but engulfed him in violence and vice.
Close to 50 per cent of violent crimes committed by male offenders in Canada’s prison system are a result of substance abuse, according to a Correctional Services Canada study. Alcohol alone is responsible for 20 per cent of violent crimes — crimes that offenders almost surely would not have committed if not under the influence, researchers said.
Ian’s criminal record reflects these wretched statistics.
On the day the world watched in horror as New York City’s twin towers collapsed, Ian’s life crumbled into its own catastrophe.
He got drunk, punched a wall and was sent to a youth correctional facility.
There, shock over the 9/11 terrors fused with his feelings of hopelessness and fuelled resentment rather than reform.
“I was a small guy … and I was always scared of going to prison,” Ian said.
“I had to learn how to be sneakier, how to do drugs without getting caught, how to beat the system.”
His prospects dimmed.
Once he was released, Ian’s grandparents wouldn’t take him back. They were overwhelmed caring for their own addicted children and couldn’t manage their grandsons. A daughter committed suicide, adding heartbreak to the already ravaged family.
Distraught and determined to dodge the grim group homes that trapped his brother, Conridge, Ian went on the run, couch-surfing and surviving on the streets.
He tried staying with his mother, but she didn’t have the strength to support a troubled teen. He lived briefly with his father’s family but that broke down too.
“I was pulled and pushed, not believing or understanding which way I could turn or run,” Ian said.
He was 15 years old.
Looking back, Ian can see alcohol abuse started to turn him into someone he didn’t want to be. He never wanted to hurt people. But he was not able to control his emotions when he drank. His suffering and trauma lay buried deep until alcohol shattered his defences and unleashed his agony in a destructive outpouring that harmed everyone.
As he got older, Ian’s drinking intensified. He fought urges to commit suicide. He clung to Conridge on the streets. And he racked up a long criminal record, that started shortly after his 18th birthday.
He was just 21 when he was first arrested for aggravated assault — a crime he would repeat many times, one he now deeply regrets.
“I am accountable for my actions, what I’ve done in my past, and I take full responsibility for those actions,” he said, his eyes staring soulfully at the ground.
“Nobody deserves to be treated violently in any way by any person.”
Eventually a domestic assault charge sent Ian to Saskatchewan Penitentiary. 
According to local media, the provincial court hearing the case in 2016, highlighted Ian’s likability, intelligence and skills, but also his addictions.
Judge Patrick Reis classified Ian as a long-term offender and underscored his need for “extensive and intensive (addiction) treatment.”
But in prison, Ian got the opposite. He learned how easily hard drugs could erase old traumas.
“I was doing morphine. I was doing hydromorphone. I was injecting it. I was doing crystal meth. I was injecting that. I was smoking fentanyl.”
“I was doing it every day.”
From his first injection, Ian became consumed by hunting his next hit. He bartered cleaning cells, selling beaded artwork and etching mirrors in the prison. He pawned his television, stereo and clothes.
The spiral didn’t stop at material objects; he began selling his food in pursuit of the high’s brief relief.
“I became a slave,” he recalled, as baby Galaxy napped in the family’s cosy Winnipeg home.
In time, Ian became so desperate he told a friend he would be killed if he couldn’t provide drugs to the prison’s gangs. It was not far off the mark.
Each visit, the friend smuggled 16 morphine pills, packaged in balloons, inside a body cavity. Ian would swallow the balloons, then throw them up so he could cook and inject the potent toxin he craved.
“It was scary, but I didn’t care about death. I cared about drugs.”’
Over his years in Saskatchewan Penitentiary, an archaic facility on the site of a former residential school, Ian followed the steps of a treatment program for his alcohol and soft drug abuse prescribed by the court.
But he didn’t get help for his escalating hard drug addictions — that left him in a state of paranoia, even after he became infected with hepatitis B from sharing needles.
Prison offered no hope for salvation, he said remembering those dark moments.
He was utterly alone.
Hazel Miron, a deputy director with Canada’s Office of the Correctional Investigator, said there is an urgent need to improve prison addiction treatment programs.
Federal rehabilitation programs are not adequate to help drug users overcome deep emotional trauma, Miron said. They are also not sufficiently tailored to address the anguish of Indigenous offenders, who account for 32 per cent of those in custody, despite representing just five per cent of Canada’s population.
“If it’s an Indigenous person, (healing) should come from an Indigenous perspective,” she said.
But Indigenous staff are scarce, accounting for just 10 per cent of total federal prison staff, and less in senior or therapeutic roles, according to the Office of the Correctional Investigator.
Instead of rehabilitating, prisons are inadvertently pushing vulnerable people deeper into drug abuse, Miron said.
“Many inmates are leaving prison worse off than before.”
Ian’s ordeal confirms Miron’s analysis. He didn’t get therapy for his trauma, and prison staff either didn’t see or ignored the depth of his addictions.
“I don’t think that prison helped me in any rehabilitative manner,” Ian said.
“If it wasn’t for prison, I would not have been as advanced a drug abuser.”
A federal harm reduction strategy, implemented across the prison system, to address the opioid epidemic, is working to help offenders like Ian access rehabilitation programs and avoid needle sharing, said Dr. Nader Sharifi, medical director of Correctional Health Services.
In June 2024, Correctional Services Canada reported treating 3,420 inmates — one in six people in its care — with opioid agonist treatments that use medications to replace the opioid on which a person is dependent. Needle exchange programs and overdose prevention services are also in place.
But as ever more inmates use ever more toxic drugs, the challenge increases significantly, Sharifi said.
More inmates are using methamphetamines, including crystal meth, according to Roger Martin a manager of public health and epidemiology at Correctional Services Canada. Meth, like that which ensnared Ian, is a powerful, highly addictive stimulant that doesn’t respond to medical drug treatment.
Harm reduction programs are fraught with problems, according to Star interviews. On one hand, the allure of accessing drugs may encourage inmates to enrol; on the other, the requirement to disclose substance use poses risks to struggling addicts. Although the programs themselves are not punitive, drug use outside of the programs is still punished.
It’s a circular conundrum. Inmates don’t trust prison staff because some guards are inconsistent in reporting illicit substances and others profit from drug sales themselves, Ian said.
“A lot of the (prison) employees govern that, supply that, turn a blind eye to that.”
Arrests of federal prison staff for drug trafficking are common, and there are very few checks on staff, according to Sen. Kim Pate, a national advocate for the prison population.
“From what I hear from staff and prisoners alike, there is a huge incentive for staff to engage in all kinds of things that are not appropriate, from exchanging sex for drugs or other things to the drug trade … because of the amount of money that can be made off prisoners.”
But Chris McLauchlan, a senior project officer for preventative security and intelligence at Correctional Services Canada, said in a video interview that, statistically, staff drug trafficking is not a major area of concern. His department has been focusing on new approaches to detect and seize contraband that enters prisons through correspondence, visitors and criminal deliveries.
Drones and “throwovers” — someone tossing illicit substances over the penitentiary wall — “represent a real threat to the institution just by virtue of the amount of drugs that are involved,” McLauchlan said.
Somehow between his daily cravings for illicit drugs and his struggle to stay clear of the gang enforcers, who stabbed and beat inmates with self-made spears and steel shanks, Ian fell in love.
Lea-Ann had overcome her own battle with substance abuse and reached out to support Ian in prison at a friend’s request.
“He made me laugh,” Lea-Ann said. “And he was smart.”
“We started talking every day.”
The 39-year-old mother of two, didn’t expect to fall in love, she said, her feet curled up on the couch.
But she was charmed by Ian’s warmth and moved by the plans he had for changing his life.
“I had never been loved before,” Ian said.
“After all my destructive relationships, the alcohol, the drugs, the funerals … I finally found somebody that I could connect with … that could support me mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally.”
But the night before Ian’s parole, prison officials hit the couple with an unexpected twist. Instead of releasing him near his home in Saskatchewan, they were transporting him to a halfway house almost 600 kilometres away, in Winnipeg.
If Lea-Ann’s devotion was ever in doubt, Ian’s release day would seal it. She packed a few belongings, rented a car and trailed the prison van for six hours to settle near Ian in his new home.
She hugged him at the guard shack as he left Saskatchewan Penitentiary. It was her first time meeting him in person.
From that day on, Lea-Ann commuted from Winnipeg to her job as a heavy-machine operator in British Columbia three weeks a month and devoted her time off to Ian.
Even so, Ian’s recovery was still fraught with challenges.
In his halfway house, on one of Winnipeg’s most dangerous corners, Ian worried that Lea-Ann “was out of his league” and that he could not become “the person he wanted with his whole heart” to be.
Trembling in the agony of withdrawal on his second day of freedom, he rushed to a harm reduction centre for help. But the clinic was at capacity, and staff told him to return another day.
He didn’t make it back the next day nor the day after that.
He was lucky to survive.
“Those few weeks post-release from custody are the highest risk period for overdose,” according to medical director Sharifi.
Ian relapsed and confessed to his parole officer, hoping for help finding treatment. The officer issued a warrant for his arrest.
Many offenders are not equipped to be released, said Beaudin of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples. Offenders succumb to drug addiction in prison, only to be released with the ultimatum: abstain or return to jail.
A staggering 70 per cent of inmates released with drug addictions end up back behind bars within three years, according to recent research.
“They made it very difficult for Ian,” Beaudin said.
Ian was sent to Stony Mountain, a penitentiary built to house rebels from Manitoba’s Métis resistance, known as one of Canada’s most dangerous for its high rate of suicides, homicides and violence.
Placed in 23-and-a half-hour segregation, he trembled alone in withdrawal. He longed for his mother and worried about his brother who had his own struggles. He pined for Lea-Ann and the future he had lost. He was terrified.
“We are criminalizing the people who have been failed by every other system,” said Pate, emphasizing that Indigenous people with a history of trauma and abuse are particularly penalized.
Most judges believe that prisons will heal the mental health issues and addictions that sent offenders to court in the first place, she said. But the reality is far from it.
“One of the things we have said in the Senate is that people with mental health issues should not be in prison. And I would say the same for people with addiction issues.”
When Ian was released after three months at Stony Mountain, Lea-Ann was heavily pregnant with Galaxy.
This time his fear of returning to “stare at a six by nine concrete ceiling every night,” was so strong it gave him the strength to hang onto the halfway house couch.
Today, Ian has left drugs behind and built a future by studying and qualifying as a community services and addiction worker. He helps other people avoid the dual tragedy of being punished instead of healed, only to be ensnared by even more potent drugs behind bars.
“I don’t want to see people turned away. I don’t want to see people going to jail (for addictions),” he said standing outside his halfway house.
Ian is also saving lives. One young Indigenous drug user, suicidal after being sexually trafficked and expelled from dozens of group homes, found solace in Ian’s empathy and understanding. They speak almost every day.
“He can give her guidance because he’s been through it himself,” Lea-Ann said. “He has been through the struggles and come out of it on top.”
But while Ian was fortunate to break free from the cycle of prison addiction, countless others remain trapped.
“There are so many people who wouldn’t be incarcerated if they had help with their addictions,” he said.
Tragically, his brother Conridge is one of them.
In July, he was arrested for drug and weapons offences and jammed into one of the crowded units of Saskatchewan Penitentiary.
From his panicked phone calls begging for money, Ian is certain that Conridge is caught in the destructive loop that he so narrowly escaped: Prison is fuelling his addiction instead of stamping it out, making it nearly impossible for him to rehabilitate and almost certain to reoffend.
As Ian advocates for change, Conridge serves as a reminder of the urgent need to reform a prison system overwhelmed by the nation’s drug crisis.
Ian is emotional when he reflects on his redemption and Conridge’s awaiting battle.
He yearns for Canadians to recognize Conridge as someone in need of relief, not reprimand, treatment, not retribution. He longs for his brother to receive trauma care, emotional support and addictions treatment inside prison. Upon release, he will fight for Conridge to get the enduring community support he will need to live a life free from alcohol and drugs.
“If I can do this, brother, you gotta want to do this,” Ian said staring straight ahead, conjuring the sibling he worries for.
“I love you, brother. I want more than anything to see you smile again.”