Leah’s Story - Early Life
Leah was born in Lethbridge, Alberta and raised on the Blood Reserve of Kainaiwa community. From a very young age, drugs and alcohol were part of her world. Her mother and father both struggled with addiction, and substances were present in daily life. Despite these challenges, her family loved and cared for each other deeply. For Leah, substance use was simply part of her reality, something she saw every day and eventually participated in herself.
Leah didn’t grow up connected to her culture and traditions. “My dad could speak Blackfoot, but the rest of us weren’t fluent in it, although my baby sister got to go to Blackfoot immersion. It was very hard for me to understand and connect with my culture. I grew up knowing I was Indigenous, and I was proud of it, but it always felt like something was missing. There’s still something missing to this day. Even though I’ve been able to find recovery and have recently started connecting with elders and smudging.”
Back then, the family lived in poverty and grew up missing a lot of essentials. It didn’t take long for Leah to start joining in. She was 9 when she first smoked a cigarette and then she started smoking marijuana behind her parents’ back. When they found out, they allowed her to smoke because they didn’t want her doing things behind their back.
“The last thing my mom wanted was having secrets between us.”
Leah believes that when they allowed her to smoke pot it gave her permission to push her boundaries, to see how far she could go. And sure enough, she started to drink with her friends and cousins.
Leah was just 13 the first time she drank. She became so intoxicated that her friends had to carry her, and word quickly got back to her parents. On the reserve, where the townsite offered little privacy, it was nearly impossible to hide—someone had likely spotted her from yards away.
And so, Leah was caught and brought home. But she started drinking heavily with her friends and cousins because that’s pretty much all they knew, and soon she was running away with her friends. It got to the point where Leah’s mom was always out looking for her and bringing her home.
“Then one day, my mom just said, ‘Leah, I love you so much and I want you to be OK, that’s why I come looking for you. I don’t want anything to happen to you. It’s not safe out there.’”
Leah’s mom started to allow her to drink at home with two rules: one, she was not allowed to leave the house, and two, Leah could only invite her friends and cousins – no boys. Leah is sure that having been given the freedom to drink at home contributed to her alcoholism and she took it too far.
Leah’s life began to fall apart. She was failing at school and had become rebellious. She didn’t care. She felt she had better things to do. “I didn’t drop out of school right away, but by the time I was 16, I was drinking all the time and was placed into an alternative school for ‘bad kids.’”
Leah went to school there for a little while, but she continued to drink and still did not care about much else than drinking. One night she got really drunk and got into a fist fight with another girl. She ended up with a black eye, and when she went to school the next morning, because she had taken off from her mom the previous night, the school was convinced her mom had hit her and wanted to call the police and Children Services.
“I kept telling them my mom didn’t put her hands on me, that I had been in a fight, but they didn’t believe me. So, I just got up and took off from the school.”
Children Services ended up at Leah’s house, and Leah was also getting in trouble with the police and being charged for this and that. When the police came, she had to see her probation officer with her mom.
“I think I was 13 or 14 when I was first charged with the theft of a car. When we went to see my probation officer, she said she was worried about me and wanted me to go to a youth treatment centre. But my mom fought against it. She said, ‘Nobody’s taking my daughter anywhere, I will take her home and treat her there.’ My mom was always like that because she was 13 when she had me, so she has always been very protective of me.”
“There was nothing they could do without my mom’s permission. So, I didn’t go to treatment. I ended up going back home.” Then Leah dropped out of school; she just didn’t bother going back. Not long after, she started declining.
“I didn’t know what was wrong with me. My legs were giving out. It started with my ankles, and it was so painful. Eventually I couldn’t walk, and I just stood on the uneven back roads on my reserve, crying.”
Leah’s mom was worried and felt helpless, so Leah started seeing a doctor, but behind the scenes, her mom was trying to help by giving her acetaminophen with codeine because the extra-strength Tylenols were not working.
“I started to like the feeling of the pills, so I lied to my mom, saying I needed more.”
But the pills began giving Leah stomach aches and made her feel nauseous, so her mom gave her Gravol. By the time Leah was 16, she had a full-blown opiate addiction, and it had a tighter hold on her than she was willing to admit. Drinking did not interest her much anymore.
During this time, Leah learned that she had Rheumatoid Arthritis and began getting treated for it. Her rheumatologist told her that she was one of her youngest cases at 16 and that she had a very severe case. When Leah was 18, she was prescribed Tylenol twos and worked up to Tylenol threes, then Percocet, which she liked so much she started looking for it on the streets.
“Then I got into oxycodone and morphine and basically, anything I could get my hands on, I would even travel to get them. I had my own car, and I was working, but I was only working to supply my habit.”
Leah’s dad had encouraged her to get a job. He motivated her to get a resume done and to go talk to the people at the place she was applying. Leah got the job, but most of the money was going to her opiate addiction.
“I was a functioning addict.”
There was a moment when Leah decided that she wanted to try to build herself a life. “I was working so I thought I could handle going back to school to do some upgrading. When September came I enrolled in school, and I was doing really well for a few months.”
Then December came, and Leah was pulled over by the police while driving. Her car was towed, and she ended up in jail. Leah lost her student housing and felt deeply ashamed. She had been trying so hard, and now everything was falling apart – again.
“I was totally beat down by that, and I just felt defeated.
In the next post, we’ll follow Leah into her deeper struggles with fentanyl, the dangerous street life, and the heartbreaks that led her to the brink of death.