During the peak boom period of 2006 to 2008, when oil reached a record barrel price of $147, a company that provides employee assistance to Canadian oil and gas workers saw access for alcohol addiction treatment rise fivefold, while Wood Buffalo crisis workers reported a “significant increase in suicides, predominantly by men in the oil patch,” according to Angela Angel’s research at the University of Alberta. Angel, who has studied mobile workers in the Alberta oil sands and North Dakota’s Bakken oil region, found that as many as half of the workers engaged in illicit drug use — either to cope with stress, or to “enhance” work performance. In Hinton — a central Alberta oil, coal, and forestry boomtown — the amount of child and family social services interventions related to meth use jumped from 4% in 2000 to 38% in 2005. “[Drug traffickers] marketed it to men and women who needed energy, who needed to work long hours, to shift workers, who could feel invincible and work great amounts of hours and make great amounts of money,” Angel said. A common maxim she heard was “The oil comes first.”

Angel worked a few summers in camps when she was young, but the inspiration for her research was her father, an electrician who was usually away, and her older brother, Jason Miskuski, a long-haul trucker serving the oil and gas industry. Unbeknownst to her, while she researched substance abuse in Hinton, Miskuski had also developed a crack addiction, which she believes was ubiquitous among his colleagues. As a small company contractor, he didn’t have access to the employee family assistance treatment programs of larger corporations.

Miskuski struggled in school and fell into bad crowds as a teenager, but in his twenties, following the birth of his first son, he started turning his life around. The mid-2000s oil boom proved extra lucrative for his trucking career, and he took great pride in providing for his spouse and two boys in Edmonton. Angel remembers him as “the Alberta boy,” an old soul who had few friends under 40 and who brought along Lynyrd Skynyrd CDs on every highway. He was a goofy soul, too, who’d force his cats to “dance” for company. But by the time the boom was in full swing, so was his addiction, and he broke up with the mother of his boys. He started retreating and isolating himself. While he was away for work, Miskuski's mom would leave Post-it notes around his home with crisis numbers to call, but to the best of Angel’s knowledge he never did. When he was home, Angel would check on him. Sometimes he didn’t answer; when he did, he was despondent and hollow. One of the last times she saw him, on Father’s Day 2007, she photographed him with his sons. Miskuski is the only one not smiling in the picture. Angel was left wondering, Where’s Jason?

Miskuski was in a pit of despair. A month later, aged 35, he killed himself. During his funeral service, Angel noticed funeral home staff crying alongside her. “I talked to them after, and they said, ‘This is the seventh young man that we’ve held a funeral service for in the past two weeks.'”