Looking down at her baby boy for the first time, Melissa Deschamps decided she had to stop doing drugs.

It was 2006. She was 21, lying in a room at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre. And despite the fact that by the time she gave birth, she was so addicted to prescription painkillers she was taking 12 Percocet tablets a day, she remembers hardly being concerned about whether her son would be born healthy.

That’s what opioids do. They make you not care. But for Deschamps, that changed the day she met her baby.

“When I (saw) him, he was so perfect,” she said. “That was kind of my light to change.”

Her son, who the Star agreed not to name in order to protect his privacy, avoided serious symptoms of withdrawal, and Deschamps set herself on a rocky path to recovery. But in the nine years since she resolved to get clean for her child, a staggering number of Thunder Bay mothers have found themselves in her position.

According to the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, about 30 per cent of babies birthed at the hospital are affected by an opioid-based dependency during pregnancy. A hospital spokesperson said the figures were arrived at through prenatal screening by the women’s physicians, as well as questions asked of mothers when they arrive at the hospital to give birth.

“We have an enormous addiction problem going on in Thunder Bay,” said Dr. Cheryl Everall, the medical director of the Joseph Esquega Health Centre, which launched a substance-abuse-in-pregnancy program in 2014.

Abuse of prescription opioids has been on the rise across Ontario for more than two decades. According to the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, the rate of opioid-related deaths in the province more than tripled between 1991 and 2010.

The problem is acute in Thunder Bay and the surrounding region. Five years ago, a report from the city’s drug strategy noted that prescription drug abuse had made its needle exchange program one of the busiest per capita in the province. Everall said the program distributes 55,000 needles a month, in a city with a metropolitan population of only 120,000.

In 2009, chiefs of Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which represents 49 aboriginal communities across northern Ontario, declared a state of emergency around what they described as an “epidemic” of prescription drug abuse.

Chief Peter Collins of the Fort William First Nation said he doesn’t know what’s caused the “rampant” opioid abuse in his community. But he said part of what makes aboriginal people susceptible to addiction is lingering trauma from the residential school system.

He also cited a lack of prospects for aboriginal people who migrate from the north. “They get here into Thunder Bay and there’s no real job opportunities or housing, and then you get consumed” by mental health issues and addiction, he said. He called on the federal and provincial governments to fund long-term supports that will keep people from relapsing after they go through treatment.

According to Juanita Lawson, co-chair of the Thunder Bay Drug Strategy’s maternal substance use and child working group, medical facilities in northern communities are limited, and mothers from remote regions often come to the city to seek treatment.

But Everall and other doctors are clear that the drug abuse affects both aboriginal and non-aboriginal populations in Thunder Bay.

Babies born to opioid-dependent mothers can experience tremors and other signs of withdrawal known as neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), according to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. In severe cases, newborns have to be treated with methadone and spend weeks in hospital. If left untreated, NAS can be fatal.

Quitting opioids in midpregnancy can be risky for mothers and babies, so the recommended treatment is for moms to take methadone until the baby is born. It isn’t always available in northern Ontario and so alternative drugs must be used.

There are treatment programs specifically designed for addicted mothers in Thunder Bay, including one at run out of the city’s counselling centre. Everall’s clinic, which treats about 10 mothers at a time, connects women to an addiction medicine physician and social worker, and also assigns them a primary care doctor if they don’t already have one.

Everall said that while the program has been successful at ensuring babies born to addicted moms are healthy, not enough is being done to stem the tide of opioid use. “Clearly if more and more methadone clinics keep popping up in the city, we’re missing something. We’re missing an opportunity for early intervention, we’re missing an opportunity for prevention.”

Compounding the problem is that getting pregnant women to seek treatment can be a challenge. Dr. Naana Jumah, a clinician researcher at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre, said that likely no one in society is more looked down upon than a pregnant woman who is addicted to drugs.

“So if they’re pregnant and they’re seen going to a methadone clinic, there can be huge stigma associated with that,” she said. Some mothers are especially reluctant to reveal their addiction to health workers because they fear their baby will be taken from them by child protection services.

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Stigma may also play a role in the kind of treatment addicted moms receive, which can sometimes focus on the child at the expense of the mom, according to Jumah’s research. That needs to change, she said, because while babies born dependent on opioids can grow up to be healthy, they’re far less likely to if their mother continues to abuse drugs.

“Which is why the really important thing is to make sure that we treat the mom appropriately, so that they can treat their children well,” she said.

Deschamps, a First Nations woman born in Thunder Bay, is proof of the importance of supporting addicted mothers long after birth. Although she resolved to get clean when her son was born, she said that four months later she was struggling as a single mom and was on the verge of giving in. She recalled that she felt suicidal and, worrying her son would be left alone if she killed herself, she gave him up to foster care.

She said she fell back into drug use, which escalated to the point where she was injecting herself with morphine and cocaine. Sometimes, she sold her body to support her habit. “I did all that kind of stuff to get my fix,” she said.

It took watching her own mother nearly die of pneumonia to finally pull her out of her downward spiral. Deschamps spent part of her childhood in foster care, and said that almost losing her mom revived feelings of abandonment. She didn’t want to put her own son through that.

“I was on the road to dying if I continued using drugs. And I didn’t care about myself. I didn’t care if I died, but . . . I needed to step up and be a mother.”

Deschamps got back into a methadone program she had entered during pregnancy, took parenting classes and stayed clean. Nearly two and a half years after she gave up her baby, she was well enough to take him back.

This month, Deschamps said she’s marking five years since she stopped taking methadone and she hasn’t used opioids since. Now 30, she’s going to school at Confederation College, and wants to work with people suffering from mental health and addiction problems.

On behalf of the Thunder Bay Drug Awareness Committee, she’s spoken publicly about her struggles with opioid use, and said she hopes her story will lessen the stigma around addicted mothers.

“There’s a reason for people to become addicted, and usually it’s trauma from their past,” she said.

“I had a lot of trauma in my childhood . . . I’ve just made some realizations about what’s important to me in life, and it’s my son, my education, helping people and learning to love myself. ”

Despite the difficult circumstances under which he was born, Deschamps said her son is what led to her recovery.

“He’s just my world. He knows that. I tell him that.”