Adopted by a local family at 3 days old and rejected by them 15 years later, Emma spent some hard years in a government group home and homeless before landing an apartment in Rock Bay just over a year ago, where she lives with her two cats. Government care is an “addiction breeder,” says Emma, who wasn’t a drug user when she went into the group home but was by the time she got out after being placed with 4 deeply troubled young people using stimulants and fentanyl. “In the time I was there, police came four times with that big tank thing they have, and we’d all be evacuated in the middle of the night,” she recalls. Emma spent 7 months sleeping most nights in a Gordon Head park just to get away from the chaos. Now 19, Emma gets SAJE benefits as a former child in care, but that means she doesn’t qualify for publicly funded treatment that appears to be available only if she’s on income assistance. She’s currently trying to manage her drug use by substituting a 50-ml bottle of Fireball “to take the edge off” when she’s struggling. “I’m figuring out all that stuff you need to live as a productive adult, but what I can’t learn on my own is how to deal with life after being addicted,” says Emma, who hopes to become a mechanical engineer. “I want to get the coping mechanisms to manage this.”