He’s pioneering a novel recovery program for methamphetamine use disorder
Age: 34
There was a time before he started medical school when Jeremy Weleff thought he might forgo it and work instead in the Ontario antique shop where he spent his summers during college. His mother, a major influence who encouraged his love of stories, had just died, and he deferred starting medical school. During that year, he worked full time in the antiques business, where his interest in art and history came alive.
Pursuing psychiatry appealed to him, because it involves “blending art and science, and storytelling in the science,” he says. “In psychiatry, it’s all story.”
Weleff splits his time between the University of Alberta’s faculty of medicine and the 106 Street clinic’s Opioid Dependency Program, finding the two worlds influence each other. When he encounters novel psychoactive compounds in the clinic, he takes them to the university to study, so the research can be applied to the people using these drugs.
Weleff’s program is the only one in Alberta treating stimulant use disorder by using an evidence-based method called contingency management, rewarding participants for testing negative for stimulants like meth. It’s a treatment he first encountered as a fellow at Yale School of Medicine, where he specialized in addiction training. There, contingency management is gaining momentum. In Canada, he says, it’s lagging behind.
But Weleff is far from doom and gloom when it comes to the realities of meth addiction in the city’s core. He says that if you care about downtown, you care about the treatment of stimulant use disorder.
“I’m sometimes naively optimistic,” he says. “I see a lot of successes and small wins, and my days are quite upbeat. Every patient who’s showing up is there because they’re ready to make some sort of change.”
This article appears in the November-December 2026 issue of Edify
