The lonely struggles of middle-class addicts

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/08/2015 (3745 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I was driving to Headingley Correctional Centre the other night to facilitate an inmate 12 step meeting when an opiate addict I know texted me to say he’s done banging fentanyl and needs help.

For an addict, that moment of clarity is as fleeting as it is critical. I knew Fred couldn’t wait the two hours until I was back in Winnipeg, so I phoned Bill and Bobbie, new members of my 12 step group, to fetch Fred at his home in St. Vital and take him to the emergency ward at Health Sciences Centre.

When I got to HSC, struggling as usual to find parking due to the crowd of cruiser cars as officers inside babysit drunk, stoned or otherwise mentally ill patients/suspects, I found Fred, haggard and sweaty, his face as red as OC 60 (an oxycontin 60 mg pill), slouched in the waiting room beside Bill, a River Heights businessman, and Bobbie, a university student who hasn’t drank, used nor cut herself since she got out of the psychealth centre a few weeks ago and started attending our group’s daily meetings.

Four hours later, Fred was finally seen by a doctor, who promptly sent him home, explaining the province’s only chemical withdrawal unit doesn’t take opiate addicts. “GB2’s (the addictions unit) only for ethanol. That’s the protocol,” he said, suggesting Fred might phone Addictions Foundation of Manitoba in the morning.

While Fred went home to jab another needle in his arm, or grit his teeth and sweat out the physical and psychological pain of withdrawal, the doctor was right: As deadly and widespread as opiate addiction is, Manitoba has no treatment option.

Addictions Foundation Manitoba has a 28-day residential program for men after they’ve stopped using their drug of choice. (Until Manitoba Health finishes renovations, women wait in queue for one of 15 beds at River House.)

Fred might fare better if he lived on the streets instead of the suburbs. The inner-city’s the turf of non-profit, harm-reduction programs such as Street Connections, Main Street Project and Salvation Army. Fred could get a new needle to continue using, a place to clean up for a few days, or end up at one of the methadone walk-in clinics that are popping up like so many Starbucks.

Better still, Fred could get arrested. He might end up in Winding River, the “therapeutic community” at Headingley jail. But even with Manitoba Justice picking up the service slack from the Health Department, his chances are slim; getting into the treatment unit is decided after sentencing, and Manitoba’s on-again, off-again drug treatment court isn’t on again. In any event, like at AFM, in jail there’s no medically supervised treatment, and therapy is largely limited to volunteer visits by members of local 12 step groups.

The philosophy of 12 step groups, which have grown exponentially and globally since Alcoholics Anonymous was formed about 80 years ago, is that addiction is both a physical and mental condition and a daily reprieve from problems come when the addict recovers spiritually — through the 12 steps. What we call “the program” is what my family doctor calls “abstinence-based, peer-supportive community therapy”.

Winnipeg has about 60 groups, mostly AA with a dash of NA (narcotics) and CA (cocaine), though it’s rare now to find an addict loyal to one brand of booze or just one drug.

These days, fentanyl’s making headlines, having taken top spot from “oxys” — the notorious prescription painkiller oxycodone. In Canada, oxycodone bumped cocaine as the most fatal drug by 2010. Since then, oxy overdoses have declined with changes in formulation and regulation, yet opiod-related deaths continue to rise as the prescribing — and thus availability on the street — of other opiods such as fentanyl and hydromorphone, pushes the numbers. In Ontario, where one in every eight deaths of people age 25 to 34 is blamed on opiod overdose, deaths due to oxycodone had dropped by 30 per cent by the end of 2013, but the number of fatal overdoses involving opioids overall jumped 24 per cent between 2010 and 2013 — to 577 from 467.

Grim statistics don’t sell solutions. And perhaps the province has too much on its hands to worry about adults who, by law and by the 12 steps, should take responsibility for themselves. The same day Fred was being refused care, the NDP government was patting itself on the back for announcing “holistic wrap-around programming” in the form of six treatment beds for at-risk youth. Adult, employed and law-abiding but not so privileged to afford out-of-province treatment, Fred has fallen through middle-class cracks in the medical and social safety nets.

 

John A.’s identity is being withheld to respect the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous.