CHRISTMAS FUND
Escaping from fentanyl
Tessa Johnston was 18 when she believed that she had found the thing in her life that had been missing.
Unmoored from the obligations and social pressures of high school, she felt like she didn’t have to pretend to be someone else.
So she snorted a hit of fentanyl, and finally felt complete, ensnared by euphoria that lures scores of young men and women into the clutches of addiction, often killing them.
“I puked right away and swore I’d never do it again. And then I just couldn’t stop.”
Once a promising hip hop, ballet and jazz dancer who performed on a cruise ship as a preteen, Johnston had lived the party life for years before that first hit of fentanyl. But the hit started a three-year spiral that took the daughter of a working Vancouver family into drug houses carpeted with used needles and dirty mattresses. She stole from family and friends. Any morals she once clung to had fallen away.
Before she got help in Calgary, she was adrift. Getting drugs was her first thought in the morning, and her last at night.
“Anything that I ever aspired to do, they were just gone,” she said. “My whole life, suddenly, was just based off of fentanyl.”
Desperate attempts by her parents and grandparents to draw her back into the fold and get her help only served to drive her further away. She lied to counsellors that she was OK. She relapsed after detox.
Johnston was hooked years before health officials began sounding the alarm that fentanyl was behind an escalating death toll and which triggered an unprecedented public health crisis in Alberta and B.C.
Since her first hit in 2012, thousands of people like Johnston have died taking the highly toxic pill that can stop your heart in seconds. She survived. But as the years wore on, the emotional weight of all the lying and stealing eventually became too heavy to carry.
“I saw the hurt on my parents’ faces,” Johnston said. “I saw me not being able to be an older sibling, and me not being able to show up for everybody. I didn’t like not showering for a week.”
In trouble and in debt, she left Vancouver to live with her aunt in Calgary about three years ago. But the change of scenery wasn’t enough. She was drawn back into the party life of drugs and started using again, arousing suspicion in her family.
After taking drug tests at home, she admitted she was hooked and agreed to sign herself into treatment. Shortly after her 22nd birthday, she enrolled in the Alberta Adolescent Recovery Centre, which “saved my life.”
The agency is one of 12 recipients of the 2017 Calgary Herald Christmas Fund.
At the centre, she found the thing that had been missing from her life of addiction — a community in recovery. Most of the group’s non-administrative staff are graduates of the program. They’ve been there. They know the struggle.
“They looked happy and OK with themselves,” Johnston said. “Everybody struggles, and I agree with that a lot. But they just seemed OK with themselves and I wanted that because I hadn’t felt OK with myself in so many years.”
The centre takes in young people, aged 12 to 21, who are often in crisis at that point. They must stay off drugs and alcohol — based on the view that abstinence is the only risk-free option for young, developing minds — while staff take them through a recovery program modelled after Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12 steps.
At night, they stay in the homes of other client families further along in the program — the homes are accredited and parents are trained in things like suicide awareness and first aid — as the young people build and restore relationships in their path to getting well.
As they advance through the program, they mentor newer clients, sharing their experiences, their challenges and their leaps forward in recovery.
Cost for treatment depends on what families can afford. Most don’t pay what it actually costs to run the place, which means the centre recoups less than 20 per cent of its revenues from fees, the rest coming from fundraising.
“Without (donations), AARC wouldn’t survive,” said Darryl Power, who graduated from the program in 2004 and now works as a development officer at the centre with a focus on fundraising.
“Without it, the majority of families that access our program would have nowhere to go for support. A lot of them have tapped out on their resources that are available, and are basically at a crossroads.”
Proceeds from the 2017 Calgary Herald Christmas Fund will allow AARC to move more kids off the wait-list and into treatment, and help offset the fees that many cannot afford.
Nearly two years sober, Johnston is in university and working at the centre as a peer counsellor. She doesn’t know what the future will bring, but, for now, the 24-year-old feels she’s right where she needs to be. It’s where she can watch the transformation of boys and girls who first walk through the doors “hating everything about themselves and their lives and their parents.” When they graduate, “they’re sitting there with their parents, laughing and smiling, and sharing their story and just being OK; it’s a really cool sight to see.”
The Calgary Herald Christmas Fund supports 12 local agencies addressing social issues of poverty, hunger, homelessness, isolation, education and violence. All proceeds raised from donations go to these organizations.