A mother’s warning
Jenny Churchill watched as her son Jordan Wakelam went from promising hockey player to in-demand oil worker to opioid addict. After his death from a fentanyl overdose in January, she wants to prevent other parents from feeling her pain.
When Jenny Churchill thinks about her son, he’s a four-year-old who had a pet frog named Hoppy. He’s a young carpentry apprentice who learned from his dad. He’s a determined hockey player who represented Team Canada during a bantam tournament in Prague.
Jordan Wakelam was a compassionate man who championed the underdog and gave gift cards to homeless people. He was a sentimental guy who loved the movie The Notebook. He was a hard worker who had two oil-rig bosses fighting over him to join their crew.
These are some of the memories Churchill shared at her son’s funeral on Feb. 8 in Regina.
The 30-year-old died of a suspected fentanyl overdose on Jan. 27, leaving his mother, father Wayne Wakelam, sister Nicole and three-year-old son Noah to grieve.
As a growing crisis in opioid addiction and deaths grip this country, Churchill shared her son’s story in the hope it might help others and bring about change.
“As a family, it’s not our intent to sit in front of a camera and media at a time when we’re grieving, but with what happened with our son, we need to send the messages to the public of what they need to be aware of,” said Churchill. “No one’s talking about it in Regina.”
Jordan’s opioid addiction began with a workplace injury and a doctor’s prescription.
He was prescribed morphine after hurting his back at work. When the drugs he came to depend on ran out, he sought a replacement.
Jordan was already prone to drug addiction, which started with marijuana in Grade 12, then cocaine.
Four years ago, he turned to fentanyl.
“It was before fentanyl was even talked about — I didn’t even know how to spell it; I didn’t know what it was,” said Churchill.
“When he first started using opioids, he was actually buying fentanyl patches from a guy who had cancer, so this was prescription fentanyl, prescription patches,” she added.
“He started to search out the illicit drugs, and he was buying from someone that was being prescribed that patch.”
Then he began injecting.
“Most everybody who’s been to the hospital and had some sort of surgery or any kind of major pain have had opioids,” said Churchill. “Grandma doesn’t come out after hip replacement and become an addict. It doesn’t hook everybody, but for some it does.”
According to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, opioids can have a 5.5-percent risk of addiction. According to Portico, a national network of mental health and addictions resources, eight to 12 per cent of pain patients are addicted to opioids.
During the past four years, said Churchill, Jordan was in and out of short-term detox four times. He attended one 28-day treatment program.
According to the Saskatchewan Ministry of Health, there was an average wait of 48 hours to enter a short-term “social detox” program in 2016-17.
For the 28-day program, the average wait was four to six weeks.
“Individuals who are currently awaiting admission to in-patient facilities are able, and encouraged, to access outpatient and community-based alcohol and drug treatment services in the interim,” the ministry said in a prepared statement.
For Churchill, though, having such a long wait is equivalent to seeking treatment for a broken leg and a doctor saying, “come back in two months to put a cast on.”
“You have to wait months in Saskatchewan to get into that treatment,” said Churchill, “and it’s very common for addicts to relapse during the period between detox and treatment, because it can be months.”
“Then it’s a process all over again,” Wayne Wakelam, Jordan’s father, added.
“It’s like a bit of a hamster wheel and he would have so much hope when he came out of detox, and as a family we did too,” said Churchill.
In October, Jordan asked his family for help: He wanted to get clean. He spent 10 days in detox in Regina, then set to organizing his life.
He stayed clean for three months, meeting an addictions counsellor every week and attending Ready For Change recovery support meetings every Wednesday to prepare for in-patient treatment.
Then he relapsed a week before he died, which his mom says was triggered by ingesting codeine in cough syrup.
After helping a friend move a couch, he and Jordan did a shot of “lean” or “sizzurp” — cough syrup mixed with 7Up and a Jolly Rancher.
On Jan. 27, first responders found Jordan on a friend’s bathroom floor. In the room, there was a lighter, a straw, tin foil — and two suspected fentanyl pills.
Churchill and Wakelam said the Regina Police Service (RPS) has had no communication with their families, which led them to believe the police are not investigating.
However, RPS spokeswoman Elizabeth Popowich said police are assisting in the ongoing coroner’s investigation and that the RPS has an open file on Jordan’s death. “Based on the information gathered so far, we do not believe this is a criminal matter,” Popowich wrote in an email.
Police did not respond to the scene of Jordan’s death, according to Jordan’s friend, who called 911 at 8:34 p.m. when she realized he was unconscious.
They never came to the house at any point after, either, the friend told Churchill.
Popowich would not confirm this: “We cannot discuss an ongoing investigation and we will not discuss a case in which the Office of the Chief Coroner is the lead agency,” she wrote in an email.
The RPS did not accommodate an interview request. Churchill doesn’t understand why police wouldn’t attend the scene, since Jordan’s death was sudden and involved an illegal drug, and because not attending would be contrary to the RPS policy manual. A “non-suspicious death” would require police assisting the coroner in “securing the scene, collecting evidence, taking statements, (and) photographing the scene,” among other responsibilities. In non-suspicious deaths, a patrol member will investigate in most cases, the policy manual further states.
Emergency medical technicians and firefighters spent a half-hour trying to revive Jordan, according to their official report. There is no mention of a police response. In the first two months of 2018, according to a freedom of information request Churchill filed with the RPS, police did not respond to any accidental-overdose calls for service. In 2015 to 2018, RPS responded to a total 21 accidentaloverdose calls for service.
The total number of 911 calls related to overdose was unavailable, and Popowich could not provide the number of fentanyl-related calls received by RPS.
When someone calls 911, according to the RPS access and privacy officer, the “appropriate agency” is dispatched, whether police, ambulance or fire. “As such, there are times when police are not dispatched to 911 calls ultimately regarding drug overdoses.”
The RPS “does not have a dispatch code specific to drug overdoses,” so overdose-related calls are labelled with a variety of dispatch codes, including “sudden death,” “drugs,” or “sick and injured person.” “The numbers we provided only reflect the 911 calls where we could confirm, after the fact, that police were dispatched to a drug overdose,” the access and privacy officer told Churchill. The lack of police response is concerning to Churchill not only as it relates to her son, but as it relates to the public. As the police recognize, fentanyl is dangerous. “Fentanyl is transdermal and can be absorbed through the skin, posing a safety concern to police officers and members of the public,” the policy manual states. “Even if minimal risk is suspected,” police are required to “wear two sets of latex or nitrile gloves when handling unknown powdered substances, and; members must wear an N95 (face) mask at all times around the unknown powder.”
Further, “unknown powders should not be handled alone. As best practice, two or more employees should oversee the seizure of unknown powdered substances. At least one employee should have naloxone intranasal spray readily available to deploy in the event of contamination.”
While the drugs at the scene of Jordan’s death were in pill form, he had vomited, creating a mess that Churchill believes might have been hazardous for his friend to clean up.
“She could have been exposed and it is absorbed through the skin,” said Churchill.
According to data from the Office of the Chief Coroner, there were 627 deaths investigated due to “drug toxicity” between Jan. 1, 2010, and June 30, 2017, from drugs including codeine, fentanyl, hydromorphone, methadone, heroin, morphine and oxycodone. Of those, 458 were accidental, 128 were ruled suicides and 41 were undetermined.
In 2016, according to a national report by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), Saskatchewan’s opioid-related death rate was 6.2 per 100,000 people. By comparison, 10.7 per 100,000 people died due to motor vehicle collisions in Saskatchewan in 2015.
A study by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) published in September 2017 found that Regina and Saskatoon ranked higher than Vancouver and Toronto for opioid poisoning hospitalization in 2016-17: Regina’s rate was 28.3 per 100,000 people hospitalized for opioid use, and Saskatoon’s was 26.7 per 100,000 people.
By comparison, Vancouver’s rate was 20.5 and Toronto’s was 7.9 per 100,000 people. Two years ago, British Columbia declared a public health emergency related to opioid deaths.
In 2016, there were 42,000 opioid-related overdose deaths in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 2,861 in Canada, according to PHAC.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Donald Trump have recognized the opioid “crisis.”
Saskatchewan NDP health critic Danielle Chartier brought it up last week in the legislature, as a “clearly emerging (issue) here in Saskatchewan. The fentanyl crisis, that there is not even a mention of this in our budget, is of huge concern.” Her comments were echoed a week later in the legislature by Opposition leader Ryan Meili, a physician.
Health Minister Jim Reiter noted the $11 million in new funding for mental health initiatives, and said there is overlap in mental health and addictions.
He also said the province is expanding its naloxone program. (Naloxone, also known as Narcan, is a medication to block the effects of an opioid overdose. It is available in injection or nasal spray kits.)
Within one week in March, six people overdosed in Saskatoon and three died; another two people in Maidstone overdosed and died.
Saskatoon police were swift to publish the suspected drug dealer’s name and phone number, and declared an amnesty for people to bring their drugs in without fear of prosecution.
Prince Albert and Weyburn police followed suit.
Regina police did not.
“I don’t know the uptake of us just throwing open the front doors and saying, ‘Come on in and turn over your drugs to us, no questions asked,’” Regina police Chief Evan Bray said at the time. “Right now really it just comes down to good communication, education and the ongoing investigations that we’ve got going at any given time.”
Churchill believes the RPS missed an opportunity to raise awareness and educate.
“I look at the gun amnesty program that’s going on right now where the Regina Police Service is offering anybody to bring in their guns for a month. Well do you think the bad guys are going to bring their guns in?” she said.
Awareness is important to Churchill and Wakelam, which is why they ’re speaking out and sharing their story.
They see addiction as a disease, like mental illness. And as with mental illness, they hope growing the conversation can help alleviate stigma and garner more supports.
“People will say, ‘Well they’re culling the herd, let them die. They made the choice so they deserve to die. They ’re a drain on society,’” said Churchill, reiterating comments she has read online and heard in person about her son and other people with addictions issues.
“The disdain is immense and it’s fairly intense. And I always say that addicts get judgment and anybody who is suffering from another disease gets sympathy. Our son wasn’t a bad person, he was a sick person. He suffered from a disease.”
“It’s a demon, right?” said Wakelam.
“People wouldn’t say those things to someone who had just lost a daughter to suicide,” Churchill, his ex-wife, added, “’culling the herd and she was just a loser,’ because thank goodness ... mental illness became something that everybody talked about.
“We lost our son, my mom lost her grandson, our daughter lost her brother, our grandchildren lost their uncle. But most importantly, our son had a son — he lost his father. And those negative and hurtful comments are really because of a lack of understanding, of awareness.”
Jordan’s parents would like to see campaigns to address addiction, similar to the drinking and driving campaigns conducted by SGI and Saskatchewan police services.
Education and prevention are major factors in fighting opioid addiction, Churchill and Wakelam agree.
“Once they’re hooked, it’s very, very difficult for them to get off,” said Churchill.
Becoming addicted can happen accidentally, with opioids like Percocet, OxyContin, Vicodin and others commonplace in people’s medicine cabinets.
On the public education front, the Saskatchewan government has developed a fentanyl infographic and fact sheet, which is available at saskatchewan.ca.
On Feb. 6, after Jordan’s death, his family placed an impassioned obituary in the Leader-Post that captured who their son was and of his “courageous 14-year battle with the disease of addiction.
“As a family, we loved Jordan through his journey with addiction and firmly believe that the opposite of addiction is not just sobriety; it is connection,” it read.
“If you love an addict, hug them and tell them, before it is too late.”
People will say, ‘Well they’re culling the herd, let them die. They made the choice so they deserve to die. They’re a drain on society’. The disdain is immense and it’s fairly intense. And I always say that addicts get judgment and anybody who is suffering from another disease gets sympathy. Our son wasn’t a bad person, he was a sick person. He suffered from a disease. Jenny Churchill, Jordan Wakelam’s mother