A FAMILY’S AGONY
Opioids taking toll on families & communities in Saskatchewan
This week in the Regina Leader-post you’ll find Hooked: Saskatchewan’s Opioid Addiction, a three-part series produced in collaboration with the University of Regina’s School of Journalism and students in the Intermediate Broadcast and Investigative Journalism courses led by faculty members Patricia W. Elliott, Trevor Grant and Robin Lawless. Students did months of research, writing, photography, videography, online multimedia elements and logo design to produce this unflinching look at the use of opioids in Saskatchewan and the effects on the province. Today, Marie Agioritis and her son, Kayle Best, share the story of Kelly Best’s 2015 fentanyl overdose death, talking candidly about their pain at the loss of a son and brother.
In her head, Marie Agioritis had already planned her son’s funeral.
She knew her boy Kayle Best was an opioid addict.
She’d seen him through the lost jobs, the trashed condo, the arrests and the abusive behaviour.
His addiction started innocently. Kayle suffered debilitating migraines, up to four or five a month since the age of two. A few months before he graduated from Grade 12, a schoolmate offered him opioids to relieve the pain. Kayle took the pills, followed by more pills.
He found a job and moved to Saskatoon, but he knew he was hooked. Soon his job was gone, along with his car.
When the phone call came on Jan. 3, 2015, Marie was almost expecting it.
What she wasn’t expecting was the news from her ex-husband that their other son, Kelly, had died from an overdose. Kelly, 19, had taken a pill that turned out to be laced with fentanyl.
“It’s the most painful place that you will ever, ever feel,” says Agioritis.
For Kayle, the pain was compounded by guilt. The fatal pill came from a person in Kayle’s drug circle, and Kayle was with his brother the night before his death.
“I completely blamed myself for (Kelly’s) death,” says Kayle.
Kelly Best was a good kid, one who laughed constantly and was loved by everyone who knew him. Kayle says Kelly was nice to everyone and gave everyone a chance. If he liked a person, he was going to be their friend, no matter what other people thought.
Kelly was the polar opposite of his brother in personality. Agioritis describes Kelly as gentle but not shy, happy-go-lucky and fun. Despite their differences, they had a tight bond, Kayle teasing Kelly relentlessly, and Kelly always looking up to Kayle.
Kelly also loved to follow in his brother’s footsteps. He loved telling people who his brother was, and would even introduce himself as “Kayle Best’s little brother.” He would want everything Kayle had, and do everything Kayle did — which also meant getting into drugs.
“Anything I did, he wanted to do,” says Kayle, now a recovering addict. “I played lacrosse, he played lacrosse. I snowboarded, he snowboarded.
“So, when I started doing drugs, he started doing drugs.”
Kelly wasn’t a hard-core user, Kayle remembers, but in the months leading up to his death, he was starting to slip, “acting a little funny ... and wasn’t taking care of himself much.”
That January night three years ago, Kayle advised his younger brother to take just half the pill, and stayed with him to make sure things were OK.
He had seen Kelly really messed up in the past, “so nodded-out I had to keep tapping him, waking him up.” But this time Kelly seemed normal. He spent the time looking for a set of lost car keys.
“It didn’t really affect him that much. So I was like, ‘Whatever, he only had half a pill.’ I didn’t think anything of it.”
Kayle left Kelly in his apartment and headed out for the night.
The next morning, Kelly took the other half of the pill. Manufactured on the street, the fentanyl wasn’t evenly dispersed through the whole pill. The half Kelly took in the morning contained most of the drug, and was too much for his body to handle.
Kelly’s death is among the first of more than 100 drug toxicity deaths registered in Saskatchewan in 2015.
The problem, of course, isn’t confined to this province’s borders. Nationally, there were 3,989 opioid-related deaths in 2017, up from 2,861 in 2016, an increase of 39 per cent. Opioid poisonings accounted for 16 hospitalizations daily in Canada in 2017, a 53-percent increase from 10 years earlier, according to Statistics Canada.
Dawn Wilson’s son is among those hospitalization statistics, but he has survived each emergency. Still, she wonders about his long-term prognosis.
After one overdose, Wilson says, “The doctor would pop in every once in a while. The nurse would come take his vitals. They don’t really talk to you about anything. Once he’s better and stable they release him and that’s it. There’s no real education about what went on or why it happened.”
She can name other families she knows with addicted children, or who have overdosed on opioids. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through” says Wilson.
And she continues to go through it. Her son is into his 11th year of addiction and continues to use.
Families are hurting, and so are whole communities.
Kindersley is home to slightly more than 4,500 people, but even in a small city, opioids and overdoses are not uncommon. Between 2013 and 2017, there were six opioid-related deaths.
“The deaths kind of rocked the community,” says Emil Eyford, a counsellor at Kindersley’s West Central Crisis Centre. “(The community) associate(s) that more as big-city problems.”
“We’re not surprised at all when somebody comes through the door and they say that they are either struggling with an addiction or they know somebody who is addicted to opioids,” says Michelle Weber, the centre’s executive director.
Tracey Watt, an EMT who has worked in the region for 13 years, says overdose calls come in waves. “We can go a few months without getting any calls whatsoever related to opioids,” says Watt. “Then we can have a week where we will see as many as three or four.”
This spring, one such wave hit the province.
On March 16, the Maidstone RCMP reported two suspected drug overdoses. That same week, Weyburn and Kamsack RCMP detachments also issued warnings of the same lethal drugs circulating in that area. Prince Albert police followed suit.
The hardest hit was Saskatoon. In the early morning of March 10, a Saturday, Saskatoon police responded to three drug overdose calls in a three-hour span. Six people were hospitalized. Three of them died.
The following Monday, in an unprecedented move, Saskatoon police issued a public safety warning that cocaine purchased from a dealer using the name Lil Joe or Joe Bro may be laced with fentanyl. Police even went so far as to provide the public the dealer’s cellphone number in hopes users might recognize it and do away with what they’d purchased.
“This is a moment of crisis. It’s not just an urban issue,” NDP Opposition Leader Ryan Meili said earlier this year.
So far, the provincial response has been largely directed toward providing naloxone kits, a lifesaving antidote for overdoses.
Some 600 kits have been distributed through the Saskatchewan Health Authority, and are available free of charge through various addictions centres and health clinics.
In April, the Ministry of Health announced that friends and families of users who take a training program will be able to pick up free kits at pharmacies. However, expanded pharmacy access was restricted to 15 communities. Except for self-declared addicts and patients covered by the First Nations Health Benefits Program, Saskatchewan remains one of just three provinces where pharmacies regularly charge people for naloxone, averaging $50 a kit.
“We believe that even one opioidrelated death is too many,” Health Minister Jim Reiter said in a news release. “Making Take Home Naloxone kits available free of charge to anyone who may need them has the potential to save lives.”
Any government reaction to the opioid crisis will come too little, too late for Agioritis.
The death of her son, and other kids, at first filled her with anger.
“I was angry at a community of people that were doing nothing. I was angry at the school systems for not spending more time talking about these kinds of drugs to our kids,” she says. “I was angry at the pharmaceutical companies, for selling us snake oil and for the sake of piling it deeper into their own pockets and killing almost an entire generation of kids. I was angry at the politicians for not wanting to speak about it.
“That’s when the advocacy side of me woke up and said, ‘Gotta
quit asking other people to make a change.’ ”
Today, Agioritis is an advocate against the opioid crisis in memory of her late son. She offers personal support to families and speaks out publicly against opioids.
“That’s why, as mothers, we protect our children so much,” said Agioritis. “No mother wants to deal with that pain.”
I was angry at a community of people that were doing nothing. I was angry at the school systems for not spending more time talking about these kinds of drugs to our kids.