‘A WAKE-UP CALL’
Agencies across the city join forces to fight the ‘scourge’ of crystal meth
When Debbie Roberts was in her mid-30s, she woke up in a Saskatoon hospital bed blind, partially deaf and with a tube coming out of her head to alleviate the pressure in her swollen brain.
Two weeks earlier, she had overdosed on crystal methamphetamine after injecting herself with the contents of a needle she believed contained the less potent drug Ritalin.
Friends dropped her off at the hospital, then left to continue using drugs. Roberts almost died alone.
She had barely woken up, barely had time to register the loss of her eyesight, when she learned that her brother, who had also struggled with a drug addiction, had died by suicide.
“It was a wake-up call,” says Roberts. Now 41, she has been sober for seven years.
“I had my kids and then his kids to look after now, so I didn’t want them to be totally lost with no mother figure.”
Roberts slept for a week in hospital, then committed herself to quitting meth — on her own. At the time, treatment services in the city didn’t seem to know how to deal with a meth addict and she didn’t know who to speak with about getting off the drug, she said.
Roberts is just one of the growing number of people in Saskatoon affected by crystal meth, a cheap, highly addictive drug that can be snorted, smoked or injected. It causes an almost immediate high and can render its users aggressive and unpredictable.
Saskatoon Police Supt. Dave Haye says the drug first surfaced in Saskatoon in the early 1990s and “there’s been an ebb and flow to it ever since.”
The last few years appear to be a flow. City police logged 53 crystal meth trafficking and possession offences in 2013. In 2017, that number was 419, and police were on track to surpass that last year. From January to November 2018, police recorded 497 crystal meth-related offences — more than one a day.
“You look around North America and crystal meth is on the rise and who knows if it will drop off, who knows what will happen to it,” Haye said.
He noted “virtually all” of the crystal meth found in Saskatchewan comes from Alberta. Hardly any crystal meth lab busts have been made in the province and Haye, who has been part of the city police drugs unit since the early 2000s, can’t remember the service ever encountering a meth lab in the city. That makes it difficult for police to effectively suppress the drug.
“We’re at the end of a supply chain for crystal meth, or we’re close to the end,” Haye said.
“You need to interdict the meth at the source, and those source points aren’t in Saskatchewan so it’s hard for a municipal agency to influence that.”
Saskatoon’s Safe Community Action Alliance — a coalition of 29 agencies concerned with addressing barriers to safety and well-being in the city — announced last year that the crystal meth issue has “reached epidemic proportions” and that dealing with the problem is one of the alliance’s top priorities.
Mayor Charlie Clark has called the drug a “scourge.”
Many city agencies are now involved in figuring out what pathways exist for helping people who want to kick crystal meth addictions. The hope is that gaps in service will be identified and addressed to make it easier for people to get help.
Work is already underway. Tracy Muggli, director of mental health and addictions services for the Saskatchewan Health Authority, said the authority changed its approach to dealing with crystal meth addicts in its detox and treatment centres last year.
Before that, people admitted to the city’s brief and social detox unit with the “very debilitating addiction” were in brief detox for a night or two and then moved into social detox, where they spent 10 days to two weeks and attended group meetings.
That doesn’t work for meth addicts, Muggli said. Often when they come into detox, they have been awake for several days, and when they stop taking meth, the levels of the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine in their brain drop, causing many people to fall into a significant depression.
Debbie Roberts knows this all too well. In the summer of 2018, her daughter lost five friends to suicide while they were trying to recover from crystal meth addictions on their own.
“They just got lonely and depressed and they quit, quit on life,” Roberts said. “And the one, her sixyear-old son found her and that’s pretty sad. Just imagine what the kid is going to go through.”
Muggli encourages people who are struggling with addiction to turn to the health-care system for support so they don’t end up in those situations. She said changes made to protocol a year ago mean the health authority is more successful in helping people recover from crystal meth addictions.
Now when someone comes into the city’s brief and social detox centre for help with a meth addiction, they are allowed to recover in brief detox under the supervision of medical personnel for a longer period of time. Muggli said this is assessed on a case-by-case basis and that, in the past year, some people have spent “several days” in brief detox. When people move into social detox, they are allowed time to rest instead of immediately attending group meetings.
The health authority has also changed how it treats people at the Calder Centre, which offers in-patient programs for adults and youth recovering from addictions.
“We’ve frequently extended the length of stay for people who are in recovery from crystal meth because what we know is crystal meth has such an impact on the brain and the ability to generate dopamine. It takes a long time to regenerate dopamine in the brain, so we know that we have to be able to provide a longer recovery for people in that situation, so that’s what we’ve been trying to do,” Muggli said.
Challenges remain. One of the biggest is that wait times for treatment can be significant; for example, sometimes it can take four to six weeks to get a bed at the Calder Centre.
“Crystal meth — really any substance — you want to be able to, as much as possible, take advantage of that moment when people are expressing that they want to make change, and it’s hard sometimes to respond in such an immediate way with the extended or the residential treatment option,” Muggli said.
The health authority is looking at different booking strategies to alleviate these wait-lists, for example by double-booking some beds because it’s common for people not to show up for treatment. That move has already allowed the health authority to increase its capacity to help people, Muggli said.
Shirley Isbister, president of the Central Urban Metis Federation Inc. (CUMFI) recalls a time two years ago when she saw one person high on crystal meth. Now she sees it daily.
CUMFI is a non-profit organization that operates affordable housing, emergency housing, transitional housing for people overcoming addictions and programs for families who want to be reconnected with children taken from their care. Its offices on Avenue M North in Pleasant Hill are open during the day for people to come in, warm up, have a snack and do laundry.
Isbister, who has been with CUMFI for 20 years, said she’s seen crystal meth usage in the community increase “drastically.”
“It’s affected the whole city of Saskatoon. It doesn’t matter what race or skin colour you have, it’s affecting everyone. In these last few months it seems to have gotten even much worse.”
Isbister said it’s common for people to come into the CUMFI offices acting “erratically.” Sometimes they’re talking to no one. Sometimes they strip off their clothes.
Most worrying for Isbister is the increasing number of children taken into care because their parents are using meth.
“When you’re high on crystal meth, the care of your family isn’t your top priority,” she says. “Lots of children come in with neglect. We have lots of children who come in with lice and have been in bedbug and cock roached homes, have not been clothed and fed properly.”
Isbister says it’s impossible for children to be safely returned home if their parents are using meth and that these parents need more support to get off the drugs and get their kids back.
She’s in the midst of putting together a proposal to turn CUMFI’S Mcleod House, which provides transitional housing for men in addictions recovery, into a home to support moms whose children are in care because of their meth addictions.
Isbister imagines the home would house up to 10 women who have already gone through detox. Health-care professionals, including addictions staff, would be on the premises at all times, and visits with the women’s children would be arranged.
Isbister said she doesn’t yet know how much it would cost to open the house, or when it would open.
“For me, it needs to be open a year ago,” she said. “I’m hoping it’s in the next budget and I don’t think it would take us that long to turn it around because we’re already utilizing (the house) for addictions.”
All the work being done in the city to support people struggling with meth addiction is encouraging, Debbie Roberts says.
No one knows better than her what a “terrible” drug it is.
Her addiction “traumatized” her children, she said.
Four of her six kids were using meth at one point, and helping them quit has been hard.
She has seen friends and family members’ lives destroyed by the drug. She’s lost five aunts and uncles from drug-related issues. Her husband committed suicide because he couldn’t stand to see his children using the drug.
“I have friends who went paralyzed. They use walkers now because of the crystal meth and it’s sad because we’re still young to be living like that,” Roberts said.
She has joined the Safe Community Action Alliance and is working with representatives of the 29 agencies to be part of the solution to the city’s crystal meth problem.
She started a peer support group for people who are trying to beat meth addiction and is helping the Safe Community Action Alliance identify gaps in services for people like her. She would have loved more support when she tried to recover from her addiction.
She’s impressed that people are asking for her insight, despite the fact that she has no formal education, but she’s realized that involving people with “lived experience” is key, she said.
“Unless you worked the street and lived on the street and used the drug, you’re not going to know how it is ... You can’t learn everything from a book.”
Although she’s seen the problems with meth getting worse of late, Roberts hasn’t lost all hope. The work being done by groups in the city give her optimism that the problem will get better — and soon, she said.
“We’re hoping and we’re working on it. There’s a lot of people working on it.”