Getting off fentanyl
‘It takes all your cares and puts them aside’
OTTAWA – J.P. LeBlanc describes being high on fentanyl as his “Calgon bath,” borrowing the bath powder’s popular advertising slogan from the 1970s.
“’Calgon, take me away,’” he says. “That’s what I used to do. I would get it and it was like the heat would start at your toes and just run through you like a big warm wave.
“And then you don’t think of anything. It takes all your cares and puts them aside for a time — an hour or two, tops.”
And then he would go into withdrawal — dopesick — which LeBlanc, 47, describes as your worst flu times 10. People with opioid use disorder often say withdrawal makes them feel like they’re dying.
“At the beginning you get high,” says LeBlanc. “But then you get to a point where you get a tolerance level and you have to maintain that, and if you don’t maintain it you get sick, and then you use to get better.
“So first it’s to get high, then it’s to go about your day, and then you have to do it. It becomes a leash or a crutch, a ball and chain.”
LeBlanc tried his first illicit substance — cocaine — a week after his 13th birthday. “And ever since then it’s been the street life.”
A fentanyl high only lasts an hour or two, so an addiction to it creates an endless cycle often called “the hustle,” in which people who use fentanyl and other drugs spend their waking hours either using drugs or doing whatever they have to — stealing, selling drugs, prostitution — to get more.
LeBlanc’s use of roughly a gram of fentanyl per day meant he needed about $260 each day just to pay for his drugs. He describes the hustle as “really chaotic.”
“It didn’t make me who I was, but it defined what I did. That wasn’t me. It’s not me and it’s not what I aspire to do, but it’s stuff I had to do to not be sick and not feel like I was dying.”
Another person with lived fentanyl experience, Mario Toscano, 53, says: “You hit, and then you’ve got to work on getting your next hit, and so on.
“It’s more than a full-time job.”
Toscano grew up not far from Ottawa Inner City Health’s supervised consumption trailer on Murray Street. He was a straight-A student and athlete in the mid 1980s when he first tried hashish. “I was against drugs, but all my friends were smoking. So curiosity got me and one thing led to another.”
For both Toscano and LeBlanc, their paths led to fentanyl.
“I was employed and doing well and housed,” says LeBlanc, “and then I started doing the fentanyl and the purple stuff … and things just got out of control. I wasn’t cleaning my house, I wasn’t even going home — I was staying out on the street here. I wasn’t showering, I wasn’t eating properly, I got some infections.”
Both men were also frequently overdosing, Toscano almost every day. An overdose, says LeBlanc — who has had “many, many” — is not something he experiences; it’s just something that happens. “I had no idea, and when I came through, I didn’t even know I did. I was like, ‘What happened?’
“A lot of people see a big white light at the end of a tunnel. Well, I didn’t see no white light. It was just blackness.”
And when he came out of it, he felt even worse because the naloxone, a drug often administered to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, sent him into withdrawal. “And then you have to use again, so you can feel better again.”