Inquest sought in teen’s overdose death
A Victoria law firm is asking for a coroner’s inquest into the illicit opioid overdose death of Oak Bay teen Elliot Eurchuk to prevent “dangerous practices and circumstances” from robbing another young life.
Victoria lawyer Michael Scherr, a managing partner at Pearlman Lindholm Law Corp., asked chief coroner Lisa Lapointe in a letter Friday to order that inquest.
“The community needs to be satisfied that the death of its youth will not be allowed to silently continue without a searching and fulsome inquiry into the underlying causes,” Scherr wrote.
Scherr is representing parents Rachel Staples and Brock Eurchuk, who found their 16-year-old son Elliot dead from an illicit drug overdose on April 20, 2018, in the bedroom of his Oak Bay home.
The couple blames the province’s Infants Act, which they say usurped their power as parents to stop their son being prescribed opioids for pre- and post-surgical pain. They say that the act then empowered doctors to bar them from what could have been life-saving information about the type and extent of their son’s subsequent illicit drug use.
The B.C. Infants Act says anyone under the age of 19 can consent to their own medical care if a health-care provider agrees with the treatment and assesses the patient as competent to understand the risks and benefits. There is no set age when a child is considered capable to give consent. It’s based on maturity, as determined by the health-care providers.
“We believe that any parent can recognize that an addicted youth engaging in high-risk behaviour is not capable of making wise decisions,” Scherr wrote.
Brock Eurchuk says the family does not want to lay blame but rather wants to find answers. “No death should be invisible, certainly not the death of a young person with every promise in life,” reads the letter.
Elliot’s death received publicity but the “circumstances around the health supports [or lack thereof], school situations, institutional engagement with the family, legislative and health institutional policies and practices have yet to be investigated,” Scherr argued. “The systemic removal of parental authority to make decisions for a drug-addicted youth have not been brought to the public’s attention or addressed by the institutions involved.”
Scherr maintains at this point the coroner’s office is best suited to preside over an investigation aimed at making recommendations to social workers, healthcare practitioners, school administrators, peace officers and parents.
Elliot’s parents have said their son endured pain from injuries and from surgeries. Through four surgeries and a blood infection, they argue, Elliot developed a medically induced dependency on opiates. After his third surgery, Elliot was prescribed a 10-day, 60-tablet course of the pain killer Dilauded.
Staples said she voiced her concern and her preference that her son not be given addictive opiates but was sidetracked with her own battle with breast cancer.
Elliot exercised his ability under the Infants Act to direct heath providers to withhold medical information and test results from his parents.
The parents found out the extent of their son’s drug use only on Feb. 10, 2018, when he was found unresponsive and not breathing and had to be revived with drugoverdose-reversing Naloxone. He was in hospital for a blood infection at the time.
Elliot apparently acquired illegal drugs while out of the hospital on a pass for a few hours. A doctor at the bedside got around the Infants Act rules by speaking so that Elliot’s parents could overhear as she talked to the teen about his drug use and why doctors had to revive him with Naloxone.
Even then, Scherr said, two days later the hospital wanted to discharge Elliot without a plan to treat his drug dependency.
Seeing indications that Elliot was using drugs, his parents, frightened and illequipped to manage his behaviour, “took the heartbreaking step of admitting Elliot to the hospital with police intervention under section 28 of the Mental Health Act” on Feb. 16, 2018, Scherr said.
Elliot’s stay in the pediatric mental health unit was traumatizing, his parents say. Cut off drugs from physicians, he returned to using street drugs.
On April 20, Elliot overdosed “after taking street drugs, likely to help him sleep,” Scherr said.
Before he died, the school system dealt with Elliot by expelling him rather than facilitating treatment, said his parents. They added that the health care and law enforcement systems were equally unhelpful.
“He had supportive and financially welloff parents,” Scherr wrote. “Yet the systems were ill equipped to provide any measured and thorough response.
“While VIHA has investigated the matter, the results of that investigation are not being made public. This is insufficient.”