A mother’s letter to Ford

Sandi Tantardini admires and respects Doug Ford.

That was made clear in the letter she wrote to the Progressive Conservative leader and handed to Christine Elliott to personally deliver.

“More than anything else in the world, I want to vote for you. But I am afraid.”

Tantardini lost her 28-yearold son Scott to an overdose of fentanyl. That was 20 months ago.

Since then, sad but wiser, Tantardini has advocated for safe injection sites. She cofounded a support group called NAMES — Niagara Area Moms Ending Stigma. “Unfortunately, we have 130 members with more being added all the time. I hate adding people. Because I understand all too well what that means.”

Ford, with his adamant opposition to injection sites, does not understand. Tantardini’s heartbreaking letter, she hopes, will open the eyes of the man who might become Ontario’s next premier.

She tells the story better than I could. So I will get out of the way and, for the most part, use her words from the letter:

“I found out Scott was using drugs in September or so of 2012. I was blindsided. You have to understand, Scott was an amazing son. He was kind, loving and sweet. He was a hard-working young man who started his own business and purchased his first home by the age of 23. He had an incredible young lady that he was engaged to. Life was pretty sweet for him. Or so we thought.”

What the family had not grasped, until later in Scott’s life, is that his confident, outgoing nature masked what they now believe were significant mental-health issues, including intense anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. But Scott’s addiction to opioids arose from prescriptions he was given following extraction of his wisdom teeth.

“Scott found opioids and he found God. He once told me that when he started using (and abusing) opioids, it became the first time he felt calm. It can take less than a week for a person to become addicted to opioids. If you add those who are predisposed to it, it is almost immediate.”

Theirs had been a happy family, Scott the middle child.

“Still, there is that underlying thing going on that we didn’t see and it led us to here and the reason I am writing you. I need you to understand what it’s like to have a substance abuse issue and to be the parent of someone with one. I believe with all my heart that having been through these issues with your own beloved brother has most likely (given) you insight you don’t even recognize.”

Late mayor Rob Ford, who admitted he’d smoked crack cocaine, was an alcoholic, and sought treatment as an inpatient at a rehab facility.

Scott also, with his family’s support, entered rehab. He was clean for 21 months before relapsing. And that is an alltoo-common pattern. Addiction is a compulsion and a siren song. Many, most, will relapse and try again and again.

“Scott shared with me during that entire 21 months he was experiencing ‘user dreams.’ These are dreams in which the person actually believes they are using drugs in their sleep, experience the high, and wake up thinking they have relapsed. So they are literally fighting triggers each day when awake and being tormented in their sleep … it wears you down.”

Tantardini had recently heard Doug Ford speak in St. Catharines. The premier-hopeful has repeatedly stated his government would fund more hospital beds, more mental-health facilities, make addiction treatment easier to access. But that is not the point. Experts in the field unanimously support safe, hygienic inject sites to cope with the front-line crisis. From that initial contact, users are more likely to seek direction for the frequent associated issues of affordable housing, alienation and health care.

“Harm reduction is not about treatment. It never has been. And it never will be. It is about keeping people alive long enough to get the help they need. But you can’t force it on them. I have spent time at Moss Park” — where a pop-up injection site opened last summer in a neighbourhood ravaged by homelessness and addiction — “I implore you to visit with an open mind and an open heart. When I hear people say that safe injection sites are just about getting high and getting drugs, I know they have not been there or spoken with those people who are working or volunteering their time every single day.”

Scott attended half a dozen treatment centres over the years, all abstinence-based. With hindsight and hardearned knowledge, Tantardini now promotes management of addiction as a preferable regimen.

At his last in-patient admission, Scott would call his mom, crying. “It was heart-wrenching to hear him speak. I cannot even begin to tell you how much it hurt that my beautiful son was hurting so badly.”

Scott successfully completed that three-month program. “And then he was gone. Less than 24 hours later. Just gone. No more chances. His last relapse.

“I have asked myself a million times over the last 20 months, why. And I have come to realize that addiction to opioids, heroin and fentanyl, are like no other addiction.”

The odds of kicking addiction increase with medical assistance, “but this cannot happen to dead people. Safe injection sites keep people alive. Many of these people make connections to the community and take steps to begin recovery. And the idea that it encourages people to use drugs is rubbish. What it does is bring people who will use drugs anyway to a safe place and out of the bathrooms of the libraries, Tim Hortons, or worse, using alone where no one is equipped to save them if they should overdose.”

Detox, as Tantardini has been told, is “being able to feel your blood moving through your veins, and that all your bones are in danger of shattering.”

And of course drug dealers pick up where medical prescriptions often lead.

“I witnessed this for seven years. I made a lot of mistakes, did not do enough research and bought into the stigma. I was ashamed. I worried what people would think. Now, I just don’t care. Because I am proud of my son. I only wish he were here to know how much.”

With her letter, Tantardini enclosed a photograph of her son. “I am not prone to handing out his picture as they are very precious to me. But look at that face. That is the face of addiction. He does not present as the typical ‘junkie homeless person.’ Yet you would be shocked to know how many don’t.”

That’s why she started NAMES. “Because too many of our children and loved ones look like Scott. A normal, young, beautiful son or daughter, your nephew or niece or your co-worker.”

We are failing these tortured souls miserably.

“Please show me that you care and are willing to try to understand. Scott was a son, grandson, brother, uncle, cousin and friend. He is missed. And his death did not need to have happened. We must do things differently. We are losing an entire generation ...

“So yes sir, in answer to your question, ‘Would you want your son or daughter to go to those places and use drugs?’ my answer is a resounding yes. Because if Scott had, he would not have died alone, in a bathroom, less than 24 hours after release from an abstinencebased program.”

As of Friday, Doug Ford had not responded.

Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno