DEB BAILEY
The photos in Deb Bailey ’s picturesque Vancouver home show her daughter Izzy as a beautiful little girl on family trips to Disneyland and Mexico, and later playing hockey, riding horses, getting her black belt in martial arts, and playing the bagpipes.
The pictures don’t reveal the inner turmoil that Bailey believes made Izzy susceptible to the drug addiction that claimed her life two days before Christmas 2015.
“She was very affectionate, very bubbly, cheerful, always willing to try anything,” said Bailey
“But addiction is some kind of a medical issue that we need to look at from a biological, psychological and social model. These people aren’t doing this by choice, they are not well. They are ill and addiction keeps them that way ... I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own daughter: this incredible compulsion.”
Bailey, an adjunct university professor, and her husband adopted the little girl from Russia in 1998 when she was three years old.
Bailey was braced for possible problems in Izzy’s life, given that her formative first three years were spent in an orphanage and that her birth mother drank alcohol. She was a happy girl in her elementary school years, despite her learning disabilities, attention-deficit disorder, and her challenges with making friends.
But in her teen years, she met a troubled group of peers who introduced her to heroin. Bailey felt powerless to get Izzy into the treatment she needed, either because it wasn’t available or because teenagers can refuse medical options if they choose.
In 2015, an addictions doctor prescribed suboxone, a medication that suppresses opioid cravings. It worked like magic for Izzy, who talked about going back to school.
But the law at the time required her to go to a pharmacy every day so an official could monitor her taking the dosage. “It sounds like a simple matter. It wasn’t for her or many other people because she said, ‘I might see someone I know.’ And there was a lot of shame involved in being addicted for her.”
This infuriated Bailey because it was far easier for Izzy to get access to heroin than to this potentially life-saving medication.
A few months later, “a very chipper and very happy” Izzy went to Pacific Centre mall on Dec. 22 to do some Christmas shopping. She was found the next day in the stairwell of an SRO in the Downtown Eastside, another victim of the fentanyl crisis.
“I found that (suboxone) prescription in her possession among her other things when she died — that she never filled,” said an emotional Bailey.
After Bailey complained to health officials, the rules around suboxone were loosened, and she sees that as a contribution Izzy made in the ongoing battle to change drug policies.
Bailey, who volunteers with the B.C. Centre on Substance Use in the Downtown Eastside, is grateful for the strides that have been made in B.C., such as the country’s first safe-injection site and the Crosstown Clinic, which administers prescription heroin to a small number of users.
But today, more than two years after her daughter’s death, she wishes there were more advances and fewer fatal overdoses.