‘I’m still alive’
How opioids get a grip, and the struggle to get clean again
A recovered addict’s story
CAMBRIDGE — Laurie White cut a used fentanyl patch into pieces.
She scraped the residue off each piece and smoked it bit by bit. The high was euphoric, but short-lived.
So she smoked the entire patch. Moments later she was face down on the dining room table. She threw up all over herself.
Her husband shook her to keep her from slipping away.
“He thought I was dead. It was so scary,” she says.
White was an opioid user and her addiction led her to fentanyl.
But one time was enough. She never smoked it again. It was an experience that led her to recovery. Now the happily married mother of two is clean.
She hasn’t used drugs in two years and takes methadone to curb her cravings and medication for her mental health needs.
But she remembers the darkest days of her addiction. It controlled her life on and off for seven years.
When White needed morphine pills, she knew who to call.
With street drugs you never know what you’re getting, and when White was desperate for a hit, she didn’t question what she was buying.
White went from snorting crushed pills to injecting heroin.
She considers herself lucky that none of the drugs she snorted, smoked and injected were laced with lethal amounts of fentanyl. But friends of hers weren’t so lucky. “People are overdosing left, right and centre,” White says.
There are lots of reasons why people take opioid drugs.
For White it was twofold: opioids were a way to take away the pain from a painful condition, a degenerative disc disorder, but it also helped her cope with social anxiety and depression.
It took only a few crushed pills for her drug use to spiral into a dangerous addiction. “It just takes one time ... taking it and getting that numb feeling, it’s just one time and you’re hooked,” she says
White has spent most of her life in a west Galt neighbourhood in Cambridge.
The youngest of seven siblings, she says she was the shy and awkward one.
White suffered from anxiety and depression as a teen.
She was on the right path. She had good grades and decent friends and didn’t do drugs.
But depression forced White to drop out of high school. She eventually moved to British Columbia with her mom.
That was where she first experimented with drugs. Her preferred drugs were cocaine and ecstasy — uppers to jolt her mood.
It wasn’t until White came back to Cambridge in 2007 that she started using opioids heavily.
White was diagnosed with a degenerative disc disorder after a car accident in B.C. The pain can be excruciating and affects the lower back and neck.
She says she couldn’t get a legal opioid prescription for her pain because of her history of self-harm. So White took to the streets. “I had some friends who were into oxys,” she recalls. They told her it could help with the unbearable pain. It was the kind of pain that kept her up at night.
So she tried snorting the slow-release OxyContin pills, so popular with recreational drug users at the time that they were removed from the market in 2012 because of abuse.
Taken orally, the pills released pure oxycodone slowly over a period of time.
It was perceived as a revolutionary painkiller because the timed-release mechanism meant chronic pain patients would need to take fewer pills for the same relief.
But those looking for a high discovered that crushing the pills released the potent drug all at once and it was highly addictive.
Users could chew the pills or snort the crushed up powder. It could also be dissolved into water to inject intravenously.
Like most users, White’s opioid drug use started gradually.
She went from snorting one 10-milligram pill a night to snorting up to 60 to 90 milligrams in a single night.
“Not only did it help with the pain, but it made me feel good,” she says.
When she couldn’t get oxycodone or hydromorphone pills, she turned to whatever she could get her hands on. That led to heroin.
“I always promised myself I would never use needles,” White says. But then she started shooting up heroin. White stopped her nightly drug binges when she gave birth to her now eight-yearold and five-year-old children.
It was a difficult habit to quit. She couldn’t stop thinking about it. The pain surged through her body. It didn’t only stem from her back problems but also from drug withdrawal.
“It was just one phone call away and I could get it,” she says.
White’s habit soon became a routine again. She put her children to bed and then hit the streets to score drugs.
Her husband, who never touched the stuff, would break down in tears and watch as White slipped into her high and sometimes into a comatose state.
He didn’t call for help when she passed out or overdosed because he was afraid.
“He didn’t want us to lose our kids, he was keeping me alive,’ White says.
Withdrawal is a nasty beast. Cold sweats, vomit and diarrhea last for several days.
Users will tell you the fear of withdrawal keeps them from trying to get clean.
White remembers going through her last period of withdrawal as she sat by her grandmother’s deathbed two years ago. “It was awful,” she says. White didn’t use drugs for days. The night she came home from her grandmother’s funeral she remembers feeling broken and lost.
That was the night she smoked the entire patch of fentanyl.
She knew she had to make a change. A few days later White checked herself into a recovery clinic.
She had moments of desperation when she sobbed and begged her husband for just one last hit, one final high.
She threw out all her drug paraphernalia and deleted the phone numbers of her user friends and drug dealers from her cellphone. “It was too easy to relapse,” she says. Now White uses methadone and figures she will be on the treatment drug — also a strong painkilling opioid — for the rest of her life.
"It’s been a huge struggle to overcome this.”
When she reads about local overdose deaths caused by fentanyl, she can’t help but wonder if she once knew those people.
She can understand the reason why many drug users will quickly transition to stronger, more potent doses and delivery methods. “You feel like superman … like you can handle anything,” White says.
White knows how hard it is to break free from addiction.
She has heard stories of friends overdosing and dying alone because people are afraid to call for help. “Just call the police, don’t just run away. Don’t let that person be another statistic,” she pleads.
She worries about all the young people out there with mental health issues, like her, who may turn to drugs for the same reason she did — that “numb” feeling.
“There are other ways out and I wish I had known that,” White says.
“I’m still alive to talk about it.”