Growing opioid epidemic destroys homes, families
Widow angry that jailed drug addicts can’t get help they need in prison setting
LONDON Lura Muriwske will never shake the things she saw while tracking her husband.
“I can’t even tell you the stuff I’ve seen. I’ve been in hellholes finding him. I’ve walked in and there’s blood shooting out all over the place, they’re shooting up and there’s blood shooting out of their necks.” She sighs. “It’s bad. It is so bad,” the London woman says.
By the end, she didn’t even know exactly what mixture of street drugs her husband was using.
“He was on some wicked stuff. He had that darkness in his eyes. Their eyes are so dark.”
He did something to her, she won’t say what, and she tracked him down in a drug house and threw a punch at him.
Ten days later, wracked in withdrawal pain and stuck in jail, her husband, Raymond George Major, hung himself.
Muriwske has agreed to tell his story to warn everyone of the opioid crisis in London, one that’s expected to get worse as a wave of fentanyl sweeps across Ontario.
She also wants to talk about where that wave is going to break and shatter, on the floors and walls of the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre (EMDC).
Since her husband’s death in June, two more inmates have died and fentanyl, or other opioid drugs, are the suspects.
“I was the worst one to judge. I called them scumbags,” Muriwske says. “But when I went to their homes, I learned that they were either raped, beaten as children, stuff was done to them. I don’ t judge them anymore. They’ re down and out and on the street and they all have a story.”
This is Raymond George Major’s story. He and Muriwske met in 1997 in Sudbury. Four years earlier, Major had been driving while impaired when he hit a train, killing a friend and injuring himself and two others, she says.
He needed much of his right side rebuilt and served two years less a day in jail.
By the time they met, Major was taking prescription painkillers, Percocet — the gateway drug for many drowning in opioids.
He was working and managing fine, until the couple moved to London. By 2007, London was in the midst of its first opioid crisis, fuelled by the prescription painkiller OxyContin. Eventually, that drug was replaced by the more tamper-resistant OxyNEO, and new products, including the non-opioid stimulant crystal meth, filled the vacuum. In London, Major took the well-travelled path downward — from Percocet, to prescribed OxyContin, to prescribed fentanyl patches, to crystal meth.
The stronger the medication, the stronger he wanted it to be.
He began breaking down the patches to smoke fentanyl.
“I just turned my head to it because he always said he had a hold over it. I knew he didn’t, but I just didn’t want to deal with it. He kept running into the wrong people. It’s easy to get.” Then came the needle. Some people introduced Major to injecting drugs, and that was that. Dilauda, hydromorphone, “and when they can’t get those they’ll go to whatever.”
About two years ago, Muriwske separated from Major, but she still let him come home for holidays and to visit his daughter and granddaughter, or sometimes to hide from people in the drug world.
“I tried to be stronger. I told him, you’ve got to leave me alone.”
There were times when the real Ray shone through.
“He had that little twinkle in his eye. He always did a little thing with his fingers when he was scheming,” she says, drumming her fingers on a table.
“He was a funny guy. He was like a comedian. He was funny and caring.”
But the family’s hold slipped. He stopped coming by to see his granddaughter as often. He stopped playing video games with her.
Muriwske would find “bags upon bags upon bags of needles” hidden in the shed and in the house.
“The last year he pulled back, he was so out of it. Everything was about the needles. Everything.”
Major, a former machinist, pawned his tools and gear he stole for drugs. He stole jewelry from Muriwske. He sold some of his prescriptions and got into trouble with criminals. He lost work.
He began crashing in houses full of other users. He injected whatever he could get his hands on, including opioids and the stimulant crystal meth. Then fentanyl came to town.
“I watched it destroy my home and my family. I watched it kill my husband. It destroyed us,” says a crying Muriwske. Major was arrested June 2 after being found in a stolen vehicle with drugs and improper identity documents on him. Her husband had been in EMDC before, and was beaten for prescription drugs.
“He said it was a different life in there. He was so scared to go back.”
He entered EMDC at the start of a weekend lockdown, according to inmates. For the next two days and nights, an inmate told Postmedia News, Major endured a harrowing withdrawal from opioids with little help from short-staffed correctional officers and none from fellow inmates locked in their cells.
“I’ve seen Ray withdraw when he was just doing his hydromorphs and it’s just horrible,” Muriwske said. “I think about what he was going through in jail. He would have been freezing to death, and they don’t give you extra blankets. He would have been throwing up. He was in depression. He was lonely. He felt he lost all his family.”
Muriwske and her family have many questions about the care Major received while going through withdrawal. She believes, from speaking to the coroner’s office, her husband wrote an angry note about getting no help.
But London police have provided only a photograph of notes supposedly found in Major’s cell.
One note was written three days before Major was arrested and taken to jail, and is cursive. After Major’s injury, he could no longer write in cursive, Muriwske says.
The second note, which is in handwriting nothing like the first, is in upper and lower case and mentions a name no one in the family knows. Major only wrote in capital letters, and Muriwske shows the last anniversary card he gave her.
“He probably stole it,” she says with a sad laugh. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Her granddaughter, Allie, 10, says she can’t believe her “papa” would kill himself.
Shy about speaking, she writes her feelings down.
“I’m so angry at the guards for letting this happen, he should have been in 24/7 supervision. They must have thought he was an addict with no point to live.”
Correctional officers at EMDC, themselves struggling with the fentanyl threat as well as dozens of other daily challenges, will no doubt bristle at that suggestion.
But Allie lost her grandfather, and her sentiment is one shared by many — that jail is supposed to be a place where supervision and health care keep people safe.
Like every spouse, parent, sibling and grandparent before her, and those bound to follow, Muriwske has learned that lesson: Jail is no place for people addicted to drugs, yet jail is where so many of them will end up.
“We were supposed to grow old together. “I am so angry with him. But they should have helped him.”
We were supposed to grow old together. I am so angry with him. But they should have helped him.