Tough-love approach to drug use costs lives, advocates tell U of A forum
Donna May has a message for parents who have been told they must never do anything to enable their children’s drug use. Enable. The Ontario mother, whose daughter Jac died in 2012 following a lengthy opioid addiction, told an Edmonton audience Thursday the hard stance she took at the time still haunts her, and she wishes she could go back and do it all differently.
“I would be an enabler to the point where I would purchase her drugs for her, I would sit and watch over her as she took the drugs and I would counsel her to make better choices,” May said.
“We took everything away from her to stop her from her substance use, but it perpetuated the whole situation. Kicking her to the curb did nothing but ensure she was going to die.”
May, founder of the mumsDU advocacy group that aims to save the lives of drug users, made her remarks at a University of Alberta forum on the growing overdose crisis. Of the five panellists to speak, three were mothers who had lost children to drugs.
In using the word enabler, May isn’t suggesting all parents should blindly act as their kids’ drug funders and suppliers, or avoid setting boundaries.
Her message, she said, is instead geared at fostering a more “humanist” attitude, to see drug users not as criminals and low-lifes but as people with a health issue needing treatment.
She and others at the forum said such attitudes are important not only for individual families, but must also shape broader societal responses — including urgent consideration of decriminalization, legalization and regulation of narcotics.
While such policies may be seen as “enabling” substance use on a wide scale, they will also save lives and take power away from unscrupulous drug traffickers, the advocates said.
May said fentanyl in particular is so cheap and easy to distribute that traffickers don’t care if they kill a bunch of their customers. As such, legalization would be an effective way of making that business unprofitable, she said.
Another panellist at the event was Edmontonian Petra Schulz, whose son Danny died in 2014 from a fentanyl overdose. Like May, Schulz said she received the same advice to treat Danny’s addiction with tough love, but she rejected it.
She said it makes no sense to force people to hit rock bottom, when rock bottom often means death.
In Danny’s case, Schulz said he had started on a better path by joining a methadone program, but he and his family failed to understand the high risk of relapse that comes with opioids. One night when he was home alone, he took a pill he thought was OxyContin that turned out to be a fatal dose of fentanyl.