Fentanyl on street an epidemic, says former addict
SASKATOON — Kayle Best has slammed meth and heroin into his arm, smoked crack and overdosed on Dilaudid — but nothing compared to the high he got from snorting little green pills up his nose. And no other drug in his life has ever caused so much destruction.
“These days, it is an epidemic,” Best says.
Counterfeit OxyContin, green pills labelled “CDN” on one side and “80” on the other, contain fentanyl, a highly addictive opiate. On the streets of Saskatoon, they are known as “greens,” and they are deadly.
The pills have been associated with at least two deaths in the city in the last month. According to Best, those deaths are not the only ones. In the last year, he said he personally knows at least seven other people who overdosed and died on the fentanyl pills. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the pills are 80 times as potent as morphine and hundreds of times more potent than heroin.
“Everyone is doing these pills. Kids in Grade 9 are doing these pills. Kids in Grade 9 are selling these things. It’s just insane,” Best said.
The 21-year-old said he first saw fentanyl pills on the streets five years ago. Sold as counterfeit OxyContin, the drugs are manufactured illegally by organized crime groups, not pharmaceutical companies. They do not contain oxycodone and are more powerful than the original prescription drug, which has since been banned in Canada.
At one point, Best and his girlfriend were snorting a combined 20 pills a day — and at $40 a pop, their habit cost upwards of $1,000 daily, he said. They resorted to crime to pay for it, stealing money from parent’s credit cards, robbing stores and holding people up on the street.
“I was running with a pellet gun, jacking kids for weed to maintain my pill habit. It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.
Fentanyl is part of a larger family of opiates referred to on the street as “downs.” Opiates include prescription drugs like hydromorphone, oxycodone and morphine, and street drugs like heroin.
According to data from the Canadian Alcohol and Drug Use Monitoring Survey, 243,000 Canadians reported abusing opiates in 2012. The journal Addiction reported that in 2010 nearly one of every eight deaths of adults between the ages of 25 and 34 in Ontario were related to opioid use.
While no solid data exists in Saskatchewan, Brad Bodnarchuk, who works as an addictions counsellor in Saskatoon, said he’s seen children as young as Grade 8 getting hooked on opiates.
“It’s been around a long time. It’s only when we have had deaths like we do that everyone goes ‘Whoa.’ It’s what we call a ground zero moment,” he said.
Colleen Dell, a professor of sociology and public health and research chair in substance abuse at the University of Saskatchewan, said the fact that young people are resorting to dangerous drugs like fentanyl is emblematic of a larger societal problem.
“They are turning to ways of escape, and also to cope. They have pressures that are extreme,” Dell said.
Like many people addicted to opiates in Canada, Best said he got his first dose of the “down” from a friend who had a prescription.
In Grade 10, he began by sniffing prescription Dilaudid, a synthetic morphine that contains hydromorphone.
He soon moved on to street “down” like the fentanyl pills.
“I’ve never felt that desperate for anything in my whole life. Feeling that desperate for something is so demeaning,” Best said.
It wasn’t until his girlfriend got pregnant that the couple made a choice to turn things around. She successfully went to rehab and Best is now enrolled in the methadone program. Methadone doesn’t get him high but it takes away the itch to use, he said. He credits the program with saving his life.