‘WHAT KILLED HIM WAS THE SHAME’
Like many victims, son kept drug use a secret and died in a friend’s home
Advocates for people who use drugs say B.C.’s staggering fentanyl-fuelled overdose crisis won’t slow dramatically until more work is done to shift society’s view of them so that they don’t use alone, in secrecy.
There were 1,422 suspected overdose deaths in 2017, up 43 per cent from the 993 in 2016, according to a report from the B.C. Coroners Service released Wednesday.
“It was the most tragic year ever,” chief coroner Lisa Lapointe said at a joint news conference Wednesday with the provincial health officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, and the executive director of the B.C. Overdose Emergency Response Centre, Dr. Patricia Daly.
The vast majority of those who died were men and most of them overdosed at home while alone, Daly said.
Many of the victims were using a combination of drugs. The top drugs detected were fentanyl followed by cocaine, methamphetamines and heroin. Fentanyl was detected in 81 per cent of the deaths.
Vancouver resident Kathy Wagner’s 21-year-old son Tristan Kroeker died from fentanyl poisoning Aug. 23 after using cocaine. Kroeker had left a recovery centre four days earlier but used alone while couch-surfing at a friend’s place.
Wagner, who has become an advocate with Moms Stop The Harm, a group of families pushing for policy change after losing loved ones to drugs, said her son had struggled with addiction since he was 15.
In the summer of 2016, Kroeker finally entered an abstinence-based treatment program that suited him. The Kung Fu black belt and trained chef attended Narcotics Anonymous meetings, made new friends and became active in the recovery community, but “relapse was just part of his story,” Wagner said.
“He really, really wanted recovery,” she said. “He was working really hard for it.”
But the shame connected to relapse made it hard for him, she said. After leaving treatment for the last time, he kept his continuing drug use secret. “He was talking the talk, but he wasn’t able to admit he wasn’t walking it,” she said.
Wagner believes her son might still be alive if appropriate treatment was available when his drug use first began and if he could have had continued access to affordable longterm care. And she believes more work needs to be done to combat the stigma that made Kroeker feel rushed to get his life back on track before he was ready.
“In the end, what killed him was the shame around it,” she said. “It’s not the kind of disease that everyone can recover from first time around.”
Ronnie Grigg, manager at the Overdose Prevention Society in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, said de-stigmatizing of addiction remains a crucial component of the response to the overdose crisis.
“One of the things about addiction that we can observe is that it can be very isolating, it can be difficult to find a community in that,” he said. “Especially with stigma that can be generated ... the shame from it, the necessity to be closeted or to hide.”
He believes the Downtown Eastside has been best-prepared to deal with the crisis with many naloxone kits, supervised consumption sites and trained outreach workers.
Throughout the crisis, Grigg said, he has seen criticism of people for using drugs in decline. He hopes more struggling cities will adopt the harm-reduction measures used in the Downtown Eastside.
“I know that in the past year, I’ve personally witnessed an increase in the normalization of this work and this care model,” he said.
During Wednesday’s announcement, Daly said the numbers tapered off in the last four months of 2017 with the average number of deaths each month dropping to 96, compared with 129 a month in the first eight months. She credited new programs to combat the crisis.