Petra Schulz:
The call that changed our life forever came in January, 2011 from our youngest son, Danny. He was living in Vancouver at the time where he attended culinary school. And without much of a lead-up, he told me that he was using drugs, had been for some time and that he was in trouble. It must’ve been hard for him to come forward and be truthful about his struggles, but the fact that his boyfriend had left him meant he had no home. And since he had spent his student loan, he didn’t have money. When he arrived back in Edmonton, Danny started the cycle of detox and relapse. Every time the drugs were out of his system, we thought we could get the old Danny back. The child we knew. The one who made us laugh, who preferred a typewriter over a computer and loved vintage cars.
We learned the hard way that this is not the way substance use disorder works. It was painful and terrifying to watch the withdrawal symptoms. Being dope sick is worse than the worst flu. And I thought he would do anything to avoid that, but the cravings remain long after the drug is cleared out of the system and his underlying problems had not gone away. In retrospect, I understood that he was dealing with multiple risk factors. He struggled with social anxiety, as a gay teen he had faced bullying in high school, and his learning disability meant he had difficulty with impulse control.
Danny had been self-medicating, starting with prescription opioids he easily obtained illicitly. When those were not available anymore, he moved on to more dangerous street drugs. I once asked him, I said, “Danny, why do you use?” And his reply was eye-opening. Danny said, “When I take one of these rooms, one of these pills, when I take one of these pills, I can walk into any room and just be who I am.” And I thought, “Wow, that should not have been too much to ask. There should have been a way for him to do that without having to use drugs.” Most of us don’t use substances problematically, but people like Danny who do usually do because of underlying pain, physical or emotional, as well as trauma.
In a conversation about Danny, my husband, Rick, said to me, “We could lose him to that. He could die.” I said, “No way. No, no way. We got this. He will be okay.” In our family, I’m the one who jumps into overdrive if something goes wrong. And I thought this too could be overcome. The information the health system gave us was not helpful. Nobody explained how treatment opioid dependence, how treatment should look like, no less harm reduction about keeping people as safe and as healthy as possible without judgment and without shame. There was so much we did not know.
I learned about Naloxone, the antidote that can reverse an overdose only after Danny died. For Danny, things got worse before they got better. Danny moved back to Vancouver. He continued his drug use. A person who uses opioids over a longer period of time develops tolerance. And feeling good and positive, the ability to walk into any room is replaced by just avoiding the withdrawal symptoms. Danny needed higher doses and started to inject.
During this time, we had very little contact with him and there were many sleepless nights. But finally, in 2012, Danny was ready to seek treatment with methadone while he was still living on the coast. And later that year, he came back home to Edmonton to put his life back together. We had the joy of experiencing our youngest almost how we knew him. He found a job in one of Edmonton’s best restaurants and he had an apartment really close to work. On Sundays, he came home for dinner, and one of my favourite images is Danny sitting at our kitchen table sharpening my knives. A good chef always keeps his knives sharp, and Danny kept his and mine that way.
Sadly, he did not give his treatment enough time. He quit the psychologist because it interfered with work hours and he did not stay on methadone long enough to be stable. We had falsely assumed that methadone is just another drug and we had encouraged him to taper probably too soon. For a person in opioid substitution treatment, for that to be effective, they have to be stable before they can taper. We don’t expect people with other health conditions to live without their meds, but we do so in substance use when we may clean the gold standard against medical advice and with often devastating consequences. In the end, Rick’s fearful prediction came true. Danny relapsed. He bought one more pill, which he thought was a fake Oxycontin, but in fact was fentanyl. On April 30th, 2014, Danny died alone in the apartment that he had so carefully furnished only a few months before.
As a family, we had many difficult decisions to make, decisions that we were not prepared for. The most difficult one, what do we say about the cause of death? Do we tell the truth? How do we find those words? When we prepared for the funeral, we learned that giving a eulogy means to speak well of someone. And it was clear to us that if you speak well of someone, you don’t tell lies. How Danny lived and how he died was part of him. And we told the full story. After the funeral, our friends, his workplace, everyone was surprised. Substance use is often hidden and Danny was a master at disguise. We were also amazed at the number of people in our circle of friends who came forward and they had a loved one facing the same or similar challenges or they themselves were. And I thought, “Where had these people been. I never knew about this.” But then I understood they had been where we were. They have had suffered from stigma in silence.
Overdose does not discriminate. It can happen to anyone in any family. When the numbers continued to climb and there was no action from governments, I reached out to health officials and to the media. I met like-minded women who shared my pain, but also shared my desire for change. Together we formed the group, Moms Stop the Harm. These are some of the loved ones members of our group mourn. They are people from all walks of life, all genders. Most are young men between 25 and 40. Most struggled with mental health or trauma. Most died somewhere alone. By the end of this day when we all go home, in Canada, in this country, 11 people, 11 people will have died from an overdose. Imagine if your child was poisoned from the water supply and more and more people were dying from drinking that same water. Would we allow for this to happen? Would we stand by and watch or would we take action? Would we go about and fix this problem? It will take a profound change to address this crisis. The people most affected and experts in drug policy call for action in five key domains. Number one, we need a safe, regulated supply of substances on prescription for people who need them so nobody has to turn to toxic street drugs. Number two, we need to decriminalize the personal possession of substances so we can help people instead of locking them up. Number three, we need harm reduction services for everybody everywhere so we can keep people as safe and as healthy as possible. Number four, we need ready access to evidence-based treatment so nobody dies waiting. And number five, we need upstream prevention by addressing the underlying conditions such as mental health and trauma.
We must end stigma, shame and blame for so-called bad individual choices. In doing so, we will allow people to come forward and seek the help they need. The truth is people who use drugs, people like our son, Danny, are like you and me. They deserve a future and they deserve a chance. Danny did not have that chance. He’s on our mind every day and we miss him terribly. With him, laughter has left our family and my knives are often dull. I often wonder how different the outcome could have been for Danny and for us, for our family. And it is our collective responsibility to ensure that the outcome is different for you and for your children. And I sincerely hope that telling Danny’s story will help make that happen.
Thank you so much.
