Talk about it

As more powerful opiates hit the streets, recovering addict urges discussion

Mike started using drugs when he was 13 years old. By the time he was 17, he had already been arrested and was hospitalized with an overdose. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. He was addicted.

“You don’t even realize until it’s way too late. You’re like, okay, I’m going to quit. I’m not going to take any pills,” Mike says. “And you make it two hours, you’ve got the sweats and you’re crawling across the floor for your pill bottle because you just can’t make it. And at that point you’re like, it’s got me beat. What am I going to do about it? It’s got me beat.”

At 21, Mike, who asked The Times not to use his full name, still looks like a boy. He speaks intelligently but with a soft, thin voice. His eyes are bright and clear blue, his mouth curls in a boyish grin as he speaks, one that grows with embarrassment.

His fingers are stained an ashy grey.

Mike began using his drug of choice, Percocet, by the time he was 16. At the time, he said it was something he thought he could control. One pill was cheap and kept him feeling good for a while. Especially when a bout of winter depression was getting to him. He thought he had control.

But that quickly changed.

“I didn’t know it could actually happen to me … All of a sudden, it was just too late. I didn’t even know what I was getting into. I’d never seen a drug addict. I’d never seen somebody that was too far [gone]. I’d never even heard from someone who had told the story,” says Mike. “It’s a pretty destructive path. It takes up everything around you.”

After a while, one pill wasn’t doing the trick. The feeling of happiness and stress relief he got at the beginning were gone, replaced by a need to fuel a growing addiction. Pills became more expensive and instead of once a week, he was taking up to 40 per day, spending $10 per pill.

Mike’s friends didn’t want to spend time with him anymore. His family tried to force him to quit, but when that didn’t work, they kicked him out.

“When you’re high, you do it because you forget about everything,” says Mike. “And then that starts to fade away, too. And suddenly, you’re like, I spend this much money to do this, I’m not even getting the feeling that I used to get, I’m just doing it to feel okay, but what am I feeling okay about? My life is completely ruined.”

After a while, Percocet wasn’t doing the trick. He needed something stronger. He experimented with Oxycontin and more recently, saw the notorious drug Fentanyl appear.

“Fentanyl came around, and suddenly it was just around, everywhere. And everyone was like, yeah, do Fentanyl. It’s the best bang for your buck. And I know of people who did overdose and, uh, it was fatal,” says Mike, trailing off.

When his own money was spent, he began to find other ways to fund his habit. He began to sell drugs. He stole money. He stole from the people he cared about most. He stole a lot.

“I stole money from people close to me, and they didn’t know about it,” says Mike. “And then they found out about it. And that really hit me. I was like, what have I done? I just took somebody’s life savings.”

That was one of the realizations that pushed Mike to quit. He made seven attempts—not always voluntarily—before he visited Picton’s methadone clinic for help.

“It scares the shit out of you, and you’re like, ‘oh, my god,’” says Mike. “You have a couple of times when you’re close to overdosing, and at the same time everything is falling apart around you. You’ve lost your job, you’ve lost your girlfriend, you’ve lost your family, you’ve lost everyone else’s respect and you start to lose your own self-respect. You start to lose everything. You start to realize, all I have is these pills. And that’s when you’re like, oh, shit, I have to do something about this.”

For the past year, Mike has been working to get clean. For nearly a year, he has been visiting a methadone clinic regularly, slowly working to reduce his dosage and return to a normal life.

He is repairing the relationship with his family he once thought was permanently damaged. He sees a light at the end of the tunnel.

Despite hearing bad things from fellow drug addicts, Mike has nothing but good things to say about the clinic.

“The methadone clinic is huge,” says Mike. “A lot of people don’t want to admit it, but they will, eventually. There’s not one person who goes there who hasn’t at least once said, ‘I owe a lot to that place because it’s helped me so much.’ It’s great. It’s saved a lot of lives, and I don’t think it gets as much appreciation as it really should.”

Along with methadone treatment, Hastings Prince Edward Public Health is beginning to offer the emergency drug Naloxone, which can prevent fatalities in overdose cases, especially important as nationally, overdose deaths from opiate drug use is on the rise.

But Mike feels like he’s on the other side of that. He’s working to slowly reduce his dependence on methadone and start his life afresh. He has a lot of regrets, but hopes he can prevent others from begining down this path.

“Talk about it. That’s the biggest thing,” says Mike. “As soon as you get to high school, nobody cares about it. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t tried weed. It’s kind of a nonchalant thing. It’s just not talked about and people are just not aware of what it’s like. Too many people are unaware of how big of a problem it is and how much of a struggle it is for drug addicts. Everyone just thinks drug addict, and looks down upon it. I met a lot of people who had no idea about me, and I bring up methadone clinics and they go, oh, drug addicts, they have nothing nice to say about them at all. But it could be anybody.”