WEYBURN — Slim and close-shaven with deep-set green eyes that reflect a struggle beyond his years, the middle-aged man describes the "sickness" that made him leave his home and head 90 minutes north to Regina.
It was the day after Christmas. He went to the inner city, to find the fentanyl needed to get, in his words, "un-sick."
“If there's nothing around Weyburn, we have to resort to getting it in Regina, which has its own challenges ... there’s the possibility of getting burned.”
Instead of scoring fentanyl that Boxing Day, he got jumped by three guys who delivered a beating that left a deep cut on his face. They also took his money.
“It's a tough life, and I know we chose it," he says. "It's our responsibility to get away from it ... your life is going nowhere, because your whole daily function is all about getting un-sick."
The 39-year-old Weyburn man has lived in "pure hell" for at least the last two years, stuck in the gutter of a fentanyl addiction. But he's trying to climb out and agreed to share his story, at a time when an overdose epidemic has gripped this province, and indeed the country. We've called him "John Smith." It's a pseudonym out of concern for his safety, but Smith and his story are real.
Saskatchewan’s drug overdose crisis has reached into all areas of the province, small communities too.
While it's still awaiting toxicology confirmations, the Saskatchewan Coroners Service is projecting 377 total drug overdose deaths from 2020. Of those, 286 deaths involved opioids — carfentanyl, codeine, fentanyl, hydromorphone, methadone, morphine, oxycodone and others.
Outside of the larger centres, the communities where those deaths occurred are just that, small towns and small cities: Briercrest, Estevan, Fort Qu’Appelle, Lebret, Shellbrook, Swift Current, Vibank, Wadena and, among others, Weyburn.
“It’s a death sentence, no matter how you look at it,” Smith says of his addiction. “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”
He just lost two friends to overdoses in mid-January, two of three men who OD’d on the drug in the span of 36 hours.
On two of those calls, Weyburn police members used naloxone (also called by its company name, Narcan) to try reviving the users. Naloxone is an opioid blocker that restores a user’s breathing when fentanyl cuts it off.
Such calls have become all too common for that city’s police service.
Plainclothes Det. Ryan Cherniawsky knows of fentanyl addicts who overdose and survive, thanks to naloxone, one to four times per month — a frequency they somehow sustain over several years.
He cites naloxone’s frequent use as an unofficial statistic of how often people in Weyburn are using and overdosing on fentanyl: They call naloxone a reset button. “The trend in Weyburn is doing it with a buddy you know, so you have that reset button (in case of an overdose).”
Smith, too, has had to bring back people from overdoses, six times, he estimates.
He recalls using a chest rub method on one of his friends; essentially he rubbed his sternum up and down as hard as possible with two hands formed into a fist.
“I worked on him for 25 minutes one night. His heart was stopped. I couldn't get it going. I did everything I could. I literally cracked every rib on his sternum … the paramedics were coming to pick up a DOA (dead on arrival),” he says.
“Just as they walked in the door I got his pulse going … They administered Narcan and put a tube in him and he was up and walking 10 minutes after that.
"He was one of my best friends and I was not going to let him go.” He was one of the two men who died from an overdose in mid-January.
“I've been dealing with the pain of that. It's been a struggle.”
He is starting to see a flicker of light emerge as he tries working his way out of his addiction.
As of Thursday, Smith and his girlfriend were at Day 18 of living clean with no fentanyl, thanks to their Suboxone treatment programs. Suboxone is the company name for buprenorphine, a synthetic, long-lasting opioid.
“It's a pill version. You have to go to the pharmacy every day and you witness and you take your Suboxone,” which also has naloxone in it, he says. It costs $60 per week.
It’s expensive, he says, but cheaper than paying $40 per point of fentanyl (about one-tenth of a gram); a regular fentanyl user tends to ingest two or three points just to get high and numb out the withdrawal sickness.
He and his girlfriend also just recently found a new place to live, what he calls a “safe zone” to cut off certain people who may tempt them to start using again.
Smith’s recent changes have brought him renewed contact and a bit more time with his dad, who used to, he says, avoid him over worries his son would keep bugging him for money.
Regular family time with his parents is one of the few, precious things he has managed to rekindle.
But plenty of family pain still remains.
“I lost a relationship I had with my brother out in Vancouver. So I haven't gotten to talk to my nieces or see them out there, because they refuse to associate with me as long as I'm under the influence.”
And the downward spiral of addiction, how it leaves you with nothing, is still clear in his memory. He knows he’s not too far removed from it, either.
“You’re not working. You sell your stuff, you sell all your personal possessions just to get some money,” he says.
Smith believes Weyburn’s drug scene has drastically changed in the years he was away from the city while serving time for a break-in.
When he got out of jail in 2017, fentanyl was starting to make the rounds in the city. “Since then it's just blown up.”
In the last six months, Smith says, “Estevan is being flooded with (fentanyl) too. It’s become an epidemic there, too.”
Tara Busch started to see the shift to fentanyl about a year ago.
She’s the southeast regional director for Victim Services, helping crime victims in Weyburn, Estevan and the rural southeast over the last 14 years.
“Fentanyl really is the drug of the day, which is really unfortunate and scary right now,” she says.
“In Victim Services we don't deal directly with addictions, but in the past few years have become a lot more knowledgeable,” she says.
She and her assistant now often remind clients, “‘Have your Narcan on hand; play the buddy system; don’t be afraid to phone us; don’t be afraid to phone EMS if you are suspecting an OD or your buddy is overdosing.’”
She hopes users know about the Canada-wide Good Samaritan Drug Overdose Act, which became law in 2017. It applies to anyone contacting emergency support during an overdose — the person overdosing, the person who calls 9-1-1 and anyone else at the scene. It protects against drug possession charges and breach of condition charges.
For his part, Smith hopes people “have a little more compassion for the people that are using.”
Fentanyl users, he says, aren’t so concerned with its euphoric high as they are with “using so that they're not sick” to avoid the painful withdrawal symptoms.
“Once you see somebody go through the sickness, it'll change your whole perspective on the drug itself, because it's a nasty feeling. To see a grown man cry and literally defecate himself, it's not something that anybody in their right mind wants to see, right?”
“I wish people would open their eyes. It's another epidemic that needs to be stopped and I don't know how to go about that,” he says.
