I’ve been using drugs—opioids, stimulants and many others—on and off for basically my whole adult life. I don’t see it as a good or a bad thing. There have been plenty of fun times. And at other points, when I’ve struggled with mental health and suicide has been a threat, drugs have felt like the only support available to me.
But I’ve also experienced a whole lot of harms associated with drugs, and especially with the conditions of drug use under prohibition. I’ve contracted hepatitis C, and suffered injection-related infections and numerous nonfatal overdoses.
About a year ago, I decided that considering everything, I wanted to stop using drugs. So I applied for a sober living facility and started that journey. That doesn’t mean I think it’s the “right” choice for others. It just made sense for me, when by that point in my life, the risks and harms, and the impact on my mental health, had been outweighing the benefits.
Despite that decision, I recently overdosed again. I want to tell you about it because some of the circumstances could be relevant to a lot of people.
Sober living has been a mixed bag of experiences and emotions, and I’ve been in and out of facilities over the past year.
Again, recovery was the goal I chose for myself, despite past experiences with safe supply, and I went into this with my eyes open. The risk in abstinence-based treatment and sober living, as I already knew, is that you lose your opioid tolerance, so if you do use again, it becomes very easy to overdose. Researchers have often flagged this.
In early September, just over a month after I’d last left the sober living house, I got this sudden, strong urge.
Another risk is that if you’ve been in an abstinence-based culture and committed to that, the shame you may feel if you want to get high can make you hide the fact that you’re using, and choose to use alone.
I’d been making progress in my goal, sometimes going months at a time without using anything. But someone in my life started drinking again and experimenting with drugs like cocaine, and I started to partake with her sometimes.
I still felt like I was on a positive journey. Recovery comes in different shapes and sizes, and as author Johann Hari has said, “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.”
I was keeping it light and not causing havoc. I was also on 20 mg of methadone at the time, a medication proven to reduce risks for people with opioid use disorder. But in early September, just over a month after I’d last left the sober living house, I got this sudden, strong urge.
A friend of mine had just ordered drugs off of the dark web and offered to let me try some for free. So I taxied out to his house to pick them up. I was planning to do a speedball—still commonly defined as cocaine mixed with heroin, but which in 2024, where I live, means cocaine with fentanyl.
I still had harm reduction in mind. We have a lot more harm reduction resources in Nova Scotia than we used to. One notable thing here is that syringe service programs teamed up with pharmacies to offer free “brown bags”—essentially mini using kits with syringes, cookers, cotton filters, sterile water, tourniquets and alcohol swabs. In most cases, if you ask for a “brown bag” at a participating pharmacy, staff will offer you a free naloxone kit as well.
Sometimes, like me that day, you can’t hold off until you are in a safer place, where people are with you with naloxone.
So after I scored the drugs from my friend, I got the taxi to drop me off at a pharmacy close to where I was staying. I knew they offered the brown bags (some pharmacies choose not to, for the usual reasons). I asked the staff for a bag of long tips and went right into the bathroom.
I wasn’t sick but I was still jonesing for a shot. That’s how it works sometimes, for a lot of people. Sometimes, like me that day, you can’t hold off until you are in a safer place, where people are with you with naloxone.
In the bathroom I grabbed a cooker, a syringe and some sterile water. Then I put two little pink shards of fentanyl into the cooker with about 2 points of cocaine. I heated it up with a lighter until it was all dissolved, took a cotton filter and meticulously sucked up my shot into the syringe. Then I tied off my leg and went for my old faithful vein there. I slowly injected, saw the blood flag and pushed the syringe in.
It felt great—exactly what I expected. I got the cocaine high, and then I slowly came down. And that’s all I remember.
I woke up surrounded by paramedics, police officers and pharmacists. They’d cut off my nice Adidas track jacket and given me six vials of naloxone. They saved my life and were like humble heroes. The group acted if they did this everyday. Which they probably do.
I knew my name, where I was, and the fact I didn’t want to go to the hospital.
They’d given me more naloxone than I’d needed, when one dose is usually enough. For a lot of people this can heighten precipitated withdrawal, causing unnecessary suffering and greater risk. I didn’t get that, because I was no longer too physically dependent on opioids.
Surprisingly, I was all there when I woke up. I knew my name, where I was, and the fact I didn’t want to go to the hospital.
The police officer who’d arrived first and found me, after the pharmacy staff called emergency services, said I’d turned blue before I received the naloxone. He urged me to go to the hospital.
But I was dead set on not going. I’ve gone to hospitals after several overdoses, and been treated like a piece of garbage almost every time.
Nova Scotia is a small place, and one of the paramedics who helped save me actually remembered me from a talk I did on harm reduction. He explained to me that they had to have some kind of care plan for me where I wasn’t going to be alone. So I quickly suggested: How about the overdose prevention site?
The paramedic talked to the on-call doctor about my plan, and they were okay with it. Back in the day I probably would have been going to the police station. But that day, the police officer dropped me off at the local overdose prevention site.
This whole experience left me feeling hopeful that some of the work to change minds has finally started to kick in.
Overdose prevention centers (OPC), which have a lot of different names around the world, aren’t just places where people can use drugs without the fear of arrest or fatal overdose. They also offer many other resources, and referrals to health and social services. But my favorite part is the community connection you get there. You’re with compassionate, understanding people, who let you know you’re not alone in this battle against the drug war.
In that environment I recuperated, felt supported and left feeling well. I want to thank everyone there.
This whole experience left me feeling hopeful that some of the work many of us have done to change minds about people who use drugs has finally started to kick in.
I could feel that the people I interacted with weren’t looking down on me the way they used to. Even when I was in the back of the ambulance, before the cop was going to drop me off, the paramedic and a student were with us, and in our conversation they encouraged me to teach the cop a few things about harm reduction, stigma, language and drug use. It turned something extremely scary for me into a learning experience for all of us.
I would choose an OPC over a hospital any day of the week.
There are obvious harm reduction lessons here about vulnerability after abstinence, naloxone, using alone and the way we all treat each other.
For me, it also raises the question of why we can’t routinely offer to take people who have overdosed to an OPC, where they’ll receive the best support and won’t need to take up a hospital bed.
OPC need resources to play that role, of course, and a lot of jurisdictions still need to open them in the first place. But it’s a thought I’ll pursue. We all deserve a choice—it’s a principle of trauma-informed care—and I would choose an OPC over a hospital any day of the week.
September 23 was Medic Monday in Nova Scotia, and I want to acknowledge all the hard work of the province’s 1,300 paramedics, who between them have saved my life on multiple occasions.
Photograph by Nova Scotia Ambulance via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 2.0
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