Ottawa father pleads for help from other parents as opioid crisis spreads

OTTAWA – An Ottawa father is urging parents of opioid-addicted teens to establish a network to save lives — the focus of a letter he shared on social media that has generated responses from other parts of Canada and the United States.

On New Year’s Eve, Sean O’Leary found himself performing CPR on one of his daughter’s teenage friends who was sprawled in his garage near death.

It took about 50 chest compressions before the 17-year-old boy started breathing again, O’Leary said. Paramedics arrived to save the teen, but O’Leary said the traumatic experience prompted his online appeal to other parents.

He said Monday he imagines it will be much easier to watch over his 16-year-old daughter Paige if he’s connected with other families going through similar struggles.

Paige O’Leary said she has been using drugs for more than a year — most recently the painkiller Percocet.

She went to rehab last fall only to start using again five days after her release in late December.

On Sunday, a funeral was held for 14-year-old Chloe Kotval — a student who attended Paige’s Ottawa school and died after taking a drug of unknown origin.

Experts say the opioid crisis, including among teens, is escalating on both sides of the border— a problem so massive it was included in a joint statement last week following a meeting between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Donald Trump.

The national issue also prompted the Liberal government to introduce legislation in December that proposes a number of measures including removing 26 strict requirements for new supervised injection sites and placing restrictions on the import of pill presses and encapsulators — two machines commonly used to produce illicit drugs.

Ottawa Public Health and Ottawa Police also issued an alert last week about counterfeit prescription drugs and their involvement in recent overdoses, noting illicit fentanyl has been detected in pills manufactured to mimic other drugs, such as Percocet.

The presence of fentanyl significantly increases the risk of overdose, officials say, because the drug is fatal in very small amounts.

Young people need to be aware other pills are commonly laced with fentanyl, Paige O’Leary said Monday, noting she has refrained from using drugs for the last four weeks.

“Some people don’t even know what fentanyl is, especially younger kids I know at my school and stuff,” she said.

She also said she didn’t realize how much her opioid addiction affected her family until she read her father’s story on social media.

“It made me feel pretty bad,” she said.

“There were times that I knew I was affecting them. but I never really knew my dad felt like that and how worried he was about me. When you’re doing them, you don’t think you’re going to die.”

—Follow @kkirkup on Twitter