Oxy addict on reserve still craves drug after losing his children

CAT LAKE, Ont. – Samuel Wesley cracked when the child welfare authorities took his daughter away.

The sturdy 30-something member of the Cat Lake First Nation in northwestern Ontario had already tried to conquer his Oxycontin addiction a couple of times over the past year. He had already seen each of his other six or seven children sent away to foster homes.

This time, he said it was too much.

“I had a flashback of myself as a kid,” Wesley told a tiny clutch of reporters visiting his remote reserve.

“I just remembered when I was crying for my parents to come get me and take me home. I was in foster care. I didn’t do nothing. Now my kids are being taken away. They didn’t do nothing.”

Wesley, like the large majority of the adults in Cat Lake, is addicted to prescription pain-killers. He is one of the rare users who agreed to speak publicly about why he turned to oxy, and his vicious — and, as yet, unsuccessful — struggle to kick the habit.

He jammed a ballcap on his head for the interview and pulled on a pair of khakis. He had been roused from his bed even though it was close to noon and he complained several times that the questions were keeping him up.

Wesley’s experience is being repeated on remote reserves across the country, with thousands of addicts trying to stare down their increasingly expensive and devastating ties to illegally traded prescription drugs.

“I made those bad choices for my kids, and my kids are paying the price for them,” Wesley says while standing outside the boarded up window of his dusty bungalow.

“I was the one getting them into trouble.”

Alcohol used to be the substance of choice for abusers on reserves. Nowadays, it’s prescription drugs such as Oxycontin or Percocet. Hundreds of people in Cat Lake alone are addicted, and thousands across the North.

Dealers and traffickers are reaping enormous profits from the misery on remote reserves. Local police can’t search bags or people on their way into the fly-in community 400 kilometres north of Thunder Bay unless they have a warrant or specific complaint. The pills are easy to hide and dealers in the tight-knit communities are protected by their friends and family. Prevention efforts are constantly butting up against sparse funding and resources.

“This drug is totally destroying homes and houses, the community, family well-being. It’s dividing and conquering,” says Mike Metatawabin, deputy grand chief of the region’s Nishnawbe Aski Nation.

The organization has ramped up its awareness campaign, and is campaigning for tough talk on reserves, as well more government funding for treatment. It was only at the urging of the association’s grand chief, Stan Beardy, that Wesley would come forward.

The outward signs of addiction are not usually as obvious as alcohol. But the needle usage is alarming. And the effect of prescription drug addiction is no less pervasive and devastating for family and friends, and as dangerous to the long-term health of the addict.

It’s also far more expensive. Now that Oxycontin is no longer in production, the price on reserves has spiked to as much as $1,000 for a full-strength pill in Cat Lake, officials say.

Wesley says he has been in a drug-induced daze for the past year.

“It was mostly just…slow, rough, getting myself into trouble. Things I don’t want to do, I do.”

Experts have a host of explanations for why First Nations communities have been so susceptible to prescription drug abuse — now known simply as PDA on many reserves, since the topic is so central to everyday life.

They point to inter-generational breakdown. Parents of today’s young adults were robbed of their parenting skills by residential schools. Their children, now grown up and having kids of their own, didn’t learn the crucial life skills needed to take care of a family.

Now, they’re seeing their own young children placed in foster homes in record numbers. Across Canada, there are now far more First Nations kids in care than at the height of the residential school system.

The experts also point to cultural breakdown on reserves — the loss of a way of life and attachment to the land that used to give families a deep sense of community and meaning. Poverty, crowded housing and poor education add to their vulnerability.

Wesley reflects some of that. He says he turned to oxy because he was bored, and because everyone else was doing it, and because he doesn’t know how to say No.

“I had a brain. I lost it. I lost my will power,” he said stoically. “I was always told to be somebody I’m not. I’m aboriginal, you know. I’m native….I guess in a way, I lost my way.”

Indeed, Cat Lake is turning to “land-based” treatment now in the hopes of reconnecting addicts with their culture and with nature, so they can replace oxy with something far healthier.

Recovering addicts are treated with medication and then spend a few weeks out in the bush, under supervision but with freedom to build a camp and hunt for food.

Wesley tried something like this last year.

“It helped me a lot. You don’t have to look over your shoulder…You’re free, eh?”

But like so many oxy addicts who try to quit, he relapsed.

At one point, he said he was out on a moose-hunting trip with some buddies. He said he was so weak and sick he couldn’t even pick up a moose head.

The withdrawal was just too much. So he went back to taking the contraband drugs, financing his habit by scraping together money from his family and playing poker.

He said he began to realize the extent of his problem recently when he was scrounging for cash to buy more, and caught himself wanting to rob someone.

“I know some day I’ll go too far. People start doing things they don’t want to,” Wesley muttered. “I’ve felt it. I felt it already. Start taking chances…what I’m saying is, I felt it: ‘should I rob this guy?’

“I don’t rob people.”

He has only been off the drugs for a few days now, and he is reaching out for some support. New programs are on the way — but slowly, and for very small numbers of addicts at a time.

Over on the nearby North Caribou Lake reserve, fisherman and mother Linda Kanate has given up trying to prevent her 32-year-old son from using oxy. Her house has been broken into a couple of times by addicts looking for supplies, and she would rather her son not stoop to that.

“My son does drugs. Oxycontin. He asks me for money. I just give it to him,” she says. “He says he has pains. That’s why he says he is taking it.”

At the nearby mine, managers test workers for exposure to drugs, so her son doesn’t stand much of a chance of landing work there, she said. She wishes he could go into detox, but he has tried to kick his habit in the past and not succeeded.

But while the range of explanations for the widespread addiction problem is complex and varied, Wesley is clearly conflicted about who is to blame. He talks about culture, he talks about pressure from society, lack of meaningful work, lack of support services and health care.

In the end, though, he places the blame squarely on himself.

“I make these choices. I stick this needle in my arm. Nobody ties me to a chair,” he says.

“I’ve got to reprogram my head, I guess.”

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