Fentanyl survivor says it's time to provide addicts with safe drugs

When Gordon Smedley was coming down from a crack cocaine high, he tried to ease the crash with what he thought was heroin.

Instead, he says, he blacked out and woke up to the sight of paramedics and firefighters above him.

Smedley's heroin was laced with fentanyl — and now he has a loud message for the people behind B.C.'s opioid strategy: provide addicts with safe drugs.

"I hear the ambulance sirens going off 15 times a day," said Smedley, who lives in his car in downtown Vancouver. "We got to get this stuff completely off the streets."

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Smedley has been addicted to drugs for most of his life. He entered a recovery program 15 years ago, after he finally came to terms with his addiction.

"Since that time, I have been clean and sober more than not — but it's an ongoing struggle," he said.

He still uses, saying the addiction overpowers him a few times a month. He has a naloxone kit inside his car, and says he's more than willing to use it to save someone else's life.

Pharmaceutical-grade opiates

And while naloxone kits have been proven to save lives, 622 British Columbians have died after overdosing on illicit drugs as of October 2016. That number already far exceeds the 397 deaths related to overdoses that occurred in 2015.

When Smedley looks at the numbers, he can see only one solution.

"If we could somehow wave a magic wand and have pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, opiates and even marijuana available to addicts, you would see those 622 people that overdosed this year, that number would drop like a stone," he said.

Pharmaceutical-grade opioids have sparked the interest of researchers in the Lower Mainland, and results have been encouraging. The SALOME project, for example, has treated more than 100 patients in the Downtown Eastside with pharmaceutical-grade heroin to study its efficacy. After 88,000 injections, there were only 14 recorded overdoses and no deaths.

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However, B.C. doctors cannot prescribe the treatment to patients, which forces addicts to turn to street drugs — and risk consuming fentanyl, says Smedley.

"It's very, very common knowledge on the street. Anybody you talk to who is using is well aware of the fact that pretty much anything you buy downtown is going to be laced with fentanyl."

And the willingness to take that risk, he says, illustrates the power of addiction.

Rethinking addiction

"Addiction is a killer. It's a wildly life-threatening, irrational set of behaviours. We really don't know much in the way of answers."

Smedley wants policy makers to acknowledge addiction as a mental illness, and says the only way to fight it is to develop a, "comprehensive mental health treatment that deals with the absolutely crippling lack of self-esteem that leads people into drug addiction in the first place."

He says they might need to rethink their interpretation of the term "addiction" overall.

"[Addiction] is not a desire to get high — it's a desire to kill the pain away of knowing you don't belong."

With files from CBC's BC Almanac and CBC's On the Coast