Dangerous drug supply increases risks

Most of his teeth have fallen out. His arms and ankles are studded with needle marks. His hands are covered with burn scars.

- ROSIE DIMANNO

Four overdose calls over three days last week in Toronto have prompted a public health warning about a suspicious drug on the city's streets.

What’s somewhat astonishing is that this man — he wouldn’t agree to have his name used — has been a drug addict for the past quarter century. Crack, crank (methamphetamine), fentanyl, speedballs, hotshots. And somehow he’s still alive to tell the woeful tale.

“I’m a functioning addict,” he explains, sitting on the stoop of a safe-injection site. “I worked my whole life.” Well not quite, not for a long time. “I had a wife, kids, a house.” Taught welding. All of it gone now and living on the streets for many years, a hardscrabble existence.

He says it began with painkillers prescribed after falling off a horse, wrecked his scapula. But every addict has a story. He claims he thrice got clean — for eight years, for six years, the last time for 72 days. He’s always, eventually, succumbed to the lure of the numbing high. “It’s the pain, I’m always in pain.”

He is careful, though, at least to the extent that he consumes his opioids at safe-consumption sites where the drugs are “clean,” not cut with all the unknown additions mixed in by street dealers. Nitazenes, for instance, a new synthetic opioid that’s 10 times stronger than fentanyl, which is 50 times stronger than heroin.

So he has a word of advice for those who aren’t taking precautions. “You’re playing with your life. Doesn’t matter if you’re snorting it, smoking it, injecting it. Chances are you’re going to end up dead.”