When he turned seven, Tristan Parkes decided he would spend his birthday money buying groceries for the local food bank. The gesture came out of the blue for his parents, but his mom drove him to the grocery store and let him spend half, thinking the first grader may want to keep the remaining $75.
The son of a power engineer and a stay-at-home mom, Tristan had deep blue eyes and blond hair, then trimmed down to a buzz cut. He was goofy with a knack for deadpan humour. And he was timid. In the first grade, he continued riding his bicycle with training wheels because he was afraid of falling off.
Born in the mountain town of Grand Cache northwest of Jasper, Tristan grew up in three communities as his father kept the family moving in search of work. In Kitimat, B.C., Tristan was known among old-time fishermen on the local river as the “barefoot fisherman,” because he’d kick off his rubber boots and wade knee-deep into the water to cast his line.
The boy who had been nervous to play on a slide at the age of three would grow up to live a perilous lifestyle, eventually becoming addicted to dangerous drugs.
Leah Hennel / PostmediaLiam and Dana Parkes pose with a photo of their son Tristan Parkes, a 19-year-old who died from a fentanyl overdose in September.
During his teenage years in Fort McMurray, his parents began to see signs of trouble. He was angry. He had problems at school. He fell into bad crowds. His mother suspects it all started when he was picked on and bullied, and felt authority figures — teachers and principals — did little to stop it.
Tristan’s parents panicked when he stole jewelry from home to buy cocaine at the age of 15, and placed him under court-ordered detox. But things seemed manageable back then. After he moved to Calgary two years later, in July, 2013, he landed a well-paying construction job with the potential of an apprenticeship.
The young man, once worshipped by his younger sister and brother, began to slip away when he got into fentanyl. He spent six months on the street, later telling his mom, “You don’t even want to know what I did.” He stole family heirlooms. He pawned his mother’s engagement ring. He withdrew $6,000 from his mom’s bank account by forging cheques. He also convinced his parents to pay off a $10,000 drug debt and he called them to bail him out of jail.
Photo courtesy of the Parkes family.Tristan Parkes as a child.
In September, Tristan’s body was discovered in the janitor’s closet of an underground parkade, dead from what his parents believe was a fentanyl overdose.
He was 19.
His body may have been there, all alone, for days. His mother keeps his ashes in an urn on her bedside table, so he will never be alone again.
“It’s like watching a child die from a disease that slowly takes them,” said Liam Parkes, Tristan’s father.
“You watch them slowly deteriorate as a person for a long time. Love’s always there, but you lose trust, and hope slowly starts to diminish. And it’s sad when it ends; they don’t come out of it. Unfortunately, it’s a story that many people are seeing and hearing. It’s not one of a few; it’s one of many.
“It’s more like an epidemic.”
Fentanyl emerged from obscurity less than three years ago to become the single-largest public health threat in Alberta. Up to 100 times more potent than morphine, the drug is on track to become among the leading causes of death in Alberta this year. Both the premier and Calgary’s mayor are now warning about the severity and scope of the crisis.
This meteoric rise caught senior health officials by surprise, without an effective strategy to reduce the harm of abuse and prevent deaths at the outset. But critics say these officials should have been far more prepared.
The crisis traces back to March 2012, when the notorious prescribed painkiller OxyContin was pulled from pharmacy shelves in the face of mounting public outcry over widespread abuse, addiction and crime to feed that dependency. The crushable pills were replaced by a tamper-resistant painkiller called OxyNeo, designed to discourage misuse.
But Alberta health officials failed to ramp up treatment for those still addicted to the drug, leaving dealers with a big, lucrative pool of buyers to exploit with a new pill, said Dr. Hakique Virani, an addictions specialist from Edmonton.
It’s like watching a child die from a disease that slowly takes them
“We didn’t respond to the demand for treatment and instead drug traffickers responded to the demand for opiates,” Virani said.
“We’re seeing parents losing their kids. We’re seeing kids losing their parents… We’re seeing a mess that’s characterized by death and violence and the destruction of lives and families and communities.”
In 2011, the year before OxyNeo was introduced in pharmacies, six Albertans died from fentanyl overdoses, followed by 29 a year later. As dealers and users were unable to crush, sniff and inject the new pills, they turned to fentanyl. The death toll doubled almost every year since: 66 fatal overdoses in 2013, 120 the next year and 213 in the first nine months of 2015, with forecasts it will reach, if not surpass, 300 by year’s end.
Ed Kaiser / PostmediaDr. Hakique Virani is a public health physician who treats patients with addictions in Edmonton.
Fentanyl is the most potent opioid available to treat chronic pain, though the pills showing up in Alberta’s drug trade are made not by pharmaceutical drug companies, but by illicit dealers with no controls over dosage. Known on the street as green beans, shady eighties and fake oxy, fentanyl can be lethal in small amounts. An overdose shuts off oxygen to the brain and heart, killing the user in minutes.
According to police, the drug is now as easy to obtain on Calgary streets as marijuana.
It’s also ubiquitous on the web. A search online reveals myriad merchants are selling pure fentanyl powder, patches and lollipops. Some suppliers guarantee delivery, which means if shipments are stopped at the border, they will be sent again, ensuring Canadian dealers receive their product.
The victims of this epidemic have not only been marginalized users, but also the young and the privileged. The demographics hardest hit by all opioid deaths in 2013, the latest year for which data is available, were Albertans aged 20 to 34. Virani believes this trend has continued. In August, Alberta’s health authority reported two-thirds of fentanyl overdoses in Calgary occurred in suburban neighbourhoods.
This confluence of factors served as a backdrop for Tristan Parkes’ fall from the comforts of a loving family and middle-class suburbia to end up dead in a janitor’s closet. As the crisis shows no signs of abating — threatening to continue leaving more families in shambles — Tristan’s parents now fear their 16-year-old son is at risk of following his brother’s path.
When Andrew Nelson took fentanyl for the first time with his childhood friend Tristan Parkes, he spent much of the time searching Google to find out exactly what he had taken. Websites described fentanyl as a synthetic opiate that produces euphoria, but there were no warnings the highly potent drug could kill him, unless it was mixed with uppers, such as cocaine or ecstasy.
It was August 2014, when Alberta’s fentanyl crisis had already taken hold.
By the end of the year, the province’s death toll would hit 120, but authorities would not sound the alarm publicly for months. Andrew and Tristan, who met in Fort McMurray in the fourth grade, were on their way to Chasing Summer, an annual music festival at Fort Calgary widely known for wild partying and drug abuse. Ten people would be hospitalized for overconsumption of drugs and alcohol by the end of the weekend.
Fentanyl users often describe the high as the best sensation they’d ever felt, a sense of warmth and bliss that envelops the body. The drug produces euphoria indistinguishable from the effects of heroin and morphine. Once addiction takes hold, users take the drug to avoid the agony of withdrawal: anxiety, tremors, diarrhea, vomiting, blurred vision.
Andrew, who had made the trip to Calgary from Fort McMurray, didn’t understand the street hype surrounding the drug. He didn’t like the high.
“It was just kind of zombie-mode for a little bit, not something for me,” he said. “Tristan told me about it lots of times before, but I didn’t actually know what it was. In the beginning, I was freaking out about it, but I spent my entire high Googling what fentanyl was.”
Tristan and Andrew had been inseparable since they were children. When they were teenagers they started producing electronic music as a duo, something they hoped to parlay into a career. Looking back, Andrew said these ambitions likely played a role in their never finishing high school.
Gavin Young / Postmediailbert Wolfchild practises injecting an orange during a course on using Naloxone to help stop fatal fentanyl overdose deaths on the Kainai Blood reserve in Southern Alberta.
The friends had experimented with drugs since they were about 14, but Andrew said their use never became a major problem while they were together. “Me and Tristan, we used to dabble in all kinds of different shit, but I was never a repeat user.”
Around the same time they started messing with drugs, Andrew began noticing changes in his best friend’s behaviour. One moment Tristan would be brimming with confidence and zeal for life, “ready to take on the world.” An hour later his mood would take a deep dive to the point that he’d confide in Andrew: “I want to kill myself; my life is worthless.”
“I always just talked to him,” Andrew said. “I didn’t really have to say anything specific, just talk him down. Don’t escalate anything. Keep him occupied. There’s no magic word to bring somebody down; you just got to wait it out with him, I guess.
“He just had this internal struggle that drugs gave him a relief from almost, a peace.”
Andrew said he doesn’t know for sure when Tristan started taking fentanyl as Tristan moved from Fort McMurray to Calgary in the summer of 2013. Andrew suspects Tristan began using in November the same year, but he wouldn’t realize how badly the drug had gripped his friend for another 18 months or so.
He just had this internal struggle that drugs gave him a relief from almost, a peace
Tristan’s parents were equally in the dark. A few days after Christmas, 2014, his father found him snorting fentanyl next to his 15-year-old brother in the basement of their family home in the southeast community of Copperfield.
“He kept saying it’s harmless, so I said, ‘Let me take some then,’ not with any intent to take it, of course, and he knocks it off the table,” Liam Parkes said. “He’s telling me that amount would kill the average person.”
At the time, the father thought the episode was his son hitting rock bottom. “But it was just the beginning of a nightmare.”
By the time Tristan Parkes was first suspected of using fentanyl, health authorities were becoming concerned the drug was available in Alberta. The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse said in an alert to health officials across the country that counterfeit oxycodone pills believed to contain fentanyl had turned up in Alberta and in British Columbia during the last two months of 2013.
The alert, issued in February 2014, said lab tests of seized fake oxycodone tablets found an overwhelming majority of the pills contained fentanyl, raising fears that users who believed they were taking the far less powerful drug were at high risk of overdose.
Still, there were no public warnings.
Dr. Esther Tailfeathers, a physician on the Blood reserve in southern Alberta, said she was unaware of the unfolding phenomenon when she started seeing an increase of overdoses, sometimes two or three in a shift, in August and September, 2014. Within months, there would be 10 deaths on the reserve.
Colleen De Neve / PostmediaDr. Esther Tailfeathers, one of the community physicians in Stand-Off, Ab., spoke about the current situation with overdoses.
Tailfeathers knew the drug was an opioid because patients were responding to medication that reverses opioid overdoses. Band authorities would also come to learn that fentanyl was being sold as oxycodone on the reserve.
“It was basically something we stumbled into, and we had no idea what the impact was going to be,” she said. “We didn’t have any blueprints to go by, nobody saying, this is what’s going to happen to your community.”
Before long, the reserve’s drug problem would explode into a crisis that was out of control.
“When it kept happening,” Tailfeathers said, “it was like a natural disaster where something happens and you feel you have no power to stop it.”
The First Nation would eventually see a dramatic decline in the pace of overdoses and deaths after a comprehensive response: a community-wide awareness campaign, a police crackdown on dealers, increased access to addictions treatment and the distribution of medicine that reverses the effects of overdoses.
Dr. Michael Trew, then Alberta’s chief addictions and mental health officer, said there had been strong indications by late 2014 that fentanyl was no longer a minor player in the drug world but had triggered an escalating death toll that was unprecedented for a single substance.
Around the same time, senior health officials realized the fentanyl that users had been taking did not come from pharmacies, but from the illicit drug trade. The entire supply chain, from production of pills to transportation and sale, was in the hands of criminals, with no controls over dosage.
Trew knew any single approach would fail to control the brewing crisis on its own. The unusual spike in deaths demanded a broad strategy to reduce the harm of abuse, treat those who are addicted and curtail wider dependence on opioids by moving away from prescribing them to treat pain.
To get things moving there was a need for a culture shift in Alberta, especially among politicians, Trew said. Many legislators had long been resistant to measures that reduce the harm of drug abuse, from overdose prevention to safe consumption sites. This reluctance, he said, was rooted in the commonly held belief that addiction is a choice or a character flaw, and that it’s up to users to control their dependence.
It was like a natural disaster where something happens and you feel you have no power to stop it
Health officials knew that naloxone, a prescribed medicine that reverses the effects of opioid overdoses, saves lives. It’s an injection that revives users when fentanyl cuts off oxygen to their brain and heart, allowing them to breathe again. Emergency rooms and paramedics carry naloxone, but Trew and others wanted to get the medicine into the hands of users so friends and family could stop their next overdose, and so users could save each other.
By January, 2015, the antidote had already been available at 60 sites across British Columbia, including clinics and needle exchanges, where staff had trained 1,300 opioid users to administer the drug. The take-home program had reversed 170 overdoses since it was introduced in 2012.
In Alberta, meanwhile, only a single clinic in Edmonton dispensed naloxone to opioid users.
“If you go back 18 months,” Trew said, “there was no willingness from a political perspective to openly discuss harm reduction.”
While Trew and other health officials prepared to transform the province’s public health strategy in early 2015, Albertans weren’t notified about the fentanyl threat in part because officials had no idea how bad it was about to get. “At that point, I don’t know that there was much sense that this was going to have the degree of lethality associated with it,” he said. Another consideration was that revealing the rise of a potent drug could entice more users to try it.
“It’s always a very delicate balance with how you deal with any kind of public information to that community because you don’t want to unwittingly make people curious,” Trew said. “It’s a tough call.”
Tristan Parkes was born into a loving family with a father who earned enough that his children would never want for anything. But within three months of his dad walking in on him snorting fentanyl in late 2014, he would be living on the street.
At first, there was hope and forgiveness, even after Tristan confessed that he racked up a $10,000 drug debt. He told his parents he had been dealing fentanyl and using his own supply. His parents paid off the debt, and they sent him to detox in January, 2015. After he was out, his mother encouraged him to seek treatment, but he resisted. And she was powerless to force him. He was 18.
Photo courtesy of the Parkes familyTristan Parkes, seen here as a boy, robbed banks to fuel his drug addiction as a teenager.
She had tried to help him before. Back when Tristan was in school, he saw a psychologist and a counsellor after his parents became concerned about his mental health. He was picked on and bullied, and believed teachers didn’t do enough to stop it. His mother once spotted him standing all alone in the schoolyard during lunch hour, hiding from his peers. After a few sessions, Tristan stopped seeing the psychologist and counsellor. His mother felt helpless to do anything about it.
“He had been let down so many times by figures of authority, teachers, things like that, that he became extremely defiant to adults,” said Dana Parkes. “He was a sad boy, and he was an angry boy, and (the drugs) were almost like a self-medicating thing.”
Tristan’s first time in adult detox did little to persuade him to stay away from fentanyl, but his dependence would be shaken one morning in March, 2015. He had been over at a friend’s house getting high the night before. Keegan Kostiuk was supposed to drive his mother to work the next morning, but he appeared to have slept in. Tristan woke up to Keegan’s mom screaming after finding her 18-year-old son dead from a fentanyl overdose.
Keegan had earlier struggled with a drug problem, having been arrested for selling ecstasy and pot, though his mom doesn’t believe he was ever into fentanyl. He had been clean for three months before that night in March, when his mom decided to bend her rule against having friends over for the night, because he had been doing so well.
“A lot of people were really angry with Tristan because he was the one who had the fentanyl,” said Dana Parkes.
Leah Hennel / PostmediaLianne Sander with a photo of her son Keegan Kostiuk in his room. Kostiuk died from a fentanyl overdose at the age of 18.
But Lianne Sander, Keegan’s mother, doesn’t blame Tristan. “We all know Keegan made his own decision that night.”
A redhead who called himself “Gingger” on Facebook, Keegan loved baseball from the moment he picked up the sport, and had been preparing for the spring season. He was a fun-loving kid who wrote his own music, played guitar and had recently taken up rap.
“Keegan was my little bear,” Sander wrote on Facebook after he died. “From the day he was born he hugged so tight. His smile lit up a room. He was the funniest kid I ever knew…
“Yesterday I felt his arms around me and his sweet kisses on my cheek. My beautiful little ginger baby will always be with me. Missed by so many.”
After Keegan died, Tristan admitted himself into detox, but it took four or five days before he secured a bed. It was his second time at Renfrew Recovery Centre in Calgary, which placed him lower on the priority list.
The same day he got out, he tried to cash a forged cheque in his mother’s name, but the bank declined him. Tristan had previously stolen $6,000 from his mom’s account by forging signatures on a blank chequebook he found hidden in his parents’ bedroom. The latest attempt was enough to burn what little trust that remained. His mother kicked him out.
At some level, you’re just kind of seeing this unfolding in front of your eyes, and you’re almost dumbfounded about what you do to stop this, and what’s possible to do
In the weeks that followed, Tristan routinely called home asking for money, but his mother shut him down. One day in March he called from the Strathmore hospital where he was treated for anxiety, but his mom refused to pick him up, still angry about all the stealing and lying.
“It was anger at ourselves for paying things off and nothing changing and being the classic definition of insane: Doing the same things over and over again expecting different results,” Dana said. Kicking him out and refusing to pick him up were among the most difficult decisions she has ever made. “Nobody wants to see their children on the streets. Nobody wants to see their children hurting or in pain.”
The scale of the fentanyl crisis began to come into focus for Dr. Trew in late January or early February when the medical examiner’s office shared with health officials the final tally of deaths in 2014. Early indications suggested there were 61 fatal overdoses that year, but the final report revealed there were 120, a stunning figure that would not be publicly released until March.
“The degree that they had jumped was, I think, surprising and disturbing to everyone that saw them,” Trew said. “At some level, you’re just kind of seeing this unfolding in front of your eyes, and you’re almost dumbfounded about what you do to stop this, and what’s possible to do.”
Efforts to address the crisis would soon be underway. Dr. Nicholas Etches, the medical officer of health for the Calgary area, warned senior health officials in January that not only were deaths from fentanyl and other opioids on the rise, but so were admissions at emergency rooms, acute care centres and intensive care units. He called for a provincewide naloxone program, which would place the antidote into the hands of users.
Leah Hennel / PostmediaDr. Michael Trew, a senior health official who was at the forefront of the crisis response for Fentanyl .
“This was recognized that this was a public health crisis, especially with what was happening in the Blood Tribe,” Etches said.
The fastest way to distribute naloxone was to replicate the model at Edmonton’s needle exchange, Streetworks, where a physician prescribes the medicine and trains users to administer it. Five other needle exchanges in Alberta would be selected to hand out the first wave of naloxone, but there would be delays to secure the green light. In late March, three months after Etches’ presentation, then-health minister Stephen Mandel approved the harm reduction program and earmarked $300,000 to distribute more than 3,000 kits, considered a breakthrough for Alberta.
“Within government, you try and get attention up the chain, and that needs to go through the channels; sometimes the channels are fast and sometimes they are not,” Trew said. “Ultimately, it did get to the minister’s office.”
Around the same time that Mandel gave his approval, RCMP and Alberta Health Services issued their first formal public warning about fentanyl, revealing for the first time on March 18 that more than 100 Albertans had died from the drug last year. In their attempt to convince Albertans to stay away from fentanyl, authorities were careful not to call the drug strong or powerful, fearing these terms could attract more users, but instead they called it toxic.
Calgary police had told the Herald for weeks throughout early 2015 that fentanyl was not a problem locally. But they issued their own warning on March 25, a week after Mounties and health officials delivered theirs. Fentanyl would become among the Calgary Police Service’s top priorities and the No. 1 concern for its drug unit.
As for health officials, a major focus in early 2015 was getting the naloxone program up and running. The antidote would be distributed to six needle exchanges in July, seven months after Etches made his recommendation. Two other needle exchanges would later obtain it.
In October, with the death toll rising, the province’s health authority activated an emergency command centre — previously used to monitor measles and H1N1 outbreaks — to co-ordinate a response to the crisis.
Within the next two months, Alberta earmarked 2,000 more naloxone kits to dispense provincewide, with plans to have emergency room staff hand out the antidote, though officials have still not finalized the full distribution plan. More health care workers were given authority to prescribe and administer the medicine.
Leah Hennel / PostmediaStaff Sgt. Martin Schiavetta of the CPS Drug Unit holds some fentanyl during a press conference at CPS headquarters in Calgary on August 13, 2015.
“We recognize we need to do more,” Etches said. “We absolutely recognize the gravity of the situation, so we need to get more naloxone kits out into the community. And we need to do it faster. And we need to make it more accessible for Albertans.
“And that’s what we’re working to do.”
Tristan Parkes was arrested and charged twice when he was living on the street, once for theft under $5,000. He pleaded guilty and received a $200 fine.
In July, his mom received a phone call from a police detective searching for her son, then wanted in a pair of bank robberies. He was accused of walking into two northwest banks earlier that month and presenting tellers with a note demanding money before fleeing with cash. He was never tried for the crimes, but his mother believes he was in debt with drug dealers at the time.
The bank robberies were part of a major increase in property and violent crimes in Calgary. Break-ins, vehicle thefts, car prowlings, home invasions, commercial robberies and bank robberies were all on the rise in the first 10 months of the year, up by at least 45 per cent over the same period in 2014. The number of commercial break-ins nearly doubled, up to more than 3,000 between January and October.
“The increased crime rate, the commercial break-ins, the house break-ins, the auto thefts, the gang violence on our streets, these are all related to the control of drugs,” said Staff Sgt. Martin Schiavetta of the Calgary police drug unit. “We’re speaking about fentanyl, which plays a major part in this.”
When Tristan was arrested and charged in connection with bank robberies in August, his parents put up $5,000 for bail. He was home for a day before he took off, breaking his court-imposed house arrest conditions, but police caught up with him again within a week.
By mid-September, 2015, Tristan was back at home. After taking him to court one day to register for probation, his mother took a nap. When she woke up, he was gone. On his bed she found a letter.
Leah Hennel / PostmediaLiam and Dana Parkes worry their second son is headed down the same path.
“Please know I love you all very much,” Tristan wrote. “But I can understand me being here is just a burden and me being here is going to bring more focus on (my brother) and he’ll end up on the street and I can’t have that. I made mistakes and I’ll pay for them. Call me in (to police). I more than likely (will) be turning myself in.
“I love you guys more than anything and I’m deeply sorry. But I won’t burden (you) anymore, not until the law isn’t a factor. Sorry to always let you guys down. But I don’t wanna let you guys down anymore or burden you at this time in my life.
“Much, much, much love. Your son, Tristan.”
At the bottom of the letter he wrote: “Sorry. I love you.”
Tristan’s 16-year-old brother saw him at a northeast mall later that day. His brother implored him to return home, but he refused. They agreed to meet again the next day, both telling each other, “I love you.” Two days later, on Sept. 18, Tristan’s body was discovered by a janitor in a custodial closet in the parkade of an apartment building.
Dana Parkes was alone at home when two officers knocked on the door.
“I don’t know if I knew what I was going to hear but he said twice, ‘There’s no easy way to tell you this,’ and I kind of interrupted him, until the third time when they said they had found his body,” she said.
“And the first words out of my mouth were, ‘Are you sure it’s him?’ which is horrible, because if it wasn’t him then somebody else had lost a child. But at that moment, I didn’t care. I just didn’t want to think about my child not being here,” the mother said.
“Like I told the police officer, I prepared for this day. I wrote his obituary in my head many times. I just never expected it to actually happen. And the reality is so much worse than what I imagined it could be.”
I wrote his obituary in my head many times. I just never expected it to actually happen
Almost a year after Dr. Etches warned his colleagues about an escalating number of fentanyl deaths and emergency room visits, the crisis rages on with no signs of slowing down. The death toll in 2016 may be the same as this year’s, according to Dr. Trew.
“The number of deaths due to opiates in North America has been steadily rising for over a decade. And we need to, at the very least, get that curve to flatten out,” said Trew, whose contract as Alberta’s chief addictions and mental health officer was not renewed in September, when the province eliminated the position.
“If we don’t do what we’re doing now, it would almost certainly get worse.”
For more than a year, Trew has been working on contract with Alberta Health Services, one day a week, to identify measures to expand access to methadone and suboxone, replacement drugs that satisfy cravings for opioids but do not produce euphoria.
In April, the only publicly run methadone clinic in Calgary had patients waiting eight to 12 weeks for treatment. Another snapshot of demand, taken in early December, found clients were waiting six to eight weeks, which observers said is long enough for someone on the wait list to die before they receive treatment.
Trew said his project has been complex in part because it involves encouraging more physicians to treat opioid addictions. Doctors with methadone patients must carry out laborious tasks, such as filling out detailed prescription renewal forms by hand on triplicate sheets, and searching health databases to ensure their clients are on proper medications.
These doctors are paid the same as those checking for high blood pressure without all the added paperwork. Providing methadone doctors with assistance to manage this administrative burden runs the risk of “opening the flood gates for all sorts of other demands” by other physicians, Trew said.
“Over the last year, we’ve been getting more agreement from more and more people that something needs to happen, and we’ve got some ideas about how to do that,” Trew said. “Unfortunately, it’s progressed more slowly than I would have liked.”
Senior decision-makers at the province’s health authority and Alberta Health have been considering a proposal to open access to treatment since at least October, though no decisions have been made. Trew said he hopes these efforts, once approved, would increase spaces for 1,000 new patients within a year.
“When people’s lives are chaotic, and they come into a decision that they need to get out of this, and the only way to do that is to move into treatment, then you need to help them as soon as possible,” he said. “Saying, ‘Get on this waiting list and we’ll see you in a few weeks,’ is nobody’s idea of the right way to do that.”
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Since her eldest son died, Dana Parkes has found green residue on Q-tips and Kleenex lying around her Copperfield home, signs that her 16-year-old boy has been snorting fentanyl. Conversations in which she’s tried to convince him to stop have been tough.
“He goes, ‘I lost a brother, mom; you don’t know what it’s like,’” Dana said. “I said, ‘I lost a child, and you don’t know what that’s like. And I don’t want to make it two. And you don’t want your little sister to have lost both of her big brothers.’”
A few weeks ago, Dana’s 12-year-old daughter confessed that, just because she doesn’t cry as much as her mom, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t cry at all; she does it alone, in bed. The seventh grader has become protective of her brother during arguments over his drug use.
“She says, stop yelling at him; you’re going to make him leave like Tristan. And then he’ll die, too.”
Things may be getting better. In the past month, Liam Parkes has noticed a shift in his son’s behaviour; he appears to be in search of passion in his life; he’s writing more music — some rap, house and techno — giving his father hope he’ll find something to keep him grounded and out of the drug world.
“As a parent you’re never going to stop worrying about him,” the father said. “All I can do is make sure that he knows that we’re there for him, and that Tristan’s death wasn’t for nothing.”