Pain pushed her to drugs

Photo: The Canadian Press

Lorna Bird says she was forced to buy street drugs when her doctor cut off her prescription.

Desperate for relief from unbearable pain following knee surgery, Lorna Bird says she was forced to buy drugs from the Downtown Eastside streets of Vancouver when her doctor stopped prescribing an opioid in response to new standards aimed at preventing fatal overdoses.

"I started with heroin because I couldn't stand the pain," Bird said, recalling her fears about dying from fentanyl-laced street drugs because "everybody was croaking" and she didn't want her grandchildren dealing with that outcome.

Bird, 60, said the prescription opioid hydromorphone, which is five times more potent than morphine, numbed the pain after her surgery in December 2014 but her doctor tapered off the dosage before stopping it despite her continuing pain.

Experts say Bird is among thousands of Canadians facing the predicament of getting pain-numbing street drugs after being weaned or taken off opioids to which they've become addicted.

Bird said concerns about contaminated heroin had her spending $100 a day on cocaine instead, but she tries not to use it alone because she worries about overdosing if the powerful painkiller fentanyl has been added to anything she buys on a street corner.

Benedikt Fischer, a senior scientist at the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, said between 500,000 and one million Canadians are addicted to opioids because doctors have overprescribed the narcotics for years.

"The new guidelines are basically an attempt to turn around a huge freighter ship that's moving in one direction, and now we're doing a 180-degree turn," Fischer said, adding a "catastrophic" number of deaths could result if more patients resort to taking street drugs.