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Kelowna  

Little has changed in Kelowna since Helen Jennens' sons fatally OD'd

'This city is literally dying'

This is Part 3 of Castanet's series on the lack of addiction services in Kelowna. Follow these links for Part 1 and Part 2.

A Kelowna mother knows all too well about the lack of addiction services in Kelowna.

Both of Helen Jennens' sons died from drug overdoses – Rian from a combination of prescription pills in 2011 and Tyler from fentanyl in 2016. And while several years have passed since her family was forced to seek help, very little has changed.

“Access to affordable treatment is next to impossible, we are so under-resourced in Kelowna. We have 10 detox beds, that's about a third of what we need,” she said.

“You just have to look at the death count, it just mounts daily ... This city is literally dying, people are dying.”

Helen, who's now part of the nationwide advocacy group Moms Stop the Harm, recalls her son Tyler calling treatment centres across B.C. on a daily basis in 2015.

“Every day, religiously, Tyler would call: 'no beds today, no beds today,'” she said. “Tyler was very disappointed, frustrated, hopeless.

“They don't tell you what the wait times are, they can be anywhere from six weeks to three months. People in substance-use disorder can't wait three months ... It is a death sentence.”

Tyler had become hooked on opioids after he was prescribed Oxycontin when he ruptured his achilles tendon playing football in 2010. After his prescription ended, he turned to heroin, which he struggled with for about four years.

“We tried everything. We tried accessing recovery treatment centres all over British Columbia,” Helen said.

Because of the lack of local facilities, Tyler went through detox at his parents house on three separate occasions.

“They go through sheer hell in detox,” Helen said. “Vomiting, diarrhea, sweats, chills, hallucinations. It's really terrible.”

Finally, after getting into trouble with the law, a judge issued Tyler a court order to enter a residential treatment facility, fast-tracking him into Kamloops' Sage Health Centre, at a cost of $8,000 for his 28-day stay.

Six months after Tyler returned home from Sage, a friend he had made in recovery overdosed on heroin and died. Helen said the death “shattered” Tyler, and he relapsed soon after.

On Jan. 14, 2016, after having coffee with his ex-wife, Tyler called a dial-a-dope line and had 0.2 grams of what he thought was heroin delivered to him. The “heroin” turned out to be 100 per cent fentanyl. Tyler "never stood a chance" against the powerful opioid.

“My two sons had parents who adored them, lived in nice homes, had jobs, one of them had children,” Helen said. “We don't see it as anything but a street-entrenched problem, but it's way bigger than that.”

With Moms Stop the Harm, Helen advocates for providing a safe supply of drugs and decriminalizing their use, while working to eliminate the stigma around addiction. And of course, building adequate treatment and recovery centres.

“If we go back 25 years when Rian was in drug use and there were no treatment beds ... that's when we should have started working on this problem,” she said. “Now the horse is out of the barn and everybody's scrambling.”

Helen says the lack of supports her sons had makes their deaths all the more horrible.

“The suffering they endured before their death, the lack of dignity and respect, to be treated like a junkie, to have a health disorder that is just so minimized and under-treated and judged. It was horrible, they felt useless,” she said.

“Tyler used to say to me, 'I'm such a burden, I'm such a burden.' I'd take that burden back, I really would.”



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