Parents are breaking the law to stop their kids from overdosing

Sign up for our new VICE News Canada newsletter here

As Canada’s opioid overdose crisis worsens, a lack of recovery services is prompting desperate parents of teens suffering from addictions to take drastic measures — even if it means breaking the law.

One Ottawa-area father admitted publicly this week that he and his wife locked their 16-year-old daughter Paige inside their home to force her to detox after what seemed like a heavy night of drug use that likely included the deadly opioid fentanyl. For the last two years, she’s been severely addicted to opioids and in and out of the hospital.

“She looked like a junkie you’d see on a TV show,” Sean O’Leary said on Wednesday. “I made the decision if I don’t do something my kid might not be alive tomorrow … It’s getting to be a sad state when a 16-year-old child is close to death and the only thing I could do as a parent to help her is to break the law.

“I had a law firm ready to back me up.”

And so for the next 24 hours, the O’Learys kept Paige at home — something that is illegal to do to anyone 16 or older — until she found a phone and called 911 to get the cops to pick her up and take her to a local coffee shop. And while Paige eventually stopped using drugs altogether for five days, O’Leary says he hasn’t seen her since Tuesday.

“She’s doing drugs, doing xanax or coke right now,” he said. “I feel helpless all the time.”

He’s going public to shine a light on the struggles families like his face on a daily basis when it comes to children suffering from addictions who can’t get access to reliable, long-term help. The opioid crisis has claimed thousands of lives across the country in recent years, and has been declared as Canada’s worst public health emergency.

He said it’s basically impossible to get Paige into recovery programs and detox because they either don’t exist or are plagued with months-long waitlists. The rare time she tells her parents she’s ready for help, she’ll often get discharged from emergency rooms, or told to get on a waitlist for services that might last only a few months. When she was offered a bed once, she declined.

The situation is especially bad for teens with addictions in Ottawa and the surrounding suburbs, said O’Leary, which is why he started a group called We the Parents earlier this year to help raise awareness and provide support for other families in similar situations. He also keeps a list of 117 teens in the area who he says are addicted to hard drugs. In recent months, there has been a number of young teens in their community who have overdosed and died from fentanyl — including one 14-year-old girl.

“When your kid is ready for treatment, [and] Health Canada says substance use disorders are chronic diseases, there has to be help. And right now, there’s none,” said O’Leary. He said his group put in a request for provincial funding for a pilot program that would connect youth with addictions outpatient treatment and case workers. But the request was denied.

In addition to substantial funding commitments to close the gaps in addictions treatment, O’Leary says laws around consent of teens needs to change. “The law is set up to help kids who are abused. Understood,” he said. “But our kids who are addicted to drugs are using these laws to continue using drugs that are starting to kill them.”

Another Ontario teen, Chloe White, experienced a similar situation when she was 14 years old and grappled with drug addictions and anxiety.

Like O’Leary, her parents couldn’t find treatment for her at home, and they couldn’t force her into private treatment without her consent. “I needed the treatment in a residential treatment centre. My parents were looking and they were told that the time the wait was 14 to 16 months,” White told VICE News in a previous interview. So they turned to private treatments, which they could afford, but they still couldn’t send her there without her consent.

“I didn’t want to get help to get better. I wanted to end my life,” said White. “To ask that much of someone who cares so little of themselves is unrealistic.”

Eventually, they looked to the U.S., where parents have more control over their teen children. One day they told White they were going to take her over the border into Buffalo to go shopping. But they hired two transporters to take her in the middle of the night to a wilderness rehabilitation centre in Oregon, where she finally got help with her medical issues.

“It was extreme, but it saved my life,” said Chloe, whose mother co-founded an organization to help other parents like her. “No one should have to go to these extremes to get their kid into treatment.”

In May, a father in Victoria, B.C. called on the province to allow him to force his 15-year-old daughter into rehab for her heroin addiction.

“I don’t think she will go into rehab voluntarily until she hits rock bottom. But I don’t think there is another rock bottom. I think the only thing that could happen is for her to die,” the father, whose identity has not been released to protect his daughter, told the Vancouver Sun in May.

It’s not permitted for parents in B.C. to force their children who are minors into treatment, although some other provinces such as Ontario and Alberta have allowed parents to get special court orders to do so. But civil liberties advocates push back against granting parents these powers, saying that there’s not enough evidence to support the effectiveness of involuntary medical treatment.