Tara Finnessy got off fentanyl two years ago.
Before then, the Ottawa woman had been an off-and-on user since her fiancé’s accidental death in 1999. “I was in pain and I wanted to not be in pain. That’s how I started my journey with fentanyl,” she said.
She had been prescribed other opioids in the past, but very quickly turned to fentanyl, drawn to its potency.
“The fentanyl was everywhere and it was cheap at that time,” she said. “There were people getting prescriptions who didn’t quite know the street value of this drug. So I was able to obtain like 100 microgram patches for like $5. It was crazy. It was just crazy.”
If used as prescribed, one transdermal patch might last a patient 72 hours. Finnessy was using about one a day, she said, chewing it or extracting the drug and injecting it for a faster high.
Now she’s on methadone therapy and helping in outreach programs for other drug users. And from them, she’s hearing even more about fentanyl now than before – particularly the new form that’s causing so many deaths in Western Canada: powdered fentanyl.
Powdered fentanyl is a relatively new arrival to the nation’s capital, and it has local health authorities and outreach workers worried.
Thirteen years ago, Ottawa had 100 emergency room visits from unintentional drug overdoses. In 2015 it was 205 — something Ottawa Public Health attributes partly to fentanyl.