Teresa Michelle Gratton was a white, 50 y/o suburban mother who lived near London, Ontario with her husband, Herb, who she’d been with for 32 years. And like a lot of people who seem to have their shit together, Teresa didn’t.
Have her shit together, that is.
She suffered from chronic pain and dutifully took the prescription opioids her doctor wrote her. Dilaudid. But they weren’t enough to cover the constant agony she lived in, so she supplemented her supply by buying more Dilaudid on the street.
It might sound stupid or risky, but actually, in this matter, Teresa was smart. She knew that if her urine tests showed any opioid other than Dilaudid, she’d be taken off her prescription. The thought terrified her.
However there remained a chance that she’d be taken off anyway. Doctors were being told to cut down on prescribing opioids, or to have quotas, in which they could hand out only so many pills per month, meaning that patients who had been managing their pain for years were now being cut back, some as much as 50%, and were now in constant pain. Some committed suicide. Others tried it Teresa’s way.
From 2013 to 2017 there was a sharp rise in the price of opiates due to the avalanche of negative publicity opiates were getting. There were a few rational voices calling for patience and logic, but the pendulum had swung the the other way. In the 1980s, morphine and its derivatives were given out only in hospitals. If you had chronic pain, you just had to live with it (or kill yourself, unable to face another day with it), or try Aleve or Aspirin or some other shit that did not work for intractable pain. By the 1990s, doctors, encouraged mightily by Big Pharma, were told to consider pain management from a different angle. If a contractor has a back problem that 4 Percocet a day can manage, how can you look that man in the eye and say “well, we have the means to help you, but we can’t because you’ll get physically dependent.”
But if a physical disability is already controlling this man’s life, how is a physical dependency on opiates worse? Because Reagan’s JUST SAY NO campaign characterized drug users as amoral scumbags rather than people who just wanted to live their lives as pain-free as possible. Doctors bought into this new way of thinking, some say a tad too enthusiastically, and by 1999 OxyContin was being prescribed liberally across the United States and Canada. It wasn’t til 2010 that critics started sounding alarms, but by then it was too late. Way, way too many people had become addicted and were resorting to criminal or cartoonishly desperate ways to get drugs.
I heard a (possibly apocraphyl) story about a man in Florida who traded his Cadillac Escalade for one 80mg pill of OxyContin. Break-ins and robberies were on the rise, even among the “celebrity” class. Former first-round NFL draft pick (second overall, just behind Peyton Manning) Ryan Leaf spent time in jail for breaking into houses in both Texas and Montana in search of OxyContin. On June 29, 2015, the Los Angeles Kings of the NHL announced that they had terminated Mike Richards "for a material breach of the requirements" of his contract following his arrest at the Canadian border on charges of possessing Oxycodone without a prescription. Songwriter/rapper/actor Lil Peep struggled his whole short life with opiates and they are thought to have played a role in his untimely death. Rush Limbaugh got busted for taking opiates that weren’t prescribed to him. Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy “had a guy at Walgreen’s” who would sell him plastic bags of Vicodin. (What I would have given, back in my Oxy days, to “have a guy” who sold me loose Oxy pills in a plastic bag from my local Rexall or Shopper’s Drug Mart. But I’m not Jeff Tweedy. I didn’t write “Jesus, Etc” so I don’t get special privileges.)
Like Warner Bros hostile initial reaction to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot1, public reaction to the opiate crisis was inevitably angry and demanding. Since politicians trumpet public desires, by 2015 almost all politicians were parroting, I mean echoing the public’s demand to “get opioids off the streets!”
Except opioids are and were not street drugs. They are prescription drugs, each pill identical to the one you took before and the one you will take after.
Far from the game of Russian Roulette one plays when taking fentanyl, prescription drugs are generally safe and hard to OD on. Overdoses aren’t completely unheard of but they are very rare with Percocet, OxyContin, and Dilaudid. These drugs don’t come from criminal drug cartels. They are manufactured to exact specifications by pharmaceutical companies and are prescribed by doctors. Which is why doctors embraced anti-opiate sentiment with the same savage, unthinking glee as any other sudden rise of an opposition group. So long as it meant the finger didn’t get pointed at them, the doctors, who were the drug dealers in this situation and deeply uncomfortable about heightened scrutiny of their prescribing practices, blamed Big Pharma. Except: You can make all the drugs you want but you need to people to sell them or you won’t make much $. The doctors were every bit as culpable as the pharmaceutical companies, if not more.
Many doctors have admitted prescribing opiates to “frequent visitor” patients, ones who come in every week or so whining about a bruised knee. The doctors essentially turned these hypochondriacs into heroin addicts. It happened to me, except I didn’t go see the doctor often. But when I tore my meniscus in 2015, I was prescribed OxyContin. From the very first pill, I understood that I was in trouble. I have a very addictive personality and lying on my back, high as Jesus, I thought “these pills are filling a hole in me. A pill-sized hole that I’m afraid only more pills can fill.” By late 2016 I was buying heroin, which unbeknownst to me, contained fentanyl. Here’s what I have to say to people who think I have a weak constitution or am weak-willed: Go acquire yourself a fentanyl addiction. Use fent for 3 months minimum. Then try to quit. Then call me weak-willed. Because you have no idea what it is like. People used to say quitting heroin was one of the more difficult substances to quit. Well, as the newspapers report, fentanyl is 50 to 100 times stronger than plain morphine (which is what heroin is). Therefore it stands to reason it would be 50 to 100 times harder to quit. No? Is my logic wrong here?
There is also something anti-opiate crusaders don’t seem to understand: if people are in pain, or sick, they will find ways to lessen that pain or get less sick. If that means trying the Darkweb, fine. If that means stealing a doctor’s script pad and forging his signature, as Teresa Gratton had done, then that was fine too. None of these people were hurting anyone. They simply wanting their own hurting to stop. How is this behavior put on par with murder, rape and violence? Why the fuck was Gratton in a maximum security facility when the very agency that caught her, Canada’s Border Services, stated publicly that she shouldn’t have been in one? There was room in far less punitive facilities, ones that would have allowed her to start a Methadone program immediately. But that’s not what happened. They let Teresa Gratton, pale and sick and 50 years old and in extreme opiate withdrawal, rot for a week before deciding to “Do Something About It,” but it was too late and they killed her.
By 2017, Gratton was having a very difficult time purchasing Dilaudid. Like me, she was staving off the switch to heroin for as long as she could. So she resorting to shoplifting random shit from Walmart so she could re-sell it. Now, I understand supply and demand. More and more people wanted something there was less and less off, so the price skyrocketed. I know well-meaning folk like the titular lead guy in Netflix’s The Pharmacist think they are doing good, but they aren’t2. They are actually driving prescription opiate users into the waiting arms of heroin dealers. And since no heroin is pure anymore, these poor people soon become addicted to fentanyl because of “well-meaning” idiots like that pharmacist.
Once that happens (and this happened to me too) their previous drug of choice, be it Dilaudid or Percocet or OxyContin, is like taking a quarter of an aspirin. The old drugs simply do not work anymore once you’ve graduated to heroin/fent. I learned this the hard way in late 2016, when OxyContin jumped, without warning, from $20 a pill to $30 a pill. Already on a diet of 3 pills a day, $60 ate more than half my wages, To eat I went to a food bank or salvaged what I could from work. Sometimes I just didn’t eat. Many nights I wrote essays for lazy undergrads for $15 a page. But 90$ a day? That was not far from making my going to work redundant, considering I cleared about $110 per day after taxes. So I had to find other options. I’d been told to try heroin for years by this point, and up til then had avoided it. I knew once I switched there would be no going back. I did 14 cold-turkey detoxes from Oxy, and they got harder every time.
The first detox took 4 days. I was unsick enough to read Stephen King’s The Dark Half from cover to cover. By the 14th one I was basically crying and vomiting and sweating the entire time (your emotions get so out of whack during detox, you can find yourself bawling at State Farm commercials).
But as for the 10$ increase in Oxy pills in November 2016…I had a job now. A good one, too, considering my options. I simply couldn’t take the full-week off that would have been needed to get over the physical mountain of detox. As for the mental part, the unclimbable Iron Mountain that made living seem like a pointless affair, like the whole damn planet was rotting from the outside in. Coming off opiates, even beautiful people were just waiting to become food for worms, it seemed. The people lined up for the subway each morning were like lambs to the slaughter, or the Hitler Youth (I make this comparison only because of the slavish adherence to a code whose consequences they couldn’t understand and the blind ass-kissing attentiveness to a leader who is not even close to the man people say he is. This is a viable description of most people’s boss and of Hitler. All the photos of Hitler pouring over maps, making decisive hand gestures and redrawing borders have made people forget that Hitler wasn’t a military leader.
He was an idle dreamer who avoided work as much as possible, making all his crucial decisions from his mountain retreat, the “Eagle’s Nest” without consulting any of his generals, or anyone who knew what the situation was like at the front. Oh, and by the end of his life Hitler was taking opiates, which clouded his judgement. Hermann Göring was also taking morphine when he surrendered to the U.S. authorities. The British took him to their island and tapered him. Think on that. Hermann Göring, a war criminal responsible for thousands, if not millions, of deaths, was treated more humanely for his opiate addiction than Teresa Gratton.
ANYWAY, fuck Göring and fuck Hitler. I am simply relating the state of mind one can get into during detox. Let the world burn. It’ll never get better. This is how you feel coming from the beautiful feather bed you so foolishly abandoned to walk blindly into a new dark age. Opiates are like mental sunglasses and after removing them, you need a period of adjustment.
Myself, I had to keep going to work, so heroin (with fentanyl) it was. This was October or November 2016, whenever the Royal Winter Fair was on. A $100 bag got me enough for 2 days, instead of $120 for two days worth of OxyContin. And Lord, did it get me high. I remember it hitting me in the stomach the first time ever and just falling back on the bed and thinking, I made the right choice.
Short term, I guess I did. Long term, I most decidedly did not. Because here’s the thing anti-drug commercials NEVER show or tell. They always show a buncha people lounging around in a shitty apartment with dishes stacked to the ceiling. That’s inaccuracy #1: Junkies don’t cook. We can’t afford to order in so we microwave those $1.25 Michelina’s or buy the thin-crust Delissio (but only when it’s on sale for $2.99. Regular price is $6.99. That’s too much, if you ask me) To maintain the drug habit, certain parts of your life must be jettisoned, and eating in variety is the first thing that goes. After that it’s dating.
There’s a line in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises where a tactless man asks a couple how they went broke. “Both ways,” the man replies, unperturbed. “Gradually, then suddenly.” It’s the same with addiction.
I also have beef with those anti-drug commercials for what they don’t show. What they don’t show is drug addiction’s chief problem: The lack of drugs. These commercials first show a normal brain (“this is your brain,” intones the VO3), then you see a bunch of idiots in sweatpants giggling on a couch. And then the commercial shows a brain with all its synapses dead or some such nonsense. “This is your brain on drugs.” There are variations, of course. Like this one:
But…but…don’t people prefer their eggs to be cooked? They don’t just sit around, gloating over a full carton of unused eggs, do they? The point of having eggs is to eat them. Otherwise your brain really is made of eggshells.
Here’s a quick way to get the sweatpant wearing chucklers to shut up: Being an addict doesn’t mean you get to sit around all day being high, enjoying yourself. If you’re lucky, you get four or five days of that per month. The rest of the time you are searching for enough money to buy a point ($20) or two ($40). Some dealers will do 3 points for $50 but I’ve never met one who sells 2 or $30. Addiction consists of desperation, not giggle-fests with friends over whatever the fuck was on TV in the 1980s. Night Court? Archie Bunker’s Place? Mork & Mindy? Happy Days?
So, to recap: When you are an addict, you will lose everything: your family, your friends, your financial stability, (in most-but-not-all cases) your job (I was able to hold a job down during the worst of it, or highest amount of using, to be more accurate, but not everyone can do that). You also lose your self-respect, your dignity, your health, etc: But here’s the kicker: MOST OF THE TIME, YOU WON’T EVEN HAVE THE FUCKING DRUGS YOU THREW AWAY ALL OF THE ABOVE FOR. You threw everything away for drugs and you don’t even have drugs most of the time.
Most of the time you’re busking or begging or asking one of your few remaining friends you won’t pay back for money. Most of addiction is a gnawing hunger and feeling of fright: what if I can’t put together the cash? What if [insert drug dealer’s name here] doesn’t answer his/her/their phone when I finally do get the $20 or $40 together? Also…most dealers have a $100 minimum. For some it’s $50. They all have brand new cars, paid for in part, by you. Think about that: You spent $20 000 with one dealer in one year and he won’t drive 4 km to come sell you drugs despite how sick you’ve emphasized you are?
“Sorry dude. Maybe in the morning.”
“MAYBE?”
And you can’t tell him to fuck off cuz all your other dealers are incarcerated, going through the same withdrawal hell Teresa went through, but they are tougher and stronger and should survive the experience. Meanwhile you’re eating your lone remaining dealer’s shit.
“Can you please come as early as you can? I’m really sick man.”
“Okay man, I’ll be there first thing.”
And you’re up at 6AM (you didn’t sleep at all) but he doesn’t arrive til 3 PM. This has happened to me so many times, I lost track of the number. These are the corners you paint yourself into when you’re an addict. Addiction takes away your choices.
You could try going to Queen & Sherbourne to get a new dealer but chances are high you’ll just get robbed or he (and I’ve had a few she’s and they’s) sell you something that looks like powder but sure as hell is not heroin/fent. Now you don’t even have money for when your real dealer shows up, 17 hours after you called him.
At least Teresa was buying Dilaudid, though I imagine, had she not died when she did, she was only months away from losing her prescription and dealing with heroin/fent dealers, which would have started well and quickly turned sour, like a too-big carton of milk when all you use it for is coffee.
As it happens, the prison doctor took her off opiates anyway. Reading that Teresa Gratton was managing her pain with both legal and illegal Dilaudid, the prison doctor (and I’d love to know his fucking name) took a short look at Gratton’s file and decided: “you should not be on opiates.”
The drug that got her through the days, like insulin for diabetics, was seized from her because of the terrible reason that she needed it to function. Like arthritic medicine for those with seized up joints.
What the fuck was the doctor’s reasoning? “It sounds like you really need this stuff, Teresa. So I’m gonna take you off it completely. No weaning, no nothing. After all, you’re an addict and your addiction brought you here.”
I don’t consider Teresa Gratton a criminal. She wasn’t stealing shit for kicks. If her original doctor had just prescribed her the amount she needed, she wouldn’t have robbed the fucking Walmart that landed her in such bizarre legal limbo.
Because I can’t write it better myself, as I’m prone to delve down digressive alleys and launch into side street speeches, I’m going to quote liberally from Brenden Kennedy’s investigation for the Toronto Star published/posted December 17 2017. All quotes in italics:
A U.S. citizen and permanent resident of Canada since 2011, Gratton was not serving a criminal sentence. She was detained by border services after she served 24 days in jail for trying to steal food and clothing from a Walmart near her home in London, Ont.
But border services was trying to deport her for convictions from 2013, when she pleaded guilty to multiple counts of fraud under $5,000 and was sentenced to nine months of house arrest. Permanent residents can be deported for “serious criminality” if they are sentenced to “a term of imprisonment of more than six months” or convicted of an offence with a maximum sentence of 10 years or more. In such cases, they have no right to appeal.
Border services interpreted Gratton’s house arrest as a “term of imprisonment” and was hoping to quickly deport her.
Incidentally, 19 days after Gratton was detained, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled it was unreasonable for immigration officials to equate conditional sentences, such as house arrest, with jail sentences. Gratton’s admissibility hearing was scheduled for Nov. 8, when, even if she had still been ordered deported, she likely would have been released pending an appeal.
Later in the article, Kennedy drops a bombshell (all bold font is my own, for emphasis):
According to the Canada Border Services Agency’s own policies, Gratton, who had never been charged with or convicted of a violent offence and was not considered a danger to the public, should have been eligible to be detained at the Toronto Immigration Holding Centre, a far less restrictive facility dedicated to immigration detainees.
Instead, she was sent to a maximum security jail, where frequent lockdowns and regular strip searches are routine, and treated as harshly as sentenced criminals and those awaiting trial.
Wow. So a 50-year old woman who has never seen the inside of a prison before is now experiencing humiliating strip searches and lockdowns in a maximum security facility, all while suffering through acute pain and severe opiate withdrawal. And she is suffering greatly. If I think going cold turkey is bad at 35 (though most of my own CT’s4 were done just after age 30, when I was still a young pup), I can’t imagine how bad it gets at 40, 45, and 50.
So here’s how it works for inmates in Canada. If you are on a methadone program when you are incarcerated, you may continue that program whereby Methadone will be prescribed to you each morning by the prison nurse, who watches like a hawk as you drink it, and then you go about day 159 in prison (not that you’re counting. Oh no. A watched pot never boils. And the fact that 159 is crossed out on your cell wall, with a whole 158 crossed out before it, is also a coincidence, right?)
One more time: if you were ALREADY on an existing Methadone program and are arrested, you have the right to continue. If you were NOT on a program, they won't let you start Methadone, which makes the Teresa Gratton thing even more mysterious. Her going on Methadone when she wasn’t on a program was against the rules. Against the law.
Suboxone is a definite no, even if you were already on it. It works better & last longer. So if you are taking Suboxone and get yourself arrested and detained, you’ve got some serious illness coming your way, but not til about 48 hours since last dose. (I’ve heard Suboxone withdrawal can last months (one inmate who went through it said “it took til day 62 for me to realize I wasn’t going to die,” whereas Methadone withdrawal is usually about a month.) With Methadone, you’ll be sick 24 hours after last dose. Kadian is a definite no too, bcuz it contains morphine sulphate, which inmates can trade for pretty much ANYTHING.
When her husband visited Teresa 7 days after her arrest, she was pale, thin, sniffling, shaking, violently shivering & just totally in FULL ON opiate withdrawal. All this because her first day in prison, the prison doc looked at her file and said "you should not be on opiates."
Herb Gratton, Teresa’s husband of 32 years.
The woman had been on opiates for YEARS. Making her quit cold-turkey while trying to acclimatize to a maximum security prison was an asinine and cruel decision. Whoever made it must have known it would cause Gratton great suffering. The prison doctor who took Teresa off opiates, then put her back on a week later after a week of hell, but on too high of a dose, killing her, should be stripped of his license and publicly named and shamed for forcing someone, needlessly, to suffer severe opiate withdrawal and then die. If he was just going to put her on Methadone anyway, why not put her on it immediately while she still had a tolerance? As in, on Day One, not Day Eight?
Why make her suffer for a 7-day period, during which her tolerance dropped to roughly half of what it had been when she was regularly using?
Moreover, the fact that the Canada Border Services Agency admitted that Gratton should not have been in a maximum security prison at all, is just another indicator of the casual cruelty that maximum security staff regularly subject inmates to.
I can’t help but remember a scene/line from the 2017 film Brawl in Cell Bock 99, the line delivered by the inimitable Don Johnson, though I will admit that the much taller Vince Vaughan doesn’t appear especially intimidated by this munchkin warden: “The Red Leaf Detention Center is classified as a maximum security facility. But there's another term I prefer. One that I think will give you a clear picture. Minimum freedom.” Ouch. If I fucked up the time stamp, it’s @ 1:42 of the following video.
First, they make Vince submit to a humiliation strip search right there in the parking lot, in plain sight of the prison’s administrative staff. Then they empty Vaughan’s character’s box of possessions, including his wedding ring, right onto the parking lot. During processing Vaughan goes: “I had a ring?” to which Johnson busily retorts “I’ll look for it tomorrow. If I have time.”
I’m not saying that a 50 year old woman, near death due to dehydration and dopesickness, should have literally tried to fight her way out of jail. I mention this only to illustrate the daily brutalities and humiliations inmates of Max Sec5 Institutions are subjected to on a daily basis. No wonder Teresa Gratton begged her husband, on the 7th day, to “get [her] out of there!” She sent him a note too (capital letters are hers, not mine): “PLEASE GET ME OUT OF HERE I DON’T BELONG HERE!! HELP ME! HELP ME! PLEASE!!!!!! … I don’t see how they can continue to keep me locked up like a criminal. I have no charges. I had already paid my time for my crime. I’ll leave Canada if that’s what it comes to, but let me out until that’s what’s desided (sic) if it comes to that.”
A week later she was dead. Killed by the system. Not symbolically or metaphorically either. She was literally killed by a system whose function is to flatten people into pancakes. Their individual needs frustrate prison officials and guards because it reminds them that they are dealing with human beings, not the Hitler Youth. And dealing with real life, real people, is messy and unorganized, two words antithetical to the running of an efficient prison.
So maybe they killed her on purpose. If they had no plan to, they would have transferred her over to Methadone the day she got there, for she was opiate dependent. Then they gave her so much opiates she overdosed and died on just her second dose. That’s almost unheard of. Methadone is a cumulative drug. If you’re on too high a dose, it won’t become lethal until you’ve already experienced a few days of vomiting, feeling high but WAY too high, nodding off at random times, and other tell-tale signs. But this prison wants us to believe that a woman took a lethal dose, was seemingly fine that entire day, and then died after midnight? She would have been exhibiting symptoms throughout the entire day of the 31st.
The prison is covering its own ass, and the (probably) lily white ass of the incompetent doctor who first tortured her for 7 days and then murdered her with incompetent dosage. I’ve been scouring articles to find this idiot’s name, but I can’t seem to get it anywhere. If you find it, please let me know: essayelf@gmail.com
It has since entered indie rock lore that Warner subsidiary Nonesuch Records purchased and released Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, meaning the same label paid Wilco twice for the same album.
In The Pharmacist, the lead, one Dan Schneider, had a surveillance partner, a former cop who was on opiates for pain, and who had himself gone to the very doctor Schneider and his friend were now investigating. Why doesn’t the documentary delve into this paradoxical compromise Dan Schneider had made? Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy, was a valiant attempt to understand the opiate crisis in America, but her twin case studies, one following a “bright” white young man who got hooked, overdosed, and died, the other following the Black dealer who sold him the stuff, shows that there are no easy answers. The dealer was so afraid of heroin (he pronounces it herron, throughout) he had his brother don gloves and pack the packages himself. He’d tried to find legal employment, but the only callback he got was a McDonald’s 3.5 hours away. Fuel costs would have eaten up his paycheque. So when the opportunity to sell drugs came, he took it. He had a daughter and he needed money. Prosecutors referred to this decision to sell as him bringing a “tsunami of misery” to the Midwest region where he was settled, but as the dealer astutely points out: “These people were already addicted. I offered a better high and I gave it to ‘em cheaper.” Macy leaves the prison interview realizing that the opiate crisis is not a binary thing. A white kid dies, so let’s blame the Black dealer is just an updated & outdated version of lynching talk. The dealer was not a user (and in my own personal experience, Black dealers rarely are heroin users, while every white dealer I’ve had has been a user, therefore less reliable, more prone to using other drugs like coke and crack, and are just generally less professional). Finally, it should be noted that the now-incarcerated dealer (he was sentenced to 20 years) did the Macy interview just to show his daughter that “there’s another side to things.” The interview was supposed to take 3 hours. It ended up being 7. The book shows dark side of America, the one that venerates white skin & insists that white addicts are “victims” of predatory Black dealers, when in fact it’s the white world that has made it damn near impossible for a Black man with kids to “make it” in America.
VO = Voiceover
CTs = “cold turkeys.” Think it’ll catch on? I don’t. Norm Macdonald had a great bit about Lincoln starting the Gettysburg address with: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men...” and how his wife may have interjected with “Fourscore? you sure you wanna go with that?” Lincoln (flustered now): “Yes! Yes! Score! It’ll catch on!”
Yes, you guessed it. Maximum Security.