Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/12/2018 (1949 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the living room of her cozy Tyndall Park home, Joyce Holmes carefully spreads out several stacks of paper. There are more in her office, she says, but this is what she’s gathered so far, a documentary record of her family’s struggle.

Dozens of pages, clipped neatly together. Medical records and copies of emails sent to doctors. Point-form notes written in black pen, where Holmes jotted down events as they happened.

“It’s so much that even just looking at it, I’m kind of overwhelmed by it all,” she says.

This is the raw and unvarnished record of what it takes to try and save a loved one from crystal meth.

Oct. 2, 2017: Picked up Meg to take to women’s shelter. Oct. 4: Took Meg to appt & doctor (AFM), then detox. Detox refused bed (even though doctor booked it). Oct. 5: Meg here. Oct. 6: Meagan left (relapsed). Oct. 8: Meagan here under influence — she left. Oct. 9: I put in missing report. Meagan picked up… police put in Remand.

This is the story less often told, as crystal meth makes its torrential resurgence across Manitoba. Families’ lives thrown into chaos. Parents desperately scouring scant addictions resources, trying to find help for their children.

After more than a decade of trying to help her daughter, Holmes has been on this journey longer than many. She’s jumped through endless hoops to get 29-year-old Meagan into treatment, navigating long waits and frantic runarounds.

Those efforts tell the story of a province where addiction and mental health supports are often siloed into islands, forcing parents like Holmes to swim against the current, trying to tie together a lifeline between different resources.

It also gives a clear look at how heavy meth users, like Meagan, develop a staggering reliance on services which involve nearly every front-line system, from health-care and emergency responders to justice and law enforcement.

Sept. 12, 2017: Meagan here 10 days. Over wknd paranoid, syringe in bag, cig burn… ambulance / police / fire all.* Overdosed. Taken to hosp. (7 Oaks.) Released said NOT paranoid. Called police again — taken to Remand.

There is a lot to tell in this story. Let’s start in the present, where Meagan is gone, again.

It’s a bitterly cold Sunday afternoon in mid-December, and Joyce Holmes has no idea where her daughter is. Days before, Meagan was picked up by RCMP in Portage la Prairie, where she grew up and often returns during a meth binge.

Holmes guesses her daughter is likely in custody at the Remand Centre, on yet another probation violation. Or maybe she’s at the women’s correctional facility in Headingley. (Citing privacy laws, RCMP won’t confirm either.)

“We’re worried, but I’ll follow up tomorrow I guess,” Holmes says, with a tired sigh.

She has gone through this cycle so many times, RCMP officers in Portage la Prairie know Holmes by name. Nearly every day there’s a call she has to make, to police or hospitals or the Main Street Project’s detox facility in Winnipeg.

Holmes can’t remember how many times she’s had to call 911, because Meagan overdosed. Or because she was deep in the grip of meth psychosis, grabbing knives, trying to defend against an intruder only she could see.

Once, Holmes called police twice in the same day, to come get her panicking daughter. Or, there was the time seven ambulance bills arrived in her mailbox in the same week, a stark example of the toll meth addiction can wreak.

It isn’t always this way, with her eldest daughter. There are still good days, though increasingly few and far between. Holmes estimates over the last two years, Meagan has been in some sort of facility three weeks out of every four.

When Meagan is clean, Holmes still sees flashes of her once-happy daughter. It’s easy to see: earlier this year, fresh off a stint in detox, Meagan sat down with a Free Press reporter, to talk about her journey through addiction.

She was bright, and remarkably insightful, chatting thoughtfully about how much she longed to get and stay clean. She described her dreams for her future, and her hope to one day be a healthy mom to her 12-year-old daughter.

The problem is, she explained, there’s the other Meagan. The one crystal meth addiction created.

“I’m a completely different person when I’m using,” she said. “I’m an awful person. I’m not in the right state of mind. It’s frustrating, because I know I have potential when I’m clean. I know I’m capable of doing good, and working hard.

“But I’m never able to maintain that sobriety enough to even hold a job down, or finish schooling, or be with my daughter,” she said. “There’s this Meagan, and then there’s that Meagan. She’s depressed, paranoid, dishonest.”

It’s been a long time, now.

When Meagan was 14, shortly after her family moved to Winnipeg, she ran away to Portage. For months, Holmes tried to enlist Child and Family Services’ help to get her daughter home.

But because Meagan was in Portage, and Holmes in Winnipeg, her request bounced between regional departments. Each said it was the other’s responsibility. Looking back, that was the first time red tape bound up Meagan’s future.

“I still think back to that and think, ‘If somebody would have offered a better service, Meagan would have been home,’” Holmes says. “We had two (CFS offices) fighting each other… and at the expense of a 14-year-old child.”

It was around that time, as a vulnerable young teen away from home, Meagan started spiralling. Older men circled around her. She started using cocaine, and crack; when she was 19, she latched onto using crystal meth.

Over the years, she would come to regret that first time she used. It would spark a decade of struggle, one shot through with escalating trauma and pain. She scraped out a life in gritty apartments, surrounded by violent people.

Still, something in her kept fighting. This spring, she spent nearly four months at a residential rehab facility. She thrived, staying clean for longer than any time since she started using; she even ran a half-marathon.

“The transformation in her was amazing,” Holmes wrote, in a July email. “I felt like I had my daughter back.”

The day she left treatment, Meagan relapsed, getting high with friends she’d made in the facility. She quickly descended into psychosis, which now strikes every time she uses. That week, Holmes called 911 three times.

With that, the cycle started over. It’s hard to describe how draining it is, to those who haven’t been through it.

For example, Holmes points to the process of getting Meagan into detox. There are 25 beds for women at Main Street Project’s Magnus Avenue facility. They are still almost always full.

To get in, patients need to submit an application, including a medical clearance form signed by a doctor. Then they have to call for a bed: Holmes has sometimes called every day for a week, waiting for an available spot to open up.

In the meantime, you drag your child to a walk-in clinic or a doctor, to get the clearance form signed. So now you have the form; but it’s only valid for three days after it’s been signed, unless the doctor makes a written exception.

If the detox wait is longer, you have to race to get the medical form signed again before they release the bed to someone else. Holmes had to do that exact runaround with Meagan in October 2017.

Holmes has gone through that detox dance as many as 20 times in the last two years. The longest they’ve had to wait, she says, is about a week, but there have been “many times” where she’s given up and let Meagan detox at home.

Somehow, she has juggled all of this while also working and raising her 12-year-old granddaughter. In just the last two years, she estimates trying to manage Meagan’s addiction has cost her at least one day of work per week.

“It’s like having another full-time job,” she says.

As a self-employed occupational therapist, Holmes is better-positioned than many parents, when it comes to navigating the health-care system: she works in it, and knows how to advocate within it.

But what about families that don’t have that same knowledge, resources, or flexibility to speak up that way for their loved ones? Or the people with addiction who don’t have healthy family members who can do all of that for them?

“It took me I don’t know how long, and I still look for resources out there,” Holmes says. “For people with addiction, where do they start? They’re going to lead themselves to treatment? That’s why many of them don’t ever get there.”

Because treatment is a whole other consideration. For those who can’t afford private rehabs there are public options, including the AFM’s 30-day residential treatment programs, and longer stays at the Behavioural Health Foundation.

But the wait times for those facilities can prove a barrier. Sometimes, Meagan has been approved for rehab within days; most recently, she’s been waiting for two months to get into a 30-day AFM facility. That’s a more usual figure.

Meanwhile, even if she gets in, the supports seem insufficient. Meagan has been in and out of residential rehabs nearly a dozen times, including two stints in BHF and as many as nine at AFM’s shorter programs in Manitoba.

Each time, she quickly relapsed. That’s not unusual: studies show 30-day treatment stays have relatively low long-term success rates. Many experts believe full recovery may require one to two years of treatment.

Holmes recently heard a Manitoba politician on the radio, talking about getting meth users into 30-day facilities.

“What are you talking about, 30 days?” she says, shaking her head. “That’s just to get them to calm down. If that’s what you’re planning to give them, 30 days of treatment… most people walk out the door and relapse right away.”

If her family’s experience shows anything, it’s the current systems and supports aren’t working to help lift Manitobans out of the grip of crystal meth — and some may not have much time left.

Once, not long ago, Meagan turned to Holmes and, in a matter-of-fact tone, said the words no parent wants to imagine: “Mom, I know you’re going to outlive me.”

To hear her daughter say that was “brutal,” Holmes says, quietly. But in a way, she already knew. Years of fighting for her daughter’s life has left her exhausted.

“I honestly don’t know that she’s going to make it through this,” she says. “I want her to get better… but I’ve done everything I can. People say, ‘(People with addictions) have to want it.’ She has wanted it. She wants to get better.

“If she wasn’t so highly addicted, maybe she’d have a fighting chance, or if she didn’t have psychosis. But if they are saying, you need at least one to two years to recover, where the hell is a facility that will give her one to two years?”

The next day, Holmes starts calling around to find her daughter.

It turns out she’s in jail in Brandon. With that, the cycle starts all over again: find her, fight to keep her safe, watch as she just keeps slipping further away.

“It’s been a long haul, and I don’t wish it on anybody,” Holmes says. “I hope it gets better for other people.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Tomorrow: in part four of a seven-part series on the crystal meth surge in Manitoba, the Free Press explores how the drug’s resurgence has taxed the health-care system, putting front-line workers at risk and sapping available resources.