Thirteen-year-Talay Leinweber was just six years old when she lost her father to an accidental toxic drug overdose.
“There were a whole bunch of ambulances in front of my apartment,” she said as she recalled the day her father Tyler died in 2016.
The Kelowna, B.C., girl had lost her uncle Rian just five years prior to that, also to an overdose.
“It’s OK to talk about it,” she said. “It’s the stigma around it…that’s why people don’t talk about it and they hide it. That’s a big part of the problem.”
Hoping to reduce the stigma, Leinweber took part in marking a sombre anniversary in B.C.
On April 14, 2016, the province declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency.
“In 2016 we didn’t even really know about fentanyl,” said Pam Turgeon with Moms Stop The Harm, a group of grieving mothers advocating for change.
“It was just coming to the forefront and now it’s taken so many lives.”
Those lives include the lives of both her son, Ryan, and her son-in-law, Cody.
“It’s something we never get over,” she told Global News. “You’re never supposed to bury your child.”
Moms Stop The Harm teamed up with Starbucks in the Central Okanagan, where advocates were on hand at numerous locations raising awareness about the ongoing emergency.
“We just want people to stay alive, and we as a country, as a province, we need to do something about this,” Turgeon said.
As part of a field trip, a group of Grade 12 students from Okanagan Mission Secondary walked to the Starbucks location in Kelowna’s Lower Mission area, where Turgeon spoke candidly about her son’s death.
“He died coming home to Kelowna at the hands of a cab driver who gave him a line of coke (cocaine) laced with fentanyl, so this is a raw story that we want everybody to hear,” Turgeon told the students.
As part of the conversation, Turgeon also showed the students naloxone kits and how they can be used to save lives.
“That was super heart touching, definitely very sad story,” said Grade 12 student Brennan Jack, hearing Turgeon’s story. “I think we need more awareness about it. It’s super common but no one really talks about it.”
Grade 12 student Ryley Bullock was amazed that Turgeon can turn such a negative into a positive by trying to raise awareness.
“I hope that it works and that people can see that everyone who deals with a drug addiction are like normal people,” she said.
The regional manager for Starbucks, Robin Lukash, was happy that the coffee company got involved with a cause that’s very personal to her.
Lukash lost her own son David to an accidental overdose in 2020.
“I think it’s really important that young people are aware that what’s out there, it’s poison,” Lukash said. “It’s not like if you go to a liquor store, you know, you can buy a beer and you know exactly what’s in it down to the percentage…it’s not like that on the street.”
And it’s by the government allowing and providing that safe drug supply that Moms Stop The Harm says is the only way to reduce the number of people dying.
“It’s key,” Lukash said. “During Prohibition, it was Moonshine, I guess, a pretty high alcohol percentage and it killed people. And now you know the exact percentage you are getting, so I think there are some similarities in what’s going on.
Since 2016 more than 9,600 lives have been lost to toxic drugs in B.C., about 1,500 of them in the Interior Health region.