By Adriana Christianson

A former drug addict shares his story for Addictions Awareness Week

Nov 22, 2012 | 6:01 AM

We all grew up with the warnings about drugs in school, but sometimes the public perception of what it means to be an addict misses the reality.

“It started out with just pot and alcohol like most kids, but for me it was different it was like an instant love affair,” explains Nik Hrominchuk in a phone interview from the Leipzig Serenity Retreat drug treatment centre.

Hrominchuk says his addiction spiralled out of control when he was 18 when he was a ‘black-out’ cocaine addict. In the past decade he has used just about everything from cocaine and ecstasy to crystal meth. He remembers moving across the prairies when he was 22 thinking he could outrun his drug problem. Instead he found a new one.

“That’s when I discovered Percocet, oxycontin, morphine, Demerol – all the opiates that are out there and that’s when I just plummeted,” Hrominchuk explained. “In the one year that I was out there running crane in Edmonton I spent roughly $72,000 in one year on opiates and my opiate addiction.”

At one point he remembers feeling like he was out of options and was ready to kill himself.

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“I wrote my letter and you know my good bye note and that was it, I was on my way out the door to do it,” Hrominchuk said.

That day he remembers it was his mom who figured it out and stopped him, calling 911. They sent him to the hospital and that’s where he started on methadone treatments.

“It was nice because it alleviated the with-drawl symptoms,” he explained. “I didn’t really crave any of that ever again after I had gone onto the methadone, so the methadone programs really did work.”

Methadone used for opioid addiction treatment because in controlled doses it can help people manage their daily lives.

Hrominchuk would sink into addiction one more time in his early twenties when he got hooked on crystal meth. At his lowest point as a user, he was doing absolutely anything for drugs, getting involved with crime and dealing. He recalls laughing while a shotgun was put to his head by someone who he thought was a ‘friend’.

He says his family was the one thing he wasn't willing to give up to drug addiction.

“Putting them through hell watching me slowly commit suicide – and they just have to sit there and watch,” Hrominchuk said.

After a family intervention, he went to a private addiction treatment program at the Leipzig Serenity Retreat in Saskatchewan. Now his life has come full circle. He's five months clean and has a job at the addiction centre.

Hrominchuck may have battled addiction with many different kinds of drugs but his struggle with prescription opioid abuse rings true for more than 200,000 people in Canada.

Dr. Lindy Lee specializes in opiate addiction treatment in Winnipeg. She says started to see more and more prescription drug abuse on the prairies around 2005.

“People that I saw addicted to prescription opiates, about 80 per cent were addicted to oxycontin and about 20 per cent were addicted to other drugs,” Lee explained.

Their supply came from a variety of places, from those who got prescriptions from doctors, to people taking them from family medicine cabinets to friends who were willing to share.

Lee explains when she started out treating people she saw more young people who started taking pills for fun. Later she started seeing more adults who got hooked on their prescriptions. She says most people have the wrong picture of who is impacted by drug addiction.

“People in health, people doing recovery work, secretaries, teachers, other professionals, mothers, fathers – I’ve seen all those kinds of people with opiate addiction,” Lee said.

She says the struggle for those who develop that addiction is to see past the stigma and realize when they need help.

“You sense that you’re planning your whole life around the drug, so you’re planning when you can get it, when you can get the money to get it, what lies you can tell your family or your friends so you can sneak away and get it,” Lee explained.

To solve this issue she adds that doctors need more education on pain treatment and addiction, before they see the later consequences in the hospital.

“We have to educate physicians so that prescribing becomes more rational and controlled and they can recognize addiction,” she commented.

In a national poll released as part of National Addictions Awareness Week, 44 per cent of family doctors surveyed said they see opioid addicted patients in their practice often, but the majority refer people to addictions experts for treatment. The overwhelming majority of doctors who were polled in this study said opioid dependency is a significant public health issue and they would benefit from more training on addiction and expand the number of doctors who could offer treatment.

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