Oxy Town

published on November 18, 2014 in The Walrus

Prescription opioids, a small Ontario community, and the failure of the war on drugs

At the intersection of London Road and Victoria Street, otherwise known as Highway 2 and Highway 21, lies Thamesville, Ontario, population 928. This tiny burg is part of the sprawling municipality of Chatham-Kent, about an hour from the Windsor-Detroit border. There are few people on the streets, and only a handful of businesses: a Mac’s convenience mart, a small consignment store, the Schmid Jewellery and Gift Shop, and the John C. Badder Funeral Home. Thamesville shares its name with the nearby Thames River, a placid waterway that continues southwest, cutting a line through the middle of Chatham-Kent. A network of small places with a combined population of about 104,000 people, Chatham-Kent is, mostly, a verdant mass of farming plots. If you follow the path of the river, you’ll pass the Thamesville Maize—a corn maze shaped this year in the likeness of astronaut Chris Hadfield—until you get to Chatham, a community of 44,000. In some places, Chatham is postcard pretty, its downtown core filled with red faux-cobblestone sidewalks and the kind of jaw-dropping Victorian brick homes that dot southern Ontario. Mostly, though, it is dominated by one-storey, vinyl-sided houses and low-density commercial strips—bars, pharmacies, pawnshops, and car dealerships.

The fortunes of Chatham-Kent have risen and fallen with those of southwestern Ontario’s automotive and manufacturing industries. Recently, they have mostly fallen; in its latest forecast, the Chatham-Kent Chamber of Commerce described the prospects for the local economy as “not promising,” citing a shrinking population and the exodus of heavy industry. The symptoms of that gloomy portrait are evident in the fabric of the place; although it’s designed for strolling and shopping, downtown Chatham feels almost abandoned when I visit. Meanwhile, back up the road in Thamesville, the only business that seems to be prospering is the Westover Treatment Centre, an addiction-recovery facility. Its massive front lawn is healthy and green, the august grounds evoking a well-to-do rural university. When I arrive, some clients are out for a walk; others sit on benches, gazing at the impressive converted mansion that serves as the centre’s main edifice.

According to those on the front lines of drug treatment, Chatham-Kent’s communities have, like much of Ontario, seen a steady rise in prescription opioid misuse over the past two decades. In 2007, almost 30 percent of high school students in the Erie St. Clair Local Health Integration Network, an area that includes Chatham-Kent, admitted to having used prescription opioids for non-medical purposes at least once in the previous year, according to the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey. Although the survey documented a drop in prescription opioid misuse among junior high and high school students across the province between 2007 (20.6 percent) and 2013 (12.4 percent), it found that prescription opioids are still the fourth-most commonly used drug, after alcohol, highly caffeinated energy drinks, and cannabis.

Dan Werb
The Walrus
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