Chris Schwede was going to go to treatment, his sisters say, but “nothing was available.” On Thursday, he died of a suspected drug overdose.
On Thursday morning, Chris Schwede died alone in his tent outside Our Place of a suspected drug overdose.
His death was something he and his sisters always knew could happen. But even so, it left Candace Chacki and Tammy Trausch raw with grief and bitterness at society’s inability to help drug addicts.
“It’s like we all knew he had a terminal illness and the time was coming. But we didn’t know when it was coming and we didn’t know how to change that course for him,” Trausch said Friday. “But that still doesn’t make you ready when the time comes. It’s still a surprise and it’s unbelievable.”
She was holding Schwede’s baseball glove and sunglasses and the blue jacket he was wearing the last time she saw him. She had rescued the familiar items from the blue tent, now a makeshift memorial, outside the social services office on Pandora Avenue.
Members of the street community stopped by the tent to let the sisters know how many lives their brother had saved by administering naloxone to reverse drug overdoses.
“He was telling me, ‘Candi, I’m saving lives.’ I save lives. These people need help, and if I’m not here, I can’t help them,” Chucky recalled. “He saved a life the day before he died. But I wanted him to save himself first. The only life he could not save was his own.”
The 49-year-old’s death came as a result of drug alerts by Island Health and Our Place Society about xylazine, a veterinary sedative, being added to an already poisoned supply of illegal drugs. Our Place said it had responded to several difficult overdoses and that many were experiencing severe psychosis from the powerful new drug known as Turquoise Down.
Schwede’s sisters are not convinced that their brother died of an overdose. They are awaiting toxicology results and the medical examiner’s report.
Schwede grew up in Victoria, the second of four children. Family legend has it that he was a runner-up for the role of the naked baby Superman in the original Superman movie with Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder.
“That’s kind of how he lived his life,” Chucky said. “He was unbeatable. He was strong.
Crack cocaine would prove to be his kryptonite.
By all accounts, Shwede had a great childhood. The family went camping and fishing together, watched Star Wars movies together, celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas together, Trausch said. Schwede earned his ticket and became a journeyman electrician.
But as he got older, he seemed to lose his way.
“There was a series of life events where things got really difficult…” Chucky said.
“…then it started to snowball,” Trausch added.
Schwede, who started using cocaine at age 18, became addicted to crack cocaine. He had long periods of being healthy, but his addiction became more entrenched in the past six years.
“He wanted help and we wanted to help. Everyone felt helpless,” Trausch said. “He needed someone to set him on the right path, but nothing was available. There was no direction to point it.
Schwede was going to go to treatment, said Chucky, who helped him with his resume last year when he wanted to get off the streets and get back to work. “There was nothing he loved more than family, especially his daughter.”
The nurses had just spoken to an assistant who told them there was a 111 day wait for a detox bed.
Schwede, who lost many friends to the opioid crisis, was very careful about his drug supply, they said.
“He hated opioids. He wasn’t going to touch them no matter what,” Chucky said. “He wouldn’t let people around Our place smoke opioids in his tent or anywhere around them. He was telling them, “You have to stop. These things are dangerous. It will kill you. “
Both women believe reports of illegal drug use are wrong. They believe that instead of telling people how to use drugs safely, they should be telling them not to use.
“The way the whole system is set up — the tents over there and allowing drug use doesn’t help anybody,” Trausch said, pointing to the camp. “It makes it easier for people to continue this life. And that’s not life. They are like walking zombies on this street.
Csaky walked past Schwede’s tent every day to make sure he was safe. In the last months of his life, his tent caught fire and his hands were badly burned. He was hit by a car while cycling in the cycle lanes on Douglas Street. When he was taken to the emergency room at the Royal Jubilee Hospital, there wasn’t even a chair for him to sit on, Csaky said.
While many advocate safe supply, no woman believes it is the answer to the opioid crisis.
“People will reduce their safe supply with things that are not safe, and you still have overdose problems. Or they’ll sell the clean stuff because they’ll get more money for it and buy the stuff the dealers are selling,” Csaky said.
“There’s no such thing as a safe supply because Chris was on a safe supply and he’s in the morgue right now,” Trausch added. “We had to get to the root cause of why he had an addiction. Where does his pain come from that he can’t deal with. Where’s the trauma?”
There have been more than 10,000 illicit drug deaths in British Columbia since the province declared a public health emergency in April 2016, the Coroners Service said this week.
At least 1,095 people are believed to have died from January to June this year, including 80 in Greater Victoria and 33 in Nanaimo.
Grant McKenzie, director of communications for Our Place, believes the veterinary sedative in Turquoise Down is added to the illegal drugs to prolong the chase.
“This drug surprised us with how quickly it hit people, stopped their breathing, and how devastating it was to our population,” he said.
“We are all on high alert. The staff is extremely vigilant, watching for nodding people whose skin color turns blue. We want to make sure and check these people and make sure they’re breathing.
ldickson@timescolonist.com
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