Hey everyone, sorry for the repeat, but I wanted to make this available for all subscribers. — Tana
When Elizabeth Knight and her boyfriend came home from the emergency room at six in the morning one day in 2017, Elizabeth had a story ready for step mom Greta. Her boyfriend had slipped in the shower and hit his head, she claimed.
Greta didn’t buy it (who takes showers at 2am?). She assumed one of them had overdosed, so she set about trying to find out if it was Elizabeth or her boyfriend who had almost died that night.
She called the local authorities to ask if they’d treated anyone with Narcan, the opioid overdose antidote. They said that they had.
“Was it a boy or a girl?” Greta asked.
“I can’t tell you that,” they said. “Did the patient have a penis or not?” Greta demanded to know.
After a shocked pause, they confirmed to Greta that the patient did, in fact, have a penis. Greta and Elizabeth’s dad, John, were relieved that it had been the boyfriend, and not Elizabeth, who’d overdosed that night. But they were also worried that she was dating a heroin user. At that point, as far as they knew, their 33-year-old daughter had not done heroin for two and a half years, after more than a decade of opioid addiction.
Elizabeth started taking Vicodin as a teenager and for 15 years she’d sowed chaos in the family. The vivacious blonde refused to go to school and ran away from home. Once, the police called her dad John in the middle of the night to inform him that his beautiful teenage daughter was passed out in a car with some college guys from a nearby town. Another time, he had to rescue her from a rural West Virginia crackhouse. “And it was as bad as you’d imagine a rural West Virginia crack house to be,” he says.
Once, in her 20s, she’d slunk home looking like hell—like, “She’d literally been drug over by gravel,” John recalls. As it turns out, she had. A boyfriend had sped away in his pick-up truck and she’d tried to jump in. She’d fallen, scraping herself on the gravel in their driveway.
There were years they only saw her at Christmas, and years when they didn’t see her at all. She got married, had two kids, then divorced. Eventually her ex got full custody and she lost the right to visit them even under supervision. “There are two different phone calls you expect when you’re in our position,” John says. “One is to get a call that says, ‘Dad, I need help.’ “The other is a phone call that says, ‘Your child is dead.’”
One day, John got a phone call. It was Elizabeth. Now in her early thirties, she was ready to stop using.
Parenting a child with addiction can turn you into a great detective, like Greta getting to the bottom of Elizabeth’s unlikely explanation for why her boyfriend had to go to the ER. It also makes you a great researcher. Once Elizabeth agreed to get help, John started looking into the best ways to fight addiction. What he found surprised him.
He learned that addiction is misunderstood by many people in America and that the country of Portugal, after decriminalizing all drugs and providing evidence-based services for struggling drug users, now has an overdose death rate well below most US states.
It changed his perspective. He realized that addiction was not a moral failing on his daughter’s part, and that she had nothing to be ashamed of. He also decided to start trusting Elizabeth. He didn’t want to be his daughter’s jailer and warden, he wanted to be her dad.
“I said, ‘If you’re willing to tell the truth, I’m willing to believe you,” he says.
So, when she called him from a treatment facility begging for him to pick her up—she said she’d found heroin on the floor and was worried about relapsing—he took a leap of faith and decided to believe that it was true, and not just a manipulative ruse to get out of treatment.
Elizabeth hadn’t lied—a few months later the facility was busted because heroin was being trafficked there.
Despite her bumpy recovery and the bad-influence boyfriend, by 2017 things seemed to be going well. Elizabeth could see her kids again, and when her parents aired concerns about her relationship with a person who appeared to be addicted to opioids, she assured her parents that nothing would make her risk losing her kids again.
“Mommy’s sleeping funny”
On March 17th, 2018, the Knights were celebrating St. Patrick’s day. Elizabeth’s two kids had drawn green Leprechauns for the occasion. Although John doesn’t keep much booze around the house, he treated himself to a foamy Guinness as they watched the Loyola game on TV.
“That’s who we were cheering for. Probably because we Irish love underdogs,” he says. He was delighted to have his wife, daughter, and grandkids under the same roof, healthy and happy.
Around 9:30 at night, after a long day of family festivities, the kids were asleep on the couch and the adults were wiped.
Elizabeth went up to her bedroom while John and Greta put the kids to bed.
“Mommy’s sleeping funny!” one of the kids told John. He didn’t think anything of it.
The next day, at 7:30 in the morning, the kids jumped in John and Greta’s bed and they spent the morning watching cartoons.
John and Greta were supposed to go on a grocery run for his mother-in-law, so an hour or so later he got up to wake Elizabeth so she could watch the kids and feed them breakfast.
He went to the foot of the stairs and yelled, “Elizabeth, time to wake up! She’d always yell back, ‘Alright Dad!” This time there was nothing.
“So, she doesn’t answer. In my heart, I think, ‘Oh no.’ I start moving up the steps and called her name again and she didn’t answer, and I think, ‘Oh no.’”
He pushed into her room and saw her on her bed, head down, her knees tucked underneath her. She was wearing her clothes from the day before.
“I saw a wire on her arm and I thought, ‘My daughter’s dead.’
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In 2019, more than 70,000 people died of drug overdose deaths. This year, that number topped 100,000 for the first time in recorded history. The vast majority of these deaths involve some sort of opioid.
When John found Elizabeth, he grabbed her to see if she could be revived. “Her body temperature was cold and she was hard.” he says. “My daughter’s dead,” flashed in his head again. Then he sprung into action.
“All I could think then is, ‘I gotta get these children out of the house.”
He came down the stairs and called for Greta, trying to stay calm for the sake of the kids. She was coming up the stairs with laundry.
“I said, we gotta get the kids out of here right away.”
‘Is she dead?’ Greta asked.
“Yes. We have to get the children out of here.”
They hustled the kids, who were still in their pajamas, out of the house. Greta drove off with them. They could tell something was wrong.
After Greta sped away with the grandkids, John was completely alone. It terrified him. He didn’t know what to do so he called 911.
When the dispatcher heard what happened he told him to run back in the house to give Elizabeth CPR. John tried to explain that her body had already stiffened with rigor mortis, but the dispatcher insisted. After some back and forth, John thought, ‘Fine!’ and went back into the house, up the stairs, and back into Elizabeth’s room.
“Can you get to her chest?” the 911 operator asked.
John turned Elizabeth’s body over. “And that’s when I saw the spoon is stuck on her face. I guess from when she fell into it.”
He hung up on the 911 dispatcher, went back outside, and collapsed.
“On the street, on this Sunday morning, I was just bawling and bawling and all I could think was, ‘I just wanna die. I just wanna die,’ he says. “That’s probably happened to every parent who’s ever found their child dead.”
He realized he had to tell Elizabeth’s biological mother Debbie. “We’re not ready for this,” he kept thinking. He mustered up the courage to call Debbie and told her Elizabeth had overdosed.
“Is she dead?” Debbie asked.
“Yes.”
Debbie broke down. John and Greta drove to her house. When they got there, Debbie told them that she couldn’t breathe, as though she entered a void and all the air and life had been sucked out. “The pain is so great you can’t pull air in. You just don’t have any air,” John explains. John got her to go outside and sit on the ground, while Greta waited in the car.
“We just leaned on each other and cried,” John says. “Our child was dead.”
The three of them drove back to the house to deal with grim logistics. “I had to watch the funeral people carry my baby out of the house,” John says.
I interviewed John about a month after Elizabeth’s death. He cried three times. Finally, his wife made him get off the phone because she rightly intuited that both he and I had had enough emotional pain for one phone call. I asked him about the increase in drug-induced homicide prosecutions. That’s when police track the source of the drugs that resulted in a fatal overdose and charge the person who sold them with murder. In many cases, it’s just fellow users helping each other out by sharing a small amount of drugs. John had a clear answer.
“I don’t want that money to go to keeping someone on death row for 35 years,” he told me. “I want that money to be funneled into research to find out what made my child stick a needle in her arm after more than two years of recovery.”
Prescription opioids have a DIRECT connection to the overdose crisis around the world. The public needs to know that fact. Not your justification and rationalization for Big Pharma's lies. The death march started with prescription drugs. You either work for big Pharma, or their public relation firm. You spin death. Big Pharma is full of murderers, and you are their spokeperson.
Another great piece, however I would appreciate the distinguishing of illicit opioids -as in this case & the majority as well as reasoning of the record ODD- really illicit fentanyl poisoning of recreational street drugs… The public has been ingrained by mainstream media to think that opioids & ODD = prescription opioids (some are diverted but it is a small percentage).
Prescription opioid addiction rates, when taken as prescribed are under 1%.
Thanks again for your work!!!