A Langley father is sharing the heartbreaking story of his daughter’s death in the hopes of putting a face to the province’s other deadly epidemic.“My world has never been the same. She was my one and only daughter,” John Butler told Global News.
Butler’s daughter Olivia, 21, in October, one of thousands of British Columbians who have died after taking drugs tainted with fentanyl.
Butler is upfront about his daughter’s lengthy struggles — he first learned Olivia was taking heroin when she was just 16.“We had a lot of issues with her at home, a lot of fighting, a lot of yelling, and the fighting escalated.”
The family tried everything, from methadone to multiple rehab centres.
But he said finding resources for a teen girl fighting addiction proved harder than expected and ended up costing the family more than $100,000 over the course of three years.
“We thought there would be multiple opportunities to enroll her with counsellors or clinics,” he said. “But there was hardly any.”
Eventually the family found a lifeline in Langley’s Come As You Are rehab facility, through which Olivia landed a job and kicked off more than a year of sobriety.
