Calgary mother issues warning to parents following daughter’s fatal fentanyl overdose

A Calgary mother is sharing her story of loss in hopes of bringing more awareness to the ongoing opioid crisis in Alberta.

Samantha Card, 25, died last October after overdosing on fentanyl.

“She just had a spice about her, she was creative and smart,” Samantha’s mother Jenn Ebbesen said. “She loved kids and she just wanted to be a mom.”

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But that chance was taken away from her on Oct. 11, 2018. Ebbesen told Global News she can still vividly remember the police officer ringing her doorbell early that morning.

“He asked me to sit down and he said, ‘Samantha overdosed tonight and unfortunately she didn’t make it,’” Ebbesen recalled. “We just sat in there in complete silence trying to comprehend what was going on.”

Ebbesen said her daughter had called a suicide prevention line three months prior to her death after someone close to her nearly died from a drug overdose.

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Ebbesen is now calling for more resources to address mental health issues.

“Addiction and drug use really stems from what’s inside,” she said. “Trauma can happen in so many ways and there are probably things that happened to her that I have no idea [about].”

In 2017, the province created The Minister’s Opioid Emergency Response Commission in order to “oversee and implement urgent coordinated actions on the opioid crisis.”

According to the provincial government’s Alberta Opioid Response Surveillance Report, nearly 750 Albertans died in 2018 from overdoses.

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“Most addicts want help and they ask for it and then when they ask for it they’re basically told, ‘We have no room for you right now, come back in three months and we’ll help you,’” Ebbesen said. “You probably don’t see them in three months.”

“There has to be more awareness, I just feel if I can save one person’s life then I’ve done something.”