Sandi Tantardini admires and respects Doug Ford.That was made clear in the letter she wrote to the Progressive Conservative leader and handed to Christine Elliott to personally deliver.“More than anything else in the world, I want to vote for you. But I am afraid.”Tantardini lost her 28-year-old son Scott to an overdose of fentanyl. That was 20 months ago.Since then, sad but wiser, Tantardini has advocated for safe injection sites. She co-founded a support group called NAMES — Niagara Area Moms Ending Stigma. “Unfortunately, we have 130 members with more being added all the time. I hate adding people. Because I understand all too well what that means.”Ford, with his adamant opposition to injection sites, does not understand. Tantardini’s heartbreaking letter, she hopes, will open the eyes of the man who might become Ontario’s next premier.She tells the story better than I could. So I will get out of the way and, for the most part, use her words from the letter:“I found out Scott was using drugs in September or so of 2012. I was blindsided. You have to understand, Scott was an amazing son. He was kind, loving and sweet. He was a hard-working young man who started his own business and purchased his first home by the age of 23. He had an incredible young lady that he was engaged to. Life was pretty sweet for him. Or so we thought.”What the family had not grasped, until later in Scott’s life, is that his confident, outgoing nature masked what they now believe were significant mental health issues, including intense anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. But Scott’s addiction to opioids arose from prescriptions he was given following extraction of his wisdom teeth.“Scott found opioids and he found God. He once told me that when he started using (and abusing) opioids, it became the first time he felt calm. It can take less than a week for a person to become addicted to opioids. If you add thos ...
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