Daniel Tye takes a thoughtful pause before explaining where he found the strength to overcome 14 years of drug and alcohol abuse.
It took a certain combination of events to truly commit to recovery.
Uppermost, his mom was getting remarried and he wanted to give her the gift of his sobriety.
Then, by chance, he came across a photo of himself as a little boy and it hit him hard. He wondered where that happy kid had gone.
At the age of 27, he realized he didn’t want to die.
And Tye knew that dying was a real possibility after abusing alcohol and drugs from the age of 13.
“The main thing was I didn’t want to hurt my family,” said Tye, the oldest of three boys who describes his early childhood as really happy.
“I had parents who loved me. Everything was great for a long time,” he said. Sitting at his mom’s kitchen table in Point Edward, he chooses his words carefully.
He’s welcome to live at his mom’s now, but that wasn’t always the case. There was a time he couldn’t be there unsupervised. He’d stolen from her too many times to feed his habit and couldn’t be trusted.
That’s painful to admit, said Tye, now 34. His mom means the world to him. She is a big part of why he fought for himself and entered recovery.
Tye was a bright, straight A student in Grade 8 at Bridgeview School when he started drinking following the breakdown of his parents’ marriage.
“My world came crashing down hard. I had a whole lot of feelings I didn’t know how to handle. It did something to me mentally.
“I decided I was done with being a kid. If I did the things adults do, like party, I could go on. I was up for anything.”
Staying busy and drunk numbed his emotions.
Alcohol was augmented by a lot of marijuana. He played football at SCITS and said he played better hung over.
“I had fun for a while. It was a good time. I had friends from all over and I liked to drink on the weekend and needed people to be around me.
“I just didn’t know the pain I was in and didn’t want to talk about anything.”
In Grade 11, Tye tried the addictive painkiller OxyContin.
“It grabbed ahold of me. I wanted that feeling all the time,” he said. “I felt like Dan 2.0, like I was enhanced, like a super hero.” That lead to Fentanyl, which is significantly more potent than OxyContin and has replaced heroin as the most lethal street drug in Ontario
Despite multiple attempts to stop on his own and interventions from family and friends, the drug use continued. Still, he managed to graduate from high school and became a customs broker.
“I denied I was an addict. I just said I had a problem but it wasn’t that bad,” he recalled.
Life continued to spiral. He used opiates daily just to feel okay. At his worst, he slept in his car or couch surfed at friends’ homes.
Several times, he tried to get away from that lifestyle and went to stay with his father who had moved to the U.S. But it never stuck. The dream of going to university disappeared.
“I lost a lot of opportunity due to being sick and not wanting to ask for help,” he said.
“I was a functioning addict. I could hold a conversation, hold down a job. That’s the worst kind of addict. I used every day and had no other human experience outside of that.
“I had zero hope.”
But then his mom started making wedding plans. “So for a wedding gift I was, like, maybe I’ll get you your son back. I’ll try something different.”
Going cold turkey didn’t work. “It was terrible. For two weeks, I was so sick, and then I’d fall right back into it,” he recalled.
He also tried methadone, a long-lasting synthetic opioid used under medical supervision to replace short-acting opioids like fentanyl or OxyContin. But he didn’t want to be addicted to methadone either.
“It’s more controlled and it’s better than being on the streets,” Tye said. “But withdrawal from that stuff is way worse.”
Several days in withdrawal at Bluewater Health’s detox unit didn’t do it either.
The seven-bed unit opened at the hospital in January 2018 when Tye was beginning to take his recovery seriously.
The unit is designed to help patients with addictions for up to a week. But Tye needed at least two weeks to get the opioids out of his system. He needed long term residential support unavailable in Sarnia until this year.
For months he suffered through a nasty cycle.
“I was so scared,” he said. He’d spend a few days in detox, leave and start abusing immediately. Then he’d try again. Sometimes a detox bed was available. Sometimes not.
“It was hard. They knew me by my first name,” he said.
Then one day he came across a photo of himself on display at the Point Edward Arena, just blocks from where he grew up. It was taken in Grade 4 when he was a class leader for an anti-drug campaign aimed at elementary students.
There he was, dressed in a shirt three sizes too big with “Just Say No” printed across his chest. “I saw the photo and thought, ‘What happened to that kid? Where did that kid go?’ I felt a little shift and realized I wanted to live still. I didn’t want to die.”
His determination grew.
Four months later, he was offered a bed at a 19-day residential program at Westover Treatment Centre in Thamesville where he learned about 12-step programs.
“I left there with 26 days clean and I hadn’t been 26 days clean since I was 13,” he said. “I thought maybe there’s a chance.”
He found support at Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and a program called Red Path at The Inn of the Good Shepherd.
He abstained for 17 months until a doctor prescribed opioids following a procedure. Tye found himself right back at it.
“I blew up my life again.”
It took three more trips to detox and two more to rehab. All of it was hard work.
On Feb. 22, Tye celebrated three years of sobriety. He’s got full-time employment doing industrial inspection, volunteers as a Big Brother, and attends 12-step programs regularly. He sets goals and feels optimistic about the future.
“I know now that life is not for me. It’s been years of learning how to live and letting go of all the stuff I bottled up,” he said.
“Recovery is available for everybody. You just have to really be honest with yourself. Be patient with yourself.
“It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Where to find help
- Alcoholics Anonymous – 519-337-5211 www.aasarnialambton.com
- Narcotics Anonymous – 1-800-573-0920 www.orscna.org
- Westover Treatment Centre in Thamesville, call 1-800-721-3232;
- Renascent Addiction Centre in Toronto, call 1-866-232-1212;
- Residence at Homewood and Health Centre in Guelph, call 1-438-258-5460;
- Brentwood Recovery House in Windsor, call 519-253-2441;
- Hope Place in Milton, call 905-878-1120.
By Cathy Dobson, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on May 20, 2026 at 09:13
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