Arizona O’Neill is a Montreal author and artist, and one half of the Instagram page @ONeillReads. Her comics have appeared in Hazlitt, Exclaim!, Canadian Geographic and the Montreal Gazette, and she illustrated Nelly Arcan’s L’enfant dans le miroir and Heather O’Neill’s Valentine in Montreal. She is the author of the forthcoming graphic memoir, Opioids and Organs.
I wrote and illustrated a graphic memoir about my father’s heroin overdose in 2015, and my choice to take him off life support and donate his organs. This choice haunted me for years. His addiction left him brain dead and in a coma at 41 years old, meaning his body was young, healthy and preserved. I didn’t know it yet, but this was the perfect situation for organ harvesting. With the encouragement of the hospital, I decided to donate his organs to those suffering from a more “acceptable” illness.
Opioids and Organs is an unconventional memoir that intertwines my past and present with the history of organ transplantation. I investigate the current fentanyl epidemic and its connection to the organ donation industry in Canada. The truth is, the opioid crisis is putting an end to the organ shortage in our country. There have been more than 50,000 opioid-related deaths in Canada since 2016. Between 2014 and 2017, there was a 294-per-cent increase in organ donors who died of a drug overdose.
There are some who see this as a silver lining or a mixed blessing. But that sentiment shocks me. To even consider it any form of blessing is disturbing. No one in society should be sacrificed so that another group survives.
In many ways, I am conflicted about having given my father’s organs back to the society that abandoned him. What I learned very early on in my research is that organs in society always go up, they never come down.
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