It happens to anyone

It could have been my son, or yours. It could have been your friend, your colleague, your granddaughter. It could have been you. And this is why, I believe, the fatal overdose of Mathis Boivin shocked us so much, collectively. Alone in his room, the 15-year-old swallowed a counterfeit pill which caused a respiratory arrest and it took our breath away, too.

Since the funeral, Mathis’ father, Christian Boivin, has multiplied interviews, including with my colleague Patrick Lagacé, Tuesday, in The Press¹. He does this so that his son’s death is not completely in vain. To beg us to talk to our children, to warn them: don’t take the blue pill.

The white one and the pink one, by the way, can be just as deadly, since we have no way of knowing what might be found in this junk purchased on the black market. So don’t touch these tablets which can kill you silently, in your room, a stone’s throw from your parents who suspect nothing and who will blame themselves for the rest of their lives for not… not what, exactly? It could have happened to anyone.

In fact, this is already the case. It already happens to anyone. Each day. For years.

It has been ten years since the D^D Marie-Ève ​​Goyer, medical head of dependency and homelessness programs at the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal, is sounding the alarm. She participated in surveys of The Press². She was invited to Everybody talks about it. “I am going to say again, with more irritability in my voice, what I have been saying for ten years: we are heading towards a public health crisis. There are deaths. More and more. »

The overdose crisis, which is hitting the west of the country hard, is catching up with Quebec, where they now cause more deaths than road accidents. “We have reached 40,000 deaths in Canada [depuis 2016]. In Quebec, there are 50 deaths per month. Imagine if that were 50 deaths from meningitis or measles. After two months, it would be fixed! We would have implemented public health interventions, we would have trained doctors…”

We would never have let so many people die, for so long, in indifference. “Me, my patients, they die every week and no one talks about it…”

Let’s be honest: if Mathis’ tragic story touches us to this extent, it’s because we can (too) easily identify with it. It does not give us the cliché of the poor multi-possession junkie who dies at the bottom of an alley, a needle stuck in his arm.

“It’s super sad that it takes the death of a child for the population to wake up and realize how much it can affect everyone,” regrets Marie-Ève ​​Goyer. The reality is that all consumers can come across a contaminated pill, whether they take it every day or once a year, party Office. Obviously, the more they swallow, the more the risk of overdose increases…

But it remains a game of Russian roulette: a single tablet can be fatal.

Mathis Boivin believed he had bought oxycodone on the black market. Instead, the counterfeit tablets contained isotonitazene, a synthetic opioid that has been found in the post-mortem toxicology analyzes of at least 14 people in Montreal since 2019. It’s tiny, but extremely powerful: the equivalent of a few grains of salt can kill an adult.

Christian Boivin, Mathis’ father, doesn’t understand. We actually sell poison in the street, he was surprised in interviews. We kill consumers on the first try. Not really the best way to build customer loyalty. So where is the logic?

I asked Sergeant Jacques Théberge, a specialist in synthetic drugs at the RCMP. For criminal organizations, he explains, it can be much riskier to import 1,000 kilos of heroin than, say, 500 grams of isotonitazene. However, the more potent the opioids, the more difficult they are to handle and dose during tablet manufacturing.

We imagine that the criminals are not all Walter White, this chemistry teacher without morals, but who, at least, knew what he was doing, in the series breaking Bad. “In a clandestine laboratory, when playing with substances like carfentanil, fentanyl and nitazenes, a small difference can be tragic,” emphasizes Sergeant Théberge. It is the consumer who suffers the consequences. »

Telling our children all this is good, but it is not enough, especially since they do not always listen to us. So what can we do to avoid further tragedies? “What I can say is that the status quo does not work,” replies the D^D Goyer. If prohibition worked, we would have known it by now.

Legalizing hard drugs seems rather unrealistic. But not decriminalize their possession in small quantities, as British Columbia has been doing for a year. The idea: treat consumers not as criminals, but as people who need help. At the very least, we need to think about solutions. Seriously. It is high time that Quebec tackles the overdose crisis as it would any other major public health crisis. It’s one.