“Are not the lives of our young people worth more than tanks?”
This cry from the heart is that of Phoudsady Vanny, who is experiencing the worst mourning possible for a parent.
His son Nikian, 19, should have had his whole life ahead of him.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY FAMILY
Nikian Levesque-Vanny, 19, died of an opioid overdose.
He died one spring evening after swallowing a counterfeit Dilaudid tablet.
A graduate of Jean-de-Brébeuf College, the young man wanted to pursue his dreams at the Institut de tourisme et d’hôtellerie du Québec. He was a beautiful soul, his mother said as she read me, her voice breaking, a testimony sent by one of her son’s best friends.
“Nikian was good for the simple fact of being good. It’s one of the many things that made him so special. Thank you for raising such a great young man.”
On the night of his death, Nikian was supposed to meet friends at the park. Instead, he fell asleep, never to wake up again.
The hydromorphone – a powerful painkiller – he believed he had swallowed was a counterfeit pill containing nitazene – a synthetic opioid that killed him.
The tragedy that occurred on May 24 recalls that of young Mathis Boivin, 15, who died five months earlier from an overdose of synthetic opioids in similar circumstances.
Any resemblance between these two heartbreaking stories is not coincidental, a report by The Press1.
The two young Montrealers were unrelated. But their tragic deaths are linked, our investigative team discovered. They are both victims of the same social media drug supplier. An online store called Kushtard – a cynical play on words evoking Couche-Tard. Another type of convenience store where death is sold in pills day and night.
Oddly enough, even though a journalistic investigation was able to quickly establish these links and four alleged traffickers have just been arrested following the police investigation into Mathis’ death, the one into Nikian’s death has still not led to any arrests. As if the awareness raised by the media coverage of young Mathis’ story – his father had testified to Everyone is talking about it – had not allowed us to fully measure the seriousness of the crisis that is raging. As if beyond a sad story that left its mark on people’s minds, we had forgotten that we were facing an invisible epidemic.
This is not an isolated case. Since 2020, nitazenes have been detected in 90 cases of fatal overdoses in Quebec, my colleague Caroline Touzin discovered following an analysis of reports from the Coroner’s Office.2.
The reports follow one another and look the same on the coroner’s desk. We know that it kills. We know that in many cases, we are talking about avoidable deaths. And yet, we cannot avoid the worst.
How many more deaths will it take? Why don’t we act as if we were facing a mad shooter? Nikian’s mother wonders.
“If there was a crazed shooter in town, the entire police department would be mobilized to stop him. This drug dealer is just as dangerous as this crazed shooter, and he was allowed to wreak havoc. This is unacceptable!” she told my colleague.
She is absolutely right. Especially since, as she repeated to me on Wednesday, we are here facing an even more insidious danger. In the presence of a mad shooter, we can always barricade ourselves, establish a security perimeter in a given sector, make a description of the armed person. “But here, we don’t even know what he looks like, this Kushtard!”
So that her son did not die in vain, Phoudsady Vanny would like to see a commission of inquiry launched to tackle head-on the taboos surrounding the mental health of our children and their use of recreational or addictive drugs.
Unfortunately, due to an overdose of prejudice on the subject, the cause is not “sexy” politically, notes Isabelle Fortier, whose daughter Sara-Jane died of an overdose in May 2019, at the age of 24.3.
Instead of making it a collective responsibility, we are simply placing the blame on the shoulders of the parents alone, deplores Isabelle Fortier, who is the regional representative of Moms Stop the Harm, a group of grieving relatives who want to put an end to the stigma and silence.
“We’re still good parents! We do what we can,” says the woman who supported Mathis’ parents after their son’s death.
“What is the value of our children’s lives?” asks Isabelle, who laments the lack of eagerness of our governments to prevent this epidemic.
When the scourge of car thefts hit the headlines last year, Ottawa quickly put together a national summit to combat this lucrative transnational crime, Nikian’s mother said. A series of measures were announced.
If a young person’s life is worth more than a car, why not put the same effort into preventing overdoses?
1. Read “Synthetic Opioids: Death on Sale in an Online Store”
2. Read “Nitazene Overdoses: Opioids Are Ever More Powerful”
3. Read “The Invisible Epidemic: Isabelle and her Little Fox”