Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Sylvain Jocelyn Gauthier would never have thought of ending up there. Make appointments with resellers behind the IGA. To leave his iPhone 11 and his laptop on the counter of a pawnshop. Crushing pills, the contents of which he largely ignored, to inhale them on the sly.
“Me, I am a businessman, I am a father. I have nothing to do with drug addicts,” says the 40-year-old.
Because Mr. Gauthier never chose to play street drug Russian roulette.
Go back. Sylvain Jocelyn Gauthier is 30 years old. He has a wife, two children, a house in Saint-Hyacinthe. Hired in a car rental company to wash vehicles there, he rose through the ranks to become director of operations for seven branches.
It’s a mass a little smaller than a grape that derails this orderly life. A benign tumor, but lodged in the middle of the spine. A mass impossible to remove, which compresses his nerves and generates intolerable pain.
His doctor prescribed him Dilaudid and Hydromorph Contin, two opioids for pain.
But tolerance sets in and the drugs soon prove insufficient to calm his illness.
“I started taking two pills instead of one. Then, sometimes, three. But since I received my pills for a month, after two weeks, I had none left,” says Mr. Gauthier.
Doctors and pharmacists refuse to increase his prescriptions. Sylvain Jocelyn Gauthier then saw the terrible withdrawal from opioids.
“Lacks are awful, awful, awful. Already I have pain, there, I had even more. Sweating, spasms, pains in the limbs. You’re in bed, you veer from side to side, you just want to get out of your body,” he says.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Sylvain Jocelyn Gauthier
From drugs to drugs
As a teenager, Sylvain Jocelyn Gauthier experimented with drugs. He hasn’t touched an illegal substance since. But the father of the family finds himself reactivating contacts from that time. He’s looking for drug dealers. And eventually find it.
It is now with counterfeit drugs that he numbs his pain. In the meantime, he has to quit his job because of his state of health and is going through a separation.
“I lost my fitness, my job and my wife at the same time. It was a pretty tough time,” he says.
Her daily doses increase at the same rate as her tolerance. All his savings go there.
“At $150, $200 a day, it’s not long you’re looking for money,” he says. He invents all sorts of pretexts to borrow some from his parents, leaves his property to the pawnbrokers. He soon moves in with a drug-addicted roommate who helps him get supplies.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Sylvain Jocelyn Gauthier
He can see that the quality of the street drugs he uses varies greatly.
“From one batch to another, the taste was not the same, the strength was not the same. It is certain that I was close to death several times taking this. One day or another, I would have overdosed. »
Hell lasts six long years, during which Sylvain Jocelyn Gauthier does not talk about his consumption to anyone.
“Last, I was really at my wit’s end. I was taking over 30 8mg Dilaudids a day, in addition to the hydromorphs,” he says.
Confronted by his mother who can see that something is wrong (and who is tired of being used as an ATM), Sylvain Jocelyn Gauthier ends up confessing everything.
He joined the Cran program of the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal, which treats opioid addiction. We are gradually replacing our street drugs with methadone. It was there, by having his counterfeit tablets analyzed, that he discovered that they contained fentanyl, a very dangerous opioid.
Many consumers who have experienced opioid addiction live with the perpetual fear of relapse. This is not the case for Sylvain Jocelyn Gauthier.
“You’d put some there, in front of me, and I sure wouldn’t take any,” he said, gazing into ours. It was pretty hard to get out of it — no way I’m going back. »