Christian Boivin sits in the room of his son Mathis in Montreal. The room has been kept as it was the day Mathis died of a drug overdose.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
The day of what Christian Boivin calls “the accident” was a normal one for his Montreal family.
It was just before Christmas last year: Dec. 21, 2023. The Christmas tree was up. School was winding down for his three children: Mathis, 15, his younger brother Olivier and their little sister Frederike. Mr. Boivin had just started a holiday break from his job selling real-estate data. To celebrate, he took his wife Julie Fortin to lunch at a nice restaurant.
Then Mathis sent him a text. His friends were skipping class for the afternoon. Could he hang out with them? His father said yes, as long as he was home in time for his math tutoring at 5 p.m.
Mathis did the tutoring then joined the family for a pizza dinner. He went back up to his bedroom on the second floor and sat down at his desktop computer.
Mathis was a happy, active kid growing up. From early on, he loved to travel.
Mr. Boivin’s job pays well, so the family took overseas vacations and skiing holidays at their place in Mont Tremblant. On a trip to Eastern Europe when he was just a toddler, Mathis insisted on putting his feet in every fountain he saw, peeling off his shoes and socks to splash around. His favourite city was New York. He liked the crazy energy of Times Square.
At meals out, he always ordered the most expensive thing on the menu. The best steak, the best fish. He liked classic rock: Elton John, Neil Young, Roger Waters. He could play Money by Pink Floyd on his electric guitar.
When the pandemic hit, though, he withdrew into himself, holing up in his room for hours to play video games. A friend of his later warned Mr. Boivin that Mathis was using drugs. She said he was being careless and should watch out. Mr. Boivin sat his son down for a talk. Like countless teenagers before him, Mathis said, “Don’t worry, dad.”
Up in his bedroom that December night, he went on Roblox, an Internet gaming platform. Around 8 p.m., he told one of his online pals that he had taken a pill.
As his father learned later, Mathis had visited a kind of online boutique for drugs. He connected with a dealer through the Telegram messaging service and bought five blue pills for $50, thinking they were oxycodone, a prescription painkiller that can produce feelings of relaxation and euphoria.
But in today’s drug world, things are seldom what they seem. Dealers often mix their drugs in kitchen labs, cutting them with everything from powdered caffeine to laundry detergent. They use pill presses to turn the mix into what look like common drugstore medications. In those plain-looking pills can be fentanyl, the synthetic opioid responsible for most fatal overdoses; carfentanil, an even more potent cousin of fentanyl; benzodiazepines, a class of sedative; or even xylazine, a non-opioid tranquilizer nicknamed “tranq.”
The pills Mathis bought contained isotonitazene, an opioid that started appearing in the North American drug supply about five years ago. Sometimes known as “iso” or “toni,” it is part of a family of drugs called nitazenes that were developed in the 1950s as a substitute for morphine but never made it to market. Other members of the family include metonitazene and protonitazene.
RCMP in Labrador found nitazenes in counterfeit pills they seized in a big drug bust this month. The pills were blue and marked with the letter M on one side and the number 30 on the other to resemble prescription meds. Hamilton police found protonitazene in more than 2,500 fake oxycodone pills they seized in their own bust in September. A few weeks earlier, authorities in Ottawa put out an alert saying they had found yet another nitazene, called etonitazepyne, in fake hydromorphone pills. They were white and marked M8.
In Montreal, health officials say, nitazenes were found in 31 of 491 fatal overdoses between 2021 and 2023, 6 per cent of the total. They sometimes turn up in blue pills marked A 215.
In a series of arrests in September that they say were connected with the drugs sold to Mathis, police seized hundreds of fake pills containing isotonitazene. The newspaper La Presse reported that the suspects had been running an online store called Kushtard, where they displayed screen shots of their wares and promised to deliver them anytime from noon to midnight.
After he took one of his $10 blue pills, Mathis started feeling funny. He told his online buddy that his arms were itchy, as if they were being bitten by hordes of mosquitoes. Itchiness is one of the side effects of nitazenes.
He was getting sleepy. He told the friend he was going to call it a day and go to bed. If what happened next was “the accident,” then this is what his father calls “the error.”
Mathis put on his pyjamas, went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth, just as he did every evening. He took off his glasses and crawled under the covers.
Mr. Boivin came up around 10. He didn’t think to check on Mathis. Why would he? He just said “bonne nuit, Mathis” through the door and went to bed himself.
A photograph of Mathis Boivin hung in his room in the family home.ROGER LEMOYNE/The Globe and Mail
The next morning at around 8 he heard the alarm going off in his son’s room. He went in, told Mathis to wake up and gave him a shake. His body was still warm so the truth didn’t hit him at first. Then he turned on the light. When he saw Mathis, he said “oh, no.”
He called for his wife. They started CPR on their son, pressing on his chest over and over. They tried a defibrillator. Mr. Boivin keeps one in the house because he has a cholesterol problem. But the machine started saying, “no shock required.” In other words, no pulse detected.
The police and paramedics arrived and started working on Mathis’s slender frame. At the hospital, they worked on him some more. The heartbeat monitor showed no activity. It was then that Mr. Boivin realized “I can’t go back, it’s done. Too late.”
He would never help Mathis learn to drive, never meet his first girlfriend, never take that trip to Japan the two of them always talked about.
His voice breaks and his eyes fill with tears as he recounts all of this, seated in the living room of his comfortable townhouse. Yet he spares no details, turns away no questions. Why?
Bluntly put, because he wants people to be afraid. He wants kids to have a healthy fear of what they might be taking. In his day, he says, using drugs was like playing Russian roulette with a bullet in one chamber of six. Today, with a whole galaxy of powerful drugs out there, it is like having bullets in five of six. If kids are going to experiment with drugs, Mr. Boivin says, they should never, never take them alone, with no one around to help if they go under.
He wants parents to be aware of what their kids may be up to. Many mothers and fathers still think of overdoses as something that happens to some ragged guy in a dark alley. But Mathis died in the bosom of his ordinary, successful, supportive Quebec family. When he stopped breathing in the middle of the night, his dad was sleeping soundly just steps away.
He wants society at large to wake up to the toll of the opioids crisis, which has been killing Canadians at a rate of nearly one every hour. Why, he asks, aren’t there overdose-reversing naloxone kits alongside every public defibrillator?
Since the accident, nearly a year ago now, Mr. Boivin, 51, has been telling his story wherever and whenever he can: to politicians, to parents groups, to students in schools. He even went on Tout le monde en parle, Quebec’s widely watched television talk show. His wife, son and daughter went with him. They spoke freely about the Mathis they knew and loved.
Mr. Boivin still sends texts to his son’s number now and then, just to feel he is somehow in touch. He tells Mathis about the work he is doing to warn the public. I am trying to make a difference, he says, I hope you are proud of me. “I miss you so much.”