“On the Friday before he died, I happened to be working from home that day, and he had come around and met me in the backyard on the deck, bounded up the stairs just smiling ear to ear and started talking about his day,” said Charlene Vacon, a paramedic.
Vacon’s 19-year-old son, Archie MacIsaac-Vacon, collapsed and died at a Montreal bar around 2 a.m. on June 29. A plastic baggie was found near the teen, and when tested, showed traces of fentanyl.
Now, Vacon is asking for public health to do more than just educate about drugs. She said her son, in particular, was extremely knowledgeable when it came to the dangers of street drugs.
“The thing about Archie that you need to understand is that he was the smartest person that a lot of people had ever met, his intellect was almost unmatched,” Vacon said.
When Archie was a kid, he wanted to be an anaesthesiologist. If he wanted to understand something, which he often did, he would study it.
“He could draw all the chemical images of what an opioid looked like; fentanyl, carfentanil, morphine… What their potency was, so he knew very much what the issues around those drugs were,” Vacon said.
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