Deadly opioid 40 times more powerful than fentanyl smuggled into Canada inside PlayStations, basketballs

The video call is grainy, but it's crystal clear what the person on the phone is trying to sell: illicit drugs, packaged and ready to be shipped to Canada. 

The seller, who goes by the name Kim, says he sells cocaine, methamphetamine, MDMA and nitazenes, a powerful class of synthetic opioids most people have never heard of — but which can be up to 43 times more powerful than fentanyl.

"It can kill people, right? So, I just want to make sure that you know that," the CBC journalist asks in a secretly recorded phone call.

"That is the game," the seller replies.

The seller is one of the 14 people the CBC's visual investigation unit spoke to in text messages and phone calls after finding them through ads posted by users on major social media platforms such as LinkedIn, X and Reddit and e-commerce websites advertising nitazenes for sale. 

These ads, posted in the open, contain contact information that put CBC in touch with drug dealers who claim to be part of international criminal networks. CBC did not purchase any illegal substances.

Nitazenes, which have never been approved for medical use and are Schedule 1 drugs under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, have increasingly been turning up in drug busts across Canada.

Last year, two lab busts in Quebec alone may have accounted for more than a million counterfeit pharmaceutical oxycodone pills, which were actually protonitazepyne, a type of nitazene — or "analog" — according to the RCMP.  

Nitazenes have killed hundreds of Canadians over the past four years, according to data collected by CBC's visual investigations unit from coroners across the country.

"[North Americans] not only are the largest consumers of nitazines, but really have the biggest problem as it relates to the number of deaths," said Alex Krotulski, director of the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education in Pennsylvania, a toxicology lab that tests for nitazenes in Canada and the U.S. 

"This is really becoming an established drug class of novel synthetic opioids."

Nitazenes aren't nearly as popular as fentanyl and its analogs, but they offer a more potent high, making them appealing to drug dealers. Drug users might not even know they're consuming nitazenes, which can be laced into counterfeit pills.

"It makes me angry," said Montreal resident Christian Boivin after CBC shared its findings with him. Boivin's 15-year-old son Mathis died of a nitazene overdose last year after consuming what he thought were oxycodone pills. "[These sellers] don't have a conscience. They're bad people and they just want money… they don't care about lives."

Mathis's story isn't an isolated case. Because public-facing statistics group them as "non-fentanyl opioids," CBC reached out to coroners in all 13 provinces and territories to compile data on the total number of deaths from nitazenes in Canada.