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Cole Nicholls was no angel, and he admitted it freely.

This was, perhaps, why his 17-year-old view from the trenches of the fentanyl crisis added urgency and veracity to the storm last year that followed the deaths of three Kanata teens after opioid overdoses.

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“You try the pill. It’s wicked,” he told this newspaper of using the counterfeit Percocet pills known among teens as Percs. “It’s your party drug. Then you want to do it every day.”

At the time, Nicholls said he had weaned himself off fentanyl, a process he described as “the worst” in a front-page story.

It appeared that he had found his way, but it didn’t hold.

Nicholls died Friday of a suspected overdose.

“He was a good kid with a big heart,” said Sean O’Leary, the founder of We The Parents, a group that formed to advocate for access to support resources for youth after the Kanata deaths.

Nicholls packed a lot of hard living into his 18 years. By his own admission, he used drugs in inventive and dangerous combinations and was no stranger to the courthouse. But he also had insight into why this new drug was so dangerous.