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The night before he died, Elliot Eurchuk and a friend snorted lines of fentanyl-laced heroin on the grounds of Esquimalt High School, a coroner’s inquest heard Wednesday.

Both teens would eventually go home with their share of the remaining two grams of heroin, and go to bed. About midnight Elliot’s friend woke from a blackout just long enough to shoot himself with the overdose-reversing drug Narcan and survive.

Elliot was not as lucky. He was found unresponsive April 20, 2018, in his bedroom about 7:30 a.m. He had been dead for up to four hours, paramedic Douglas Harwood testified.

Testimony from three of Elliot’s friends painted a grim picture of drug use that progressed from experimenting with marijuana and prescription drugs to injecting fentanyl-laced street drugs on schoolgrounds.

Brock Eurchuk, Eliott’s father, called the revelation of the breadth and depth of drug use by his son and his friends “a bombshell.”

“By Grade 11, I’d say I was dependent on opioids and Elliot did it just as much as me,” a friend testified. “In Grade 11 we started injecting the drugs and quickly after that we started doing heroin. … We would do it at school — really whenever we could or had drugs.”

Drugs were bought for as little as $5 in downtown Victoria. Heroin was purchased from Switzerland through the dark web using Bitcoin and delivered to Victoria.

Elliot learned to inject drugs when he gave his mother her daily chemotherapy drugs as she battled breast cancer. He then taught his friend.

Death was a common topic of conversations, said the friend. “We knew what we were doing and the chances we were taking every time we did heroin and that we would most likely end up dead. It was just kind of accepted."

After Elliot’s death, his friend swore off drugs. But then, six grams of heroin that Elliot had ordered via the internet, for delivery to the friend’s home, arrived in the mail. He took it as “a sign from Elliot” to enjoy it in his memory. “[Elliot] was dead at that point and I had no one to share it with and so I did it all.”

But afterwards, he realized to maintain his habit he would have to resort to more and cheaper street drugs.

“At that point I realized I didn’t want to die and went to the youth clinic and got [opioid substitute] Suboxone,” he testified.

“I’m sober a year and graduating so I’m doing good. I’m surviving,” said the teen.