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TOP STORY
Despite years of official claims that it was “misinformation” to suggest that the black market was being flooded with government-supplied opioids, a leaked B.C. document confirms that the problem is not only happening, but is considered “significant.”
“A significant portion of the opioids being freely prescribed by doctors and pharmacists are not being consumed by their intended recipients,” reads the notes from a presentation prepared by the B.C. Ministry of Health.
It added that these opioids were being trafficked “provincially, nationally and internationally.”
The leaked presentation was circulated on Wednesday by the Opposition B.C. Conservatives, who called it evidence of “taxpayer-funded drug trafficking.”
B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne confirmed that the report — and its claims about diversion — were real, and had been intended for law enforcement. “These allegations are here. There’s absolutely no denial of it. There’s no diminishing of it, and there should be no acceptance of it,” she said.
Since 2020, B.C. has operated one of the world’s most comprehensive programs of what it calls “safer supply.” The basic idea is to distribute free recreational opioids to addicts, and thus wean them off potentially tainted supplies of illicit fentanyl or heroin.
“Safer supply services can help prevent overdoses, save lives, and connect people who use drugs to other health and social services,” reads an official Government of Canada backgrounder on the policy.
The just-leaked presentation reveals the scale of the program. In just two years (from 2022 to 2024), B.C. handed out 19,751,000 mg of hydromorphone as safer supply — the equivalent of about 2.5 million 8-mg pills. In that same period, the province also distributed 1.4 million mg of oxycodone, the equivalent of about 70,000 20-mg pills.
From the beginning, critics warned that addicts might simply sell their “safer supply” rations and use the money to continue using illicit drugs. The consequences would thus be two-fold: Addicts given more money to buy drugs, and the black market flooded with government-prescribed hydromorphone pills.
“As long as (safer supply) gives valuable things away for free, or for far below market prices, one should expect there to also be ‘profiteers’ wishing to profit by obtaining supply for resale,” reads an internal B.C. government report on the “economics” of safer supply authored by U.S. drug policy expert Jonathan Caulkins.
The evidence for diversion began immediately as “safer supply” pills started turned up in drug busts and in online marketplaces. Or, one could simply stand outside a pharmacy distributing “safer supply” doses.
“You can stand in front of just about any of these pharmacies that are involved in this — usually close to the safer supply prescribing office — and you can sit outside for five minutes and watch all kinds of transactions going down,” addiction outreach worker David McEvoy told the National Post’s Adam Zivo in April.
The month before, the B.C. RCMP executed a massive drug bust in Prince George that had involved little more than watching the front entrance of a pharmacy for a few weeks. “We have noted an alarming trend over the last year in the amount of prescription drugs located during drug trafficking investigations, noting they are being used as a form of currency to purchase more potent, illicit street drugs,” RCMP spokeswoman Cpl. Jennifer Cooper said at the time.
When the deputy chief of the Vancouver Police testified to a House of Commons committee on the issue of safer supply, she said there was “no question” it was happening.
“We … know that about 50 per cent of the hydromorphone pills that we come across can indeed be attributed to safe supply,” Deputy Chief Constable Fiona Wilson told the Standing Committee on Health on April 15.
And yet, drug policy advocates and B.C. government officials have repeatedly gone on record to say that diversion was not a problem, and to suggest that saying otherwise was misinformation or political posturing.
In late 2023, Provincial Health Officer Bonnie Henry released a 96-page report recommending a massive expansion to the safer supply program, including the distribution of smokeable fentanyl. The report said that “some diversion is occurring,” but chalked this up entirely to “unmet needs,” reasoning that if the safer supply was delivering a more powerful high, addicts wouldn’t feel the need to flip it for cash.
In March, B.C. Solicitor General Mike Farnworth said it was “simply not true” that diversion was happening on a widespread scale.
As recently as November, Science World hosted a talk in which speakers denounced the “politicization” of the safer supply program.
“Diversion of prescribed pharmaceuticals … has been hugely exaggerated by certain loud voices in media,” Leslie McBain, CEO of Moms Stop the Harm, told a crowd at an event entitled Misinformation and the Toxic Drug Crisis.
“The furor over safer supply has had a real chilling effect on anything that’s going on in the addiction sphere,” SFU researcher Bohdan Nosyk told the same event, calling the phenomenon “problematic.”
B.C. health officials primarily dismissed concerns about diversion by using a single data point: That “safer supply” wasn’t showing up in “significant” amounts in autopsies of fatal overdose victims.
In a June, 2023 press conference, then-chief coroner Lisa Lapointe cited the autopsy results as the singular reason that diversion concerns were not “informed by evidence.”
Lapointe didn’t have data on the share of “safer supply” that was reaching its intended users, or even on rates of hydromorphone addiction, but said hydromorphone was not “present in a significant number” of the bloodstreams of the roughly 200 people per month who were dying of overdoses in B.C. at the time.
“We have been concerned about this increasingly polarized rhetoric that is not informed by evidence, that is not paying attention to evidence, as a matter of fact, and is sharing opinion or anecdote that, in fact, is clearly not defensible if you look at the data,” she said.
IN OTHER NEWS
Canada was able to secure an 11th hour reprieve on threatened Trump administration tariffs because of a promise to boost border security in a bid to crack down on fentanyl smuggling and illegal migration. But much of that pledge has been directed towards increased patrols of the physical border – which arguably isn’t nearly as effective as, say, busting up fentanyl super-labs. Mark Weber, national president of the customs and immigration union, called the stepped-up patrols “border theatre.” One of the more absurd elements of the new border plan is that provincial police officers deputized to patrol the border have limited enforcement powers. If they encounter an illegal border-crosser, all they’re allowed to do is tell the Canada Border Services Agency about it.
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