A leaked document produced by British Columbia’s Ministry of Health alleges that “significant” quantities of “safer supply” opioids are being diverted to the black market with the assistance of organized gangs and certain unscrupulous health-care providers. This raises serious questions about the competence and honesty of B.C. New Democrats and federal Liberals, who gaslit Canadians for two years by insisting that reports of mass diversion were disinformation.
The document in question is a PowerPoint presentation summarizing the findings of a special investigative unit that, according to B.C. Health Minister Josie Osborne, was created sometime before last October’s provincial election. Many details remain unclear, as only the presentation slides were leaked last week, but the available bullet points and summaries are damning enough.
The presentation confirms that “a significant portion” of safer supply opioids are being diverted to the black market, where they are being trafficked “provincially, nationally and internationally.” Photos of diverted safer supply prescriptions, apparently confiscated during vehicle searches and still in their original packaging, were included to illustrate the point.
The special investigative unit identified at least 60 B.C. pharmacies allegedly providing prohibited paid “incentives” to customers, doctors and assisted living residences to increase their profits.
Canadian pharmacies charge a dispensing fee each time they fill a prescription, which, in this case, is typically billed to the provincial government. As pharmacies may dispense up to three prescriptions a day for a single safer supply patient, and dispensing fees in B.C. hover at around $10, pharmacies can earn up to $11,000 per year for every safer supply patient they serve.
The presentation notes that normal customers yield around $120 in dispensing fees per year, suggesting that a single safer supply patient can bring in more revenue than 90 other people combined.
The province’s investigators suggest that the profits from these billings are sometimes used to “pay incentives” to ensure safer supply patients don’t use competitors. For example, some community housing staff allegedly require tenants to pick up prescriptions from specific pharmacies.
Two PowerPoint slides cover pharmacy ownership regulations in B.C., as well as provincial requirements for criminal background checks for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, but the exact significance of this content is not specified and the B.C. Ministry of Health did not respond to a request for comment.
As the leaked presentation alleges, some “incentivized” patients may only want one of their three daily prescriptions, and thus divert their extra opioids to the black market, fuelling organized crime, or, alternatively, the pharmacy fraudulently bills the province without actually dispensing the drugs, meaning that patients do not receive some or all of their prescriptions.
It should be noted that all of these practices echo the fraud and criminality that occurred during the OxyContin crisis 20 years ago, and that addiction experts and doctors have repeatedly drawn parallels between that crisis and safer supply. This is equal to 19 per cent of all the hydromorphone, and 13 per cent of all the fentanyl patches, dispensed in B.C. during this period.
The volume of safer supply opioids potentially being diverted is astronomical. The presentation confirms that, between 2022 and 2024, approximately 20-million milligrams of hydromorphone (an opioid as potent as heroin) and 232,000 fentanyl patches were dispensed through safer supply.
Harm-reduction advocates have insisted that there are too few safer supply patients (roughly 4,500 in B.C.) to meaningfully influence the overall drug market. These figures debunk that argument. Evidently, offering safer supply to even a relatively small population is dangerous.
The B.C. government has, in the past, declined to publicly disclose the costs of administering safer supply, but if those 4,500 patients were incurring up to $11,000 a year in dispensing fees, it would mean that taxpayers could be paying upwards of $50 million a year in pharmacy fees alone, before even factoring in inventory costs, to flood their own communities with dangerous opioids.
As stated in the leaked presentation, the province will move forward by targeting specific pharmacies and prosecuting bad actors, which is helpful, but insufficient.
The bureaucrats and politicians currently tasked with fixing this problem spent two years insisting that reports of widespread safer supply diversion were disinformation and fear-mongering. They held press conferences pushing this falsehood, repeatedly smeared critics and either purposefully misled the public or displayed a wilful blindness towards this issue. One wonders how long it would have taken for Canadians to learn of the special investigation unit’s findings had they not been leaked.
With public trust now broken, an independent public inquiry is in order. No more gaslighting, obfuscating or secret proceedings. The time for truth is now.
National Post