To solve the fentanyl crisis, we have to stop thinking like cops.
Why didn’ t we think of it bef ore? Alberta Conser vati v e MLA Mike Ellis, a former Calgary policeman, has introduced a private members’ bill to address the deadly crisis of off- brand opioids adulterated with fentanyl and other drugs that have a low margin of safety.
It is, as one would expect from a legislator with a police background, an elegant example of what one might call “cop thought” when it comes to the control of illicit substances. Ellis wants to cut directly to the fundamental cause of all the trouble — bad guys who aren’t pharmacists manufacturing pills and selling them to vulnerable addicts and abusers. So: outlaw equipment for making pills!
It’s so simple, how could it fail to work? This is the question that haunts 100 years of drug policy, but perhaps that should not give us pause. Ellis’s stillsketchy Bill 205 would outlaw the possession and use of “a pill or tablet press, tablet machine, capsule- filling machine or pharmaceutical mixer,” except by licensed users.
The precise definition of the deprecated equipment is to be handled in a schedule to the law, but if the intention is to criminalize any pill- making apparatus, well, the ancient Romans made medicine and handed it out in pill form. A $ 100 mould, an $ 80 die and a rubber mallet could conceivably be captured by the law.
From a law- enforcement standpoint, t he s erious problem is second- hand electric- powered equipment for making hundreds of thousands of pills in a day. We know bike gangs are often able to lay their hands on such machinery in the after- market. You can find this out for yourself because the machines are often seized by the cops in widely reported drug busts. And the first thing you might notice is that the machines being legal does not stop any police force f rom confiscating t hem, nor, indeed, from introducing them as evidence of the existence of a drug manufacturing business in the ensuing trials. Police seize otherwise legal items like vehicles and cash in drug busts all the time.
This raises an obvious question about how Ellis’s legislation might be of practical help with Alberta’s fentanyl crisis: the most natural answer i s that it might help boost Ellis’s profile as a legislator. And, of course, it gives the police another factor they can use in the quest for probable cause and search warr ants. Pressing powder into a small cylinder isn’t a harmful activity in itself; it’s a sort of para- crime, something otherwise innocuous that might be indicative of conduct with a socially harmful end. Cop thought loves to seize on para- crimes; it is an everascending, ever- spreading tendency that they cannot resist.
Fentanyl adulteration of street drugs is killing Albertans by the score, and the New Democratic government has acted fast to facilitate the distribution of overdose- preventing naloxone kits to paramedics, outreach agencies and drug users themselves. This may be effective at saving lives, and it may not. Perhaps it was just not law-and- ordery enough f or Albertans. But it does have the great logical merit of being an idea that a provincial government could act on effectively.
Our fentanyl crisis comes at the end of a long series of cop- thought, para- crime measures — e ver ything from making lawfully vended oxycodone tablets crushproof to banning “precursor chemicals” for various drugs. This fact should inspire reflection and caution in policy- making. Unfortunately, the typical effect is precisely the opposite.
Cutting drugs of abuse with fentanyl — a very good pain drug, which is extraordinary at numbing, but non- euphoric — is an economic reaction to the expensiveness of fixed costs in obtaining and selling those drugs.
The only reason for a biker gang to take the risk of possessing and concealing an industrial- grade tablet press is the same reason anyone else owns an industrial machine: it is laboursaving. The effects of a law against pill- press machines are hard to guess, even for a policeman. Maybe the economic advantage already enjoyed by organized crime will increase. ( Certainly the value of the equipment they already own is bound to do so.)
And maybe, from a public- health standpoint, we actually want more of the market to be in the hands of crypto- industrial producers who have strong incentives not to kill their customers. Maybe it is small illicit-drug shops that are killing people by mishandling fentanyl in small batches made with hand- powered medieval equipment.
This may seem like a sick, nasty or pessimistic way of thinking through the problem, but are we not tired yet of the “see x, ban x” approach? An economic attack on pill manufacture, one that might force a drug gang to go all the way to Saskatchewan or Montana to obtain equipment, may be worth contemplating in the face of so many fentanyl deaths. The i mportant thing is that it be defended with real evidence for the likely changes in incentives, behaviour and drug- consumer safety. Not just cop thought.
THIS CRISIS WAS BORN FROM OTHER FAILED ANTI-DRUG POLICIES. IF WE WANT TO SOLVE IT, WE HAVE TO STOP THINKING LIKE COPS.