DETERMINED TO IGNORE ‘SAFER SUPPLY’
In a House of Commons health committee hearing this week, two high ranking police representatives disclosed several unsettling facts about the widespread diversion of “safer supply” opioids. However, their testimony also included questionable remarks, which suggest that the province’s police leadership may be playing down the extent of the problem.
Fiona Wilson, who is deputy chief of the Vancouver Police Department and president of the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police (BCACP), told parliamentarians that roughly half of the hydromorphone recently seized in the province can be attributed to safer supply — although she didn’t specify what exact quantities of the drug have been found.
To give context, she estimated that approximately 20 per cent of the people who are prescribed hydromorphone in B.C. are enrolled in a safer supply program — which implies that, per capita, safer supply clients divert four times more hydromorphone to the black market than people who receive the drug for other reasons (i.e. chronic pain patients).
This data apparently came as a shock to Premier David Eby, who told reporters on Tuesday that it was the first time that he had ever heard of it. If this is indeed true, then that casts doubt upon the province’s repeated and emphatic claims that it is “closely monitoring” safer supply diversion.
While harm reduction advocates have said that safer supply diversion is a rare or insignificant phenomenon, Wilson’s testimony demolished that position. When a taxpayer-funded program is doubling the street supply of a pharmaceutical opioid that is as potent as heroin, that is hardly insignificant.
However, the diversion problem may actually be worse than Wilson let on, because there may in fact be far fewer safer supply patients diverting even larger quantities of hydromorphone.
According to the 2018/19 British Columbia Controlled Prescription Drug Atlas (more recent data is unavailable), there were approximately 80,000 hydromorphone patients in B.C. that year. It is unlikely that this number has significantly declined since then, although validating that assumption is difficult as the provincial government does not disclose many important drug statistics.
In contrast, there have been, on average, roughly 4,500 safer supply patients in B.C. since access to the program was expanded in 2020.
These numbers suggest that safer supply clients could make up only five per cent, not 20 per cent as the chief said, of all hydromorphone patients. It thus follows that, per capita, safer supply clients may actually divert roughly 18 times more hydromorphone to the black market than everyone else.
And though Wilson said that half of the province’s hydromorphone seizures have been attributed to safer supply, she did not specify whether the other half was conclusively attributed to other sources or whether the origin of the hydromorphone in those cases was often simply unknown.
This distinction matters.
It is notoriously difficult to prove whether diverted hydromorphone originates from safer supply or not, as the federal government inexplicably refuses to make any safer supply drugs “traceable” through special dyes, shapes and chemical identifiers. Investigators must rely on circumstantial evidence, or the presence of prescription bottles and other distinct packaging, to prove a connection — but this evidence is often missing.
It is very possible that, for hydromorphone seizures where the origin of the drug is undetermined, there may be connections to safer supply that simply aren’t measurable. It is possible that safer supply diversion accounts for more than the 50 per cent of confidently attributed cases.
In an email this week, I asked the police chiefs association for clarification on their data and feedback on this analysis — but they did not respond. The Vancouver Police Department did not respond either, to a similar email inquiry on Thursday.
This was unsurprising because Deputy Chief Wilson spent much of her health committee time playing down the significance of safer supply diversion, and, to that end, often leveraged arguments which addiction experts find unconvincing.
For example, she repeatedly emphasized that most drug users die of fentanyl, not hydromorphone — but addiction physicians routinely say that the danger of hydromorphone actually lies in its capacity to hook new people into addiction before escalating them onto stronger, more lethal, opioids.
While Wilson’s comments provided the most explosive news of the committee hearing, B.C. RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne Mcdonald, who described safer supply diversion as “an emerging concern that requires forthright attention,” also raised eyebrows.
Mcdonald said that organized crime is trafficking safer supply and that the street price of hydromorphone has “gone down significantly in the last while” (which strongly suggests an explosion of diverted supply). Given that the B.C. and federal governments dismissed these facts as disinformation last year, his corroboration was significant.
However, Mcdonald also made some questionable claims.
Among other things, he said that, at present, “We do not have evidence to suggest that safer supply has been diverted outside of British Columbia.” This statement directly contradicted the testimony of Prince George RCMP Cpl. Jennifer Cooper, who told me last month that her detachment had proven that interprovincial diversion was occurring “through ongoing investigations that involve other departments and other police agencies.”
There have been ongoing concerns that the B.C. RCMP’S leadership is deliberately ignoring safer supply. Last month, the leadership, in contradiction to several lower-ranking detachments, claimed that there is “no evidence” of widespread diversion and concurrently issued a memo, which was leaked to media, instructing local detachments to avoid speaking about the issue with reporters.
After Mcdonald stood by the implausible “no evidence of widespread safer supply diversion” claim in parliament, Conservative MP Todd Doherty directly accused the RCMP and BCACP of “covering for the government in an election year.” It was hard not to sympathize with him.
THE DIVERSION PROBLEM MAY ACTUALLY BE WORSE THAN WILSON LET ON.