VICTORIA’S SECRETS
Provinces need to regulate the sale of pill presses churning out fatal drugs
Back when Mike Ellis was a Calgary police officer, he often dealt with the problem of illicit opioid drugs getting into the hands of kids and addicts on the streets.
“The biggest problem was OxyContin and we had a lot of break-ins and robberies at pharmacies,” Ellis said. “It was after I made a career switch into politics that I heard about fentanyl.”
The powerfully addictive opioid — 100 times stronger than heroin — is often smuggled into Canada through the mail, cut with other ingredients and made into pills before it hits the streets.
Now an opposition member of the Progressive Conservative party in the Alberta legislature, Ellis has kept in contact with his former police colleagues.
Just as in British Columbia, fentanyl is killing hundreds of people in Alberta, and the Calgary cops were pleading for help.
“That’s when I thought, ‘What can we do at the provincial level?’ The answer was to go after the pill presses.”
Pill presses are high-speed machines that compress powdered drugs and binding agents called “excipients” into hardened pill form.
“No one has ever been able to explain to me why anyone would need to own a machine that can make 18,000 pills an hour,” Ellis said.
“So I started talking to the government, the police, doctors, pharmacists, naturopaths. They all agreed there was no reason these machines should be so widely available for sale to anyone. As a province, we could act to control them.”
The result was one of those rare instances of co-operation across political lines.
Ellis’ private member’s bill to strictly control, regulate and licence pill presses in Alberta passed unanimously in the provincial legislature, including support from the governing NDP and opposition Wildrose parties.
The new law — the first of its kind in Canada — takes effect on Jan. 1. People caught with an unlicensed pill press will face up to a year in jail and a $375,000 fine.
Now Ellis has a question for his counterparts in British Columbia: Why aren’t you doing the same thing there?
“The police here are worried that once the Alberta law goes into effect, the drug dealers will simply set up their labs on the British Columbia and Saskatchewan borders,” he said.
“That’s why we are asking B.C. and other provinces to follow our lead.”
But British Columbia has chosen not to do that.
Last spring, Premier Christy Clark’s Liberal government refused to call a private member’s bill proposed by NDP MLA Mike Farnworth to regulate pill presses in B.C.
Instead, Clark went to Ottawa last week and called on the federal government to regulate the machines, along with a list of other federal reforms including a border crackdown to stop the drugs from flowing into B.C. in the first place.
But Ellis said now is not the time to wait for Ottawa to do something.
“Provinces have power and provinces can act,” he said. “We don’t have time to wait around for the big bureaucratic machine of the federal government to do something.”
It’s a point Ellis drove home during a recent meeting with Mike Morris, British Columbia’s solicitor general and a fellow former cop.
“I explained to him very respectfully, ‘Look, every day we wait, there are more people dying.’ I told him what we’ve done in Alberta and I offered him a cut-and-paste solution so British Columbia could do the same thing.”
The British Columbia government instead cancelled the scheduled fall sitting of the B.C. legislature while the unregulated sale of pill presses continues unabated.
A company based in Coquitlam called the Tablet Press Club openly sells pill presses over the Internet, including a US$10,000 machine that produces 16,000 pills an hour.
The company also sells the excipient binding materials to produce pills in a rainbow of different colours, making them look like candy.
“Think about how frustrating this is for law enforcement, to see these things sold openly and freely and there’s nothing they can do,” Ellis said.
The failure to regulate pill presses in British Columbia is just one area where the B.C. government has come up woefully short in dealing with an illegal-drug overdose crisis that has killed 622 people this year.
Clark’s governing Liberals promised during the 2013 election to create 500 new addiction treatment beds, but they have delivered fewer than half that number.
And the number of substance-abuse treatment beds targeted at young people dropped by 25 per cent to just 89 beds from 118 beds four years ago, according to government documents released under freedom of information laws.
The government is taking action, however, when it comes to pre-election advertising.
An ad campaign called “Fighting the overdose crisis” is currently running on TV and online and cost $275,000. Some of the ads prominently feature the premier saying: “We must protect our children.”
I agree with the premier that this is an emergency requiring urgent action by the government to protect kids.
That’s why I think the government should immediately commit the money to deliver on its promised addiction-treatment beds.
The government should also recall the legislature and regulate pill presses the way Alberta has done.
The bill could be passed in one day with unanimous support in the legislature.
Running TV commercials and pointing fingers at Ottawa isn’t good enough.