B.C. opens door to chemical tracking after police confirm safe supply in organized crime operations
As any savvy politician knows, the best way to bury news you don’t want to answer questions about, is to release it late in the day at the end of the week.
So it was, in the waning hours of the last day in the final legislative session before the October election that B.C. Premier David Eby signalled a dramatic concession to critics of his government’s coveted safe supply program.
“I have asked [staff] … to determine whether there’s a way for us to identify prescribed alternatives — whether using chemical markers or dye or some other method – so we’re able to be certain” which drugs come from the program, Eby said, responding to a question on safe supply from BC United Opposition Leader, Kevin Falcon.
It was an astounding admission by the Premier that diversion of publicly funded addictive drugs has reached such alarming levels his government was, at long last, compelled to take specific action. Or at least was “looking into” taking action.
If that sounds underwhelming, it is. But that’s how this government rolls.
On contentious issues, any reaction beyond deny, deflect, downplay presents like progress, even if it’s miles past due and too little too late.
Safe supply ‘not yet evidence-based’
Since early 2023, BC United, the federal Conservative Opposition leader, media reports, and more recently, the Alberta Premier and BC Conservatives, have criticized Eby’s government for harms caused by safe supply.
Police and media investigations revealed prescribed safe supply drugs being used like currency to buy illicit drugs, namely fentanyl. Frontline doctors say diverted prescription drugs are creating new opioid addictions in people who don’t understand the addictiveness and trust government’s so-called ‘safe supply.’
“Report after report is showing that these so-called safe supply drugs… are being diverted, flooding communities and significantly lowering street prices and fuelling drug trafficking,” Falcon told Eby, demanding the Premier end the program.
“Report after report is showing that these so-called safe supply drugs… are being diverted.”
Kevin Falcon
Introduced as a pandemic measure in B.C. in March 2020, safe or safer supply was intended to replace a person’s need for illicit drugs and reduce overdoses. After four years, there is no scientific evidence it has achieved either.
Hydromorphone is the main drug in the program. An opioid stronger than heroin, it is prescribed in large quantities and used unwitnessed. Addictions doctors across Canada have asked the federal and B.C. governments to halt the program or ensure drugs are consumed under clinical supervision.
Senior B.C. public health officials have conceded safe supply is “not yet an evidence-based intervention” and the scale of drug diversion is unknown. Nonetheless, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry recommended expanding the program to include more drugs at higher potencies to better meet the needs of patients who currently sell their pills for more potent street drugs.
Henry is conducting another review of the program, presumably with diversion more centre-of-mind. So far, she and other senior public health officials have largely dismissed doctors’ warnings as “anecdotes,” and have cautioned that cracking down on diversion could hurt the drug users who rely on selling their prescriptions.
Meanwhile, B.C.’s elected government officials continue touting safer supply as a life-saving measure that bridges people into treatment despite having no data to support the claim. The drug overdose crisis has killed 43,000 Canadians over the last eight years, including more than 14,000 British Columbians.
‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’
After the first publicly reported drug seizures in February, the BC NDP have struggled to get in front of the situation. When pressed, they’ve issued vague promises of accountability with no details.
“Our health system is on alert, and we have provisions in place to be monitoring very carefully what’s happening with our safer supply program,” Whiteside assured legislators this spring.
“We have provisions in place to be monitoring very carefully what’s happening.”
Jennifer Whiteside
Solicitor General Mike Farnworth said in early March he’d asked RCMP headquarters to develop a “mechanism” to identify safe supply seized by police.
A release from the Premier’s Office in April said government was “working with experts to develop methods to track prescribed alternatives with the aim of identifying and preventing diversion.”
When those same sources were asked exactly what monitoring was taking place, when it began and what data has been gained, they could not point to any specific information collected on diverted safe supply.
Even B.C.’s Auditor General piled on, saying the program had inadequate implementation, evaluation and reporting, among other concerns.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” said Jess Ketchum, co-founder of Save Our Streets, an influential coalition of community and business groups calling for judicial reforms and a comprehensive system of addictions and mental health care.
“The only measurement we have… is the number of people who are losing their lives to the use of illicit drugs – is that what we want to be measured on?”
Back tracking without revealing why
No government wants to backtrack, but sometimes it’s required, and the execution can reveal a lot.
Unlike the BC NDP under former premier John Horgan, Eby’s administration is slow to correct course and loathe to admit a mistake (take the Land Act amendments and B.C.’s other drug policy experiment, decriminalization, to name two).
As it stands, the prescribed drug program is enabling so many patients to sell their prescriptions, safe supply is integrated into organized crime operations and police are seizing pills by the thousands. In Vancouver, at least half the hydromorphone seized by police is safe supply.
But anyone listening to the Premier wouldn’t know it.
“When [hydromorphone] is found on the street, it’s impossible to know whether it came from diverted prescribed alternatives [safer supply] or diverted personal prescriptions for pain,” Eby said, repeating a refrain of his addictions minister.
Which implies arthritic seniors and stage-four cancer patients could be the main source of hydromorphone circulating on the streets.
Neither did he mention concerns raised by Alberta Addictions Minister Dan Williams in March, who challenged B.C. to join his government in calling for a chemical identifier in hydromorphone to prove diversion wasn’t happening.
“If they refuse to defund [safer supply], they should at least know the data on whether or not diversion is happening and the harm that could potentially be coming from it,” Williams said in an interview.
Whether the federal government also pressed B.C. to pursue chemical tracing when it granted the province its recriminalization request, is an open question.
Chemical tracing is possible, just ask Purdue
Asked about chemical tracking two months ago, B.C. Addictions Minister Whiteside was doubtful: “I’m not aware of technology that is at the point where we can actually meet those objectives of distinguishing medication that has been produced in different ways.”
Actually, pharmaceutical companies have been doing it for more than 20 years to protect their brand and guard against counterfeiting of their products.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines for “anti-counterfeiting” identifiers were in the works as far back as 2009. Potential tracing elements include inks, pigments, flavours and molecular ingredients.
It’s hard to believe B.C.’s top public health officials are unaware pharma is technically capable of tracing or the B.C. government is too timid to ask their drug suppliers to do it.
Eby and his Attorney General Nicki Sharma can’t stop patting themselves on the back for their amazingness at squeezing a $150 million settlement out of Purdue Pharma Canada for its role in cultivating OxyContin opioid addictions (never mind that two dozen U.S. states won similar settlements against Purdue). And Sharma has lately boasted the B.C. government intends to extract even more financial restitution from pharmaceutical companies to cover health costs stemming from addictions.
Yet, this same take-charge government is not sure it can direct Purdue Pharma, which, coincidentally, also manufactures hydromorphone (brand name Dilaudid, street name “dilly”), to chemically mark its pills for safe supply?
Please.
Time to just do it
All that aside, Eby’s public commitment to look into chemical tracking is hopeful for some.
“Very pleased to see B.C. considering these measures our government requested back in February,” Alberta’s Williams posted on X, adding the federal government also needs to step up.
Any celebrating may be premature though, because as Falcon pointed out, Eby and his ministers have a record of saying and not doing.
“The situation is, in fact, that we are tracking hydromorphone,” the Premier told Falcon in the legislature more than a year ago.
“That would have given the viewing public some sense that government’s on top of this,” Falcon noted drily.
But as we can see, a year later, government is not on top of it. Not at all.
Judging by the safe supply walk-back and last month’s decriminalization reversal, the BC NDP are in fact very far behind – in an eight-ball kind of way – and they are retreating fast.