One problem fueling the oxycodone prescription crisis was the “overly intimate relationships between opioid manufacturers and universities, professional societies, patient advocacy groups, and lawmakers, and aggressive product promotion to prescribers and (to a lesser extent) the general public,” the Stanford-Lancet commission stated.
A substantial part of the PSAD/safer supply industry and ethos in B.C. tracks back to four influential public health officials who were harm reduction pioneers and early safe supply researchers, cheerleading the concept despite ongoing criticisms. All four had a hand in developing the PSAD program and crafting the policies their current drug manufacturing or distribution companies now serve.
Drs. Perry Kendall, Martin Shechter, Mark Tyndall and Evan Wood all cut their teeth on successful HIV treatment and harm reduction programs in Vancouver, and all moved on to champion heroin and other psychotropic drugs as addictions treatment. Schechter, Tyndall and Wood are still affiliated with UBC’s department of population and public health, according to their profiles.
Kendall was B.C.’s much praised provincial health officer, who retired in 2018 to run a consultancy and a heroin manufacturing company with Shechter, a registered lobbyist and the former chief scientific officer and current board director of the Michael Smith Foundation, one of B.C.’s government-funded, health research agencies.
Both are not shy about pushing their agenda from their new positions in the private sector. In 2021, they reportedly were publicly pushing the province to make a decision on purchasing their heroin product for the safe supply program.
The third influencer, Tyndall, is the former head of the BC Centre for Disease Control and owner of the non-profit My Safe which has so far gotten nearly $4.5 million in federal funding to distribute hydromorphone in three cities through its biometric-reading vending machines.
Wood was a former lead for the BC Centre for Substance Use and a former research director at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. He now holds the Canada research chair for addictions prevention and treatment at UBC, and is a principal investigator for the BC Node of the Canadian Research Initiative on Substance Misuse (CRISM). In 2021, his company reportedly had a license from Health Canada to research, import and distribute MDMA, DMT and LSD.
Co-founder of one of Canada’s most influential, government-funded citizen drug policy advocacy organizations, Moms Stop the Harm, Leslie McBain, is another vocal supporter of PSAD/safer supply. And a particularly effective one. Who can argue against the unknowable pain of a grieving mother?
McBain has been employed by the BC Centre for Substance Use, a research hotbed of B.C.’s safe supply-affirming studies, and is a regular on the safe supply speakers’ circuit. Her organization has received more than $500,000 in federal funding through the Substance Use and Addictions Program (SUAP), the federal quasi-harm reduction slush fund that has doled out at least a half billion dollars to what appears to be mainly harm reduction-oriented initiatives.
McBain has the ears of top federal and provincial public health and elected officials, without registering as a lobbyist. She is an aggressive proponent of across-the-board legalization of all drugs and sits on the three-person board of Tyndall’s heroin distribution company.
None of which seems to be a conflict of interest in the legal sense (otherwise, government would not allow it, surely?), but perception is reality and the overlapping connections and affiliations between legislators, advocates, researchers and suppliers of safer supply most certainly presents the appearance of it.
The last word goes to the mighty brains behind the Stanford-Lancet commission, which cautions: “The profit motives of actors inside and outside of the health care system will repeatedly generate harmful over-provision of addictive pharmaceuticals unless regulatory systems are fundamentally reformed.”