Addictions
“Government Heroin” documentary exposes rampant safer supply fraud
By Adam Zivo
There is no substitute for hearing testimony with your own ears and eyes.
Although there is ample evidence that Canada’s “safer supply” programs are being widely defrauded and flooding communities with opioids, advocates continue to deny that this problem exists. That’s why I premiered my new documentary this week, “Government Heroin,” which follows the story of Callum Bagnall, a 25-year-old student who purchased thousands of diverted safer supply pills in London, Ontario.
While many written accounts of safer supply fraud have been published in the Canadian media, this documentary provides, for the first time, an extended interview with a former addict who openly describes his own use of these diverted drugs. It is one thing to read these stories, and altogether another to watch and listen to them – so perhaps this will help dispel the myths that have been pushed, rather aggressively, by the harm reduction movement.
In the film, Callum explains how, three years ago, a friend informed him that drug users in the city were receiving “insane” amounts of free safer supply drugs – predominantly hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin. While these drugs are meant to wean addicts off riskier street substances, the friend explained that recipients mostly sell their safer supply at bargain prices so they can procure stronger substances, such as illicit fentanyl.
At first, Callum thought this was a joke. He had been struggling with a moderate addiction to pharmaceutical opioids – mostly oxycodone and Percocet – but, as these pills were expensive and hard to find, his drug use remained stable. The idea that the government was showering individuals with hundreds of powerful opioid pills a month, for free and with essentially no supervision, seemed “almost like a dream for a drug addict.”
But then he connected with some safer supply clients and realized that everything that he had heard was true. Fueled by a near-limitless supply of dirt-cheap opioids, Callum’s drug use rapidly spun out of control and, for two years, his life fell into utter disarray. Although he went to rehab last year, he says that his mind remains muddled by the aftereffects of these drugs to this day.
“I would have already been at the end of my road and (would) have gone to rehab at that point, if safer supply drugs weren’t so cheap and available. With the small amount of money I was making, I was able to afford hundreds of safer supply pills a week because of how cheap they were,” he says.
It was obvious to Callum that these pills were not counterfeit, given their quality and consistency and the fact that they typically came in their original, labelled prescription bottles: “Usually the people I was buying them from would try to scratch out the doctor’s name or their name. They were kind of paranoid about that. But sometimes they would just give it to me with the label unripped, not covered with marker or anything.”
Callum estimates that 90 percent of the safer supply clients he interacted with were diverting their drugs – a figure that is fairly consistent with estimates provided by former drug users I interviewed in London last year, who typically placed the diversion rate among their circles at around 80 percent.
Callum also believes that organized crime is involved in the trafficking of these drugs, and recalled how one higher-level dealer said that he would drive to northern Ontario, where safer supply is essentially unavailable, with thousands of pills stowed in his trunk to resell at a significant profit.
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While I was unable to independently verify Callum’s claim about intraprovincial trafficking, his testimony is consistent with information provided to me earlier this year by Michael Tibollo, Ontario’s Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, who said that, based on certain police reports and epidemiological data, it is clear that there is a particular problem with safer supply drugs being trafficked from London to northern Ontario.
Callum was able to corroborate the general contours of his story by providing dozens of screenshots of time-stamped text conversations between himself and his former dealers (some of which appear in the documentary), as well as excerpts of his medical records indicating that he had been diagnosed with severe opioid use disorder and had been “buying safer supply from friends.”
He also called a safer supply patient whom he used to purchase drugs from, and, while I listened in, had her confirm that she had hundreds of pills ready to sell and could introduce him to a safer supply doctor if he wanted to get on the program. A video recording of this conversation was originally meant to be included in the documentary, but was cut to mitigate risk of retaliation.
Finally, Callum’s mother, a registered nurse, appears in the documentary and recounts finding safer supply prescription bottles in her son’s room on the day he went to rehab.
As public scrutiny of safer supply has increased over the past year, providers have insisted that they are closely monitoring diversion through urine testing. Yet Callum says that the clients he interacted with would occasionally, in the process of selling their drugs, withhold a few of their pills and openly admit to him that they needed these small amounts to pass their tests.
“(They) would also take one or two pills the night before they get their prescription, so that it looks like it’s in their system. It shows up on the urine tests. So they would use that to pass the urine tests, so that they would get another script the next week,” he says in the film.
The exploitation of this loophole was confirmed by Dr. Janel Gracey, an addiction physician who treated Callum and who is also featured in my documentary. She says that “it is known in the addiction world that urine testing is not effective at catching diversion” because such tests only measure the presence of a drug, not its quantity. A safer supply patient can divert almost all of their drugs and still pass their urine tests, she says, so long as they take just one pill before giving their samples.
Gracey characterizes Canada’s current safer supply system as an underregulated “free for all” that destabilizes patients while allowing some pharmacists and physicians to reap considerable profits. “I know people on the safer supply program that have never even used fentanyl, and that’s the whole point of the program: to get them off the fentanyl. So they’re just lining up and getting a bunch of (hydromorphone), really, for no reason,” she says.
Gracey estimates that, of her 400 patients, approximately half have used, or know someone who has used, diverted safer supply drugs. She says that inexpensive hydromorphone is now “readily available on every street corner here in London,” and that dealers are “bombarding” her patients with the drug, causing many of them to “fall off the rails.”
“We are seeing younger and younger patients come in, unfortunately. Fifteen (and) 16-year-olds coming in, and they’re getting hooked on (hydromorphone) because it’s so incredibly cheap. It’s cheaper than alcohol,” she says. “We do get a few coming in that are there because of fentanyl use, but usually even the (young fentanyl users) started with (hydromorphone).”
I encourage you to watch “Government Heroin,” as the 19-minute documentary provides a more visceral and comprehensive account of the harms described here. There is no substitute for hearing testimony with your own ears and eyes.
This article was originally published in The Bureau, a Canadian media outlet that investigates the intersections of organized crime, drug trafficking and foreign interference.
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By Adam Zivo
Sweden, the U.K., and Canada all experimented with providing opioids to addicts. The results were disastrous.
[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. We encourage our readers to subscribe to them for high-quality analysis on urban issues]
Last August, Denver’s city council passed a proclamation endorsing radical “harm reduction” strategies to address the drug crisis. Among these was “safer supply,” the idea that the government should give drug users their drug of choice, for free. Safer supply is a popular idea among drug-reform activists. But other countries have already tested this experiment and seen disastrous results, including more addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. It would be foolish to follow their example.
The safer-supply movement maintains that drug-related overdoses, infections, and deaths are driven by the unpredictability of the black market, where drugs are inconsistently dosed and often adulterated with other toxic substances. With ultra-potent opioids like fentanyl, even minor dosing errors can prove fatal. Drug contaminants, which dealers use to provide a stronger high at a lower cost, can be just as deadly and potentially disfiguring.
Because of this, harm-reduction activists sometimes argue that governments should provide a free supply of unadulterated, “safe” drugs to get users to abandon the dangerous street supply. Or they say that such drugs should be sold in a controlled manner, like alcohol or cannabis—an endorsement of partial or total drug legalization.
But “safe” is a relative term: the drugs championed by these activists include pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl, hydromorphone (an opioid as potent as heroin), and prescription meth. Though less risky than their illicit alternatives, these drugs are still profoundly dangerous.
The theory behind safer supply is not entirely unreasonable, but in every country that has tried it, implementation has led to increased suffering and addiction. In Europe, only Sweden and the U.K. have tested safer supply, both in the 1960s. The Swedish model gave more than 100 addicts nearly unlimited access through their doctors to prescriptions for morphine and amphetamines, with no expectations of supervised consumption. Recipients mostly sold their free drugs on the black market, often through a network of “satellite patients” (addicts who purchased prescribed drugs). This led to an explosion of addiction and public disorder.
Most doctors quickly abandoned the experiment, and it was shut down after just two years and several high-profile overdose deaths, including that of a 17-year-old girl. Media coverage portrayed safer supply as a generational medical scandal and noted that the British, after experiencing similar problems, also abandoned their experiment.
While the U.S. has never formally adopted a safer-supply policy, it experienced something functionally similar during the OxyContin crisis of the 2000s. At the time, access to the powerful opioid was virtually unrestricted in many parts of North America. Addicts turned to pharmacies for an easy fix and often sold or traded their extra pills for a quick buck. Unscrupulous “pill mills” handed out prescriptions like candy, flooding communities with OxyContin and similar narcotics. The result was a devastating opioid epidemic—one that rages to this day, at a cumulative cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives. Canada was similarly affected.
The OxyContin crisis explains why many experienced addiction experts were aghast when Canada greatly expanded access to safer supply in 2020, following a four-year pilot project. They worried that the mistakes of the recent past were being made all over again, and that the recently vanquished pill mills had returned under the cloak of “harm reduction.”
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Most Canadian safer-supply prescribers dispense large quantities of hydromorphone with little to no supervised consumption. Patients can receive up to 40 eight-milligram pills per day—despite the fact that just two or three are enough to cause an overdose in someone without opioid tolerance. Some prescribers also provide supplementary fentanyl, oxycodone, or stimulants.
Unfortunately, many safer-supply patients sell or trade a significant portion of these drugs—primarily hydromorphone—in order to purchase more potent illicit substances, such as street fentanyl.
The problems with safer supply entered Canada’s consciousness in mid-2023, through an investigative report I wrote for the National Post. I interviewed 14 addiction physicians from across the country, who testified that safer-supply diversion is ubiquitous; that the street price of hydromorphone collapsed by up to 95 percent in communities where safer supply is available; that youth are consuming and becoming addicted to diverted safer-supply drugs; and that organized crime traffics these drugs.
Facing pushback, I interviewed former drug users, who estimated that roughly 80 percent of the safer-supply drugs flowing through their social circles was getting diverted. I documented dozens of examples of safer-supply trafficking online, representing tens of thousands of pills. I spoke with youth who had developed addictions from diverted safer supply and adults who had purchased thousands of such pills.
After months of public queries, the police department of London, Ontario—where safer supply was first piloted—revealed last summer that annual hydromorphone seizures rose over 3,000 percent between 2019 and 2023. The department later held a press conference warning that gangs clearly traffic safer supply. The police departments of two nearby midsize cities also saw their post-2019 hydromorphone seizures increase more than 1,000 percent.
The Canadian government quietly dropped its support for safer supply last year, cutting funding for many of its pilot programs. The province of British Columbia (the nexus of the harm-reduction movement) finally pulled back support last month, after a leaked presentation confirmed that safer-supply drugs are getting sold internationally and that the government is investigating 60 pharmacies for paying kickbacks to safer-supply patients. For now, all safer-supply drugs dispensed within the province must be consumed under supervision.
Harm-reduction activists have insisted that no hard evidence exists of widespread diversion of safer-supply drugs, but this is only because they refuse to study the issue. Most “studies” supporting safer supply are produced by ideologically driven activist-scholars, who tend to interview a small number of program enrollees. These activists also reject attempts to track diversion as “stigmatizing.”
The experiences of Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Canada offer a clear warning: safer supply is a reliably harmful policy. The outcomes speak for themselves—rising addiction, diversion, and little evidence of long-term benefit.
As the debate unfolds in the United States, policymakers would do well to learn from these failures. Americans should not be made to endure the consequences of a policy already discredited abroad simply because progressive leaders choose to ignore the record. The question now is whether we will repeat others’ mistakes—or chart a more responsible course.
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Tyler Ginn prior to his death from a fentanyl overdose in 2021. [Photo credit: Gayle Fowlie]
By Alexandra Keeler
Police are charging more drug dealers with manslaughter in fentanyl overdose deaths. But the shift is not satisfying everyone
Four years ago, Tyler Ginn died of a fentanyl overdose at the age of 18. Tyler’s father found his son unresponsive in the bedroom of their Brooklin, Ont., home.
For Tyler’s mother, Gayle Fowlie, the pain of his loss remains raw.
“He was my kid that rode his bike to the store to buy me a chocolate bar on my birthday, you know?” she told Canadian Affairs in an interview.
Police charged Jacob Norn, the drug dealer who sold Tyler his final, fatal dose, with manslaughter. More than three years after Tyler’s death, Norn was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.
“I don’t think you can grasp how difficult going through a trial is,” Fowlie said. “On TV, it’s a less than an hour process. But the pain of it, and going over every detail and then going over every detail again … it provides details you wish you didn’t know.”
But Fowlie is glad Norn was convicted. If anything, she would have liked him to serve a longer sentence. Lawyers have told her Norn is likely to serve only two to four years of his sentence in prison.
“My son’s never coming back [and] his whole family has a life sentence of missing him the rest of our lives,” she said. “So do I think four years is fair? No.”
Norn’s case reflects a growing trend of drug dealers being charged with manslaughter when their drug sales lead to fatal overdoses.
But this shift has not satisfied everyone. Some would like to see drug dealers face harsher or different penalties.
“If we say that it was 50 per cent Tyler’s fault for buying it and 50 per cent Jacob’s fault for selling it … then I think he should have a half-a-life sentence,” said Fowlie.
Others say the legal system’s focus on prosecuting low-level drug dealers misses the broader issues at play.
“[Police] decided, in the Jacob Norn case, they were going to go one stage back,” said Peter Thorning, who was Norn’s defence lawyer.
“What about the person who gave Jacob that substance? What about the person who supplied the substance to [that person]? There was no investigation into where it came from and who was ultimately responsible for the death of that young man.”
Manslaughter charge
At least 50,000 Canadians have died from drug overdoses since 2016. Last year, an average of 21 individuals died each day, with fentanyl accounting for nearly 80 per cent of those deaths.
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. A dose as small as a few grains of salt can be lethal.
Given its potency, police and prosecutors have increasingly turned to manslaughter charges when a dealer’s product results in a fatal overdose.
A recent study in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society found that the number of manslaughter charges laid for drug-related deaths in Canada surged from three cases in 2016 to 135 in 2021.
Individuals can be convicted of manslaughter for committing unlawful, reckless or negligent acts that result in death but where there was no intention to kill. Sentences can range from probation (in rare cases) to life.
Murder charges, by contrast, require an intent to kill or cause fatal harm. Drug dealers typically face manslaughter charges in overdose cases, as their intent is to distribute drugs, not to kill those who purchase them.
Joanne Bortoluss, a spokesperson for the Durham Regional Police, which charged Norn, said that each of their investigations follows the same fundamental process.
“Investigators consider the strength of the evidence, the dealer’s level of involvement, and applicable laws when determining whether to pursue charges like manslaughter,” she said.
The Canadian Journal of Law and Society study also found that prosecutions often target low-level dealers, many of whom are drug users themselves and have personal connections to the deceased.
Norn’s case fits this pattern. He struggled with substance abuse, including addiction to fentanyl, Xanax and Percocet. Tyler and Norn were friends, the judge said in the court ruling, although Fowlie disputes this claim.
“[Those words] are repulsive to me,” she said.
The Crown argued Norn demonstrated “a high degree of moral blameworthiness” by warning Ginn of the fentanyl’s potency while still selling it to him. In a call to Ginn, he warned him “not to do a lot of the stuff” because he “didn’t want to be responsible for anything that happened.”
Fowlie’s outrage over Norn’s lenient sentencing is compounded by the fact that Norn was found trafficking fentanyl again after her son’s death.
“So we’ve killed somebody, and we’re still … trafficking? We’re not worried who else we kill?” Fowlie said.
Trafficking
Some legal sources noted that manslaughter charges do not necessarily lead to harsh sentences or deterrence.
“If you look at how diverse and … lenient some sentences are for manslaughter, I don’t think it really pushes things in the direction that [victims’ families] want,” said Kevin Westell, a Vancouver-based trial lawyer and former chair of the Canadian Bar Association.
Westell noted that the term “manslaughter” is misleading. “Manslaughter is a brutal-sounding title, but it encapsulates a very broad span of criminal offences,” he said.
In Westell’s view, consistently charging dealers with drug trafficking could be more effective for deterring the practice.
“What really matters is how long the sentence is, and you’re better off saying, ‘We know fentanyl is dangerous, so we’re setting the sentence quite high,’ rather than making it harder to prove with a manslaughter charge,” he said.
Trafficking is a distinct charge from manslaughter that involves the distribution, sale or delivery of illicit drugs. The sentencing range for fentanyl trafficking is eight to 15 years, Kwame Bonsu, a media relations representative for the Department of Justice, told Canadian Affairs.
“Courts must impose sentences that are proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender,” Bonsu said, referencing a 2021 Supreme Court of Canada decision. Bonsu noted that aggravating factors such as lack of remorse or trafficking large quantities can lead to harsher sentences.
‘Head of the snake’
Some legal experts noted the justice system often fails to target those higher up in the drug supply chain.
“We don’t know how many hands that drug goes through,” said Thorning, the defence lawyer.
“Are the police going to prosecute every single person who provides fentanyl to another person? Jacob [Norn] was himself an addict trafficker — what about the person who supplied the substance to him?”
Thorning also questioned whether government agencies bear some responsibility. “Is some government agency’s failure to investigate how that drug came into the country partly responsible for the young man’s death?”
Westell, who has served as both a Crown prosecutor and criminal defence lawyer, acknowledged the difficulty of targeting higher-level traffickers.
“Cutting off the head of the snake does not align very well with the limitations of the international borders,” he said.
“Yes, there are transnational justice measures, but a lot gets lost, and as soon as you cross an international border of any kind, it becomes incredibly difficult to follow the chain in a linear way.”
Bortoluss, of the Durham police, said even prosecuting what appear to be obvious fentanyl-related deaths — such as Tyler Ginn’s — can be challenging. Witnesses can be reluctant to cooperate, fearing legal consequences. It can also be difficult to identify the source of drugs, as “transactions often involve multiple intermediaries and anonymous online sales.”
Another challenge in deterring fentanyl trafficking is the strong financial incentives of the trade.
“Even if [Norn] serves two to four years for killing somebody, but he could make a hundred thousand off of selling drugs, is it worth it?” Fowlie said.
Thorning agreed that the profit incentive can be incredibly powerful, outweighing the risk of a potential sentence.
“The more risky you make the behaviour, the greater the profit for a person who’s willing to break our laws, and the profit is the thing that generates the conduct,” he said.
A blunt instrument
Legal experts also noted the criminal justice system alone cannot solve the fentanyl crisis.
“Most people who have [lost] a loved one [to drug overdose] want to see a direct consequence to the person that’s responsible,” said Westell. “But I think they would also like to see something on a more macro level that helps eliminate the problem more holistically, and that can’t be [achieved through] crime and punishment alone.”
Thorning agrees.
“These are mental health .. [and] medical issues,” he said. “Criminal law is a blunt instrument [that is] not going to deal with these things effectively.”
Even Fowlie sees the problem as bigger than sentencing. Her son struggled with the stigma associated with therapy and medication, which made it difficult for him to seek help.
“We need to normalize seeing a therapist, like we normalize getting your eyes checked every year,” she said.
“Pot isn’t the gateway drug, trauma is a gateway drug.”
This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.
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